The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [79]
Imagine that you are a schoolteacher in charge of teaching math to middle school students. Although you may teach concepts in small batches, one day at a time, your overall curriculum cannot change very often. Because you must set up the curriculum in advance and teach the same concepts in the same order to every student in the classroom, you can try a new curriculum at most only once a year.
How could a math teacher experiment with small batches? Under the current large-batch system for educating students, it would be quite difficult; our current educational system was designed in the era of mass production and uses large batches extensively.
A new breed of startups is working hard to change all that. In School of One, students have daily “playlists” of their learning tasks that are attuned to each student’s learning needs, based on that student’s readiness and learning style. For example, Julia is way ahead of grade level in math and learns best in small groups, so her playlist might include three or four videos matched to her aptitude level, a thirty-minute one-on-one tutoring session with her teacher, and a small group activity in which she works on a math puzzle with three peers at similar aptitude levels. There are assessments built into each activity so that data can be fed back to the teacher to choose appropriate tasks for the next playlist. This data can be aggregated across classes, schools, or even whole districts.
Now imagine trying to experiment with a curriculum by using a tool such as School of One. Each student is working at his or her own pace. Let’s say you are a teacher who has a new sequence in mind for how math concepts should be taught. You can see immediately the impact of the change on those of your students who are at that point in the curriculum. If you judge it to be a good change, you could roll it out immediately for every single student; when they get to that part of the curriculum, they will get the new sequence automatically. In other words, tools like School of One enable teachers to work in much smaller batches, to the benefit of their students. (And, as tools reach wide-scale adoption, successful experiments by individual teachers can be rolled out district-, city-, or even nationwide.) This approach is having an impact and earning accolades. Time magazine recently included School of One in its “most innovative ideas” list; it was the only educational organization to make the list.5
THE LARGE-BATCH DEATH SPIRAL
Small batches pose a challenge to managers steeped in traditional notions of productivity and progress, because they believe that functional specialization is more efficient for expert workers.
Imagine you’re a product designer overseeing a new product and you need to produce thirty individual design drawings. It probably seems that the most efficient way to work is in seclusion, by yourself, producing the designs one by one. Then, when you’re done with all of them, you pass the drawings on to the engineering team and let them work. In other words, you work in large batches.
From the point of view of individual efficiency, working in large batches makes sense. It also has other benefits: it promotes skill building, makes it easier to hold individual contributors accountable, and, most important, allows experts to work without interruption. At least that’s the theory. Unfortunately, reality seldom works out that way.
Consider our hypothetical example. After passing thirty design drawings to engineering, the designer is free to turn his or her attention to the next project. But remember the problems that came up during the envelope-stuffing exercise. What happens when engineering has questions about how the drawings are supposed to work? What if some of the drawings are unclear? What if something goes wrong when engineering attempts to use the drawings?
These problems