We wanted to know just how far off are we from having our very own Star Trek Replicator (one Earl Grey tea, please), so we took one concept from idea to working prototype as quickly as we could. This is how we created the Fridge of Tomorrow.

Observation

There is plenty of innovation happening in the appliance industry, but most of it seems a little directionless. Samsung has a touch screen on their fridge, and LG wants to connect all of their appliances wirelessly, but we had a hunch that there was a bigger opportunity here. We were wondering what the Fridge of Tomorrow would look like. The opportunity is to create a fridge that moves past the novelty of smart tech, like the touch screen on the Samsung fridge, and into a world where smart tech actually makes a fridge better.

Idea

To make our fridge better, we looked at the implicit nature of how people interact with their appliances. At a high-level, a fridge’s job is to improve the relationship between people and their food. It used to be that the very act of refrigeration was advanced enough, but today there are myriad other ways to improve that relationship. Some of the first things we envisioned the Fridge of Tomorrow would be able to do included generating shopping list, creating recipes based on the ingredients inside, help us eat better, or let us know when the milk was running low.

Strategy

Developing the Fridge of Tomorrow required understanding and overcoming key hurdles appliance manufacturers face: things like cost, uncertainty of consumer demand, and the risk of going to market and moving out of the comfort zone of existing technology.

Creating a fridge with every potential feature would be too expensive, but we pinpointed the foundational feature from which all the other ideas would flow: the key to making the Fridge of Tomorrow was making it self-aware – allowing the fridge to know what is inside of it.

User Flows

We created three user experiences we wanted to prototype. The first flow demonstrates our most valuable idea of making the fridge self-aware. The others play with other data points and user interactions.

Translation

The next step involved translating these strategic ideas and user experiences into executable designs. As strategists, our focus is conceptualizing the value of human interaction and the directionality of communication – not programming and physically building technology. To help round out our team, we partnered with Adam Lassy, a developer and artist specializing in physical computing. Adam grounded us in the reality of what could be done easily and quickly to test our user experiences. He also brought a skilled, tactical perspective to prototyping which fleshed out our user experiences to include technology-specific solutions such as how often the scale in the fridge pinged our server, and how long the fridge should wait before it lets you know you’re out of milk.

Actual build

Then we started the actual coding and soldering that turned our idea into a physical reality. In less than two weeks, we had a working proof of concept. Two weeks later and we had the bugs ironed out. It’s certainly not pretty, but our prototype works – It has become a living piece of strategy that uses current technology to hint at a future where every fridge knows what’s inside of it. Here’s how it works.

By scanning food as it moves in and out of the fridge, we can create a complete database of everything inside and how long it has been there. From here,  we can build a recipe recommendation engine based on what is in the fridge, automatically generated shopping lists, recommend food to try based on what you like, and even connect the database to a grocery delivery service to have the fridge automatically order what it is missing.

Weighing the milk in our fridge means we know not only what is inside, but also how much of something is in the fridge. Our smart fridge lets users know when they are running low on milk and should buy more.

Finally, we tested having outside data impact some of the fridge functions. Using Fitbit, a wireless-enabled pedometer, we transformed our fridge into a dieting commitment device by adding a lock which would only unlock after burning a specific amount of calories (at first we set the Calorie goal to 1,000 – this proved to be a little ambitious). We leveraged FitBit’s API to connect our personal fitness data to the fridge.

Lessons For Next Time

With our experiment in rapid prototyping a resounding success – start to finish in a single month, we’ve pulled out a couple of insights to improve the process of building proof of concepts in the future.

1. Test the Foundation: Remember you are trying to prove and test a concept, which means the whole idea doesn’t have to be built. Building an entire concept is expensive and slow; to remedy this problem with execution is why we started this prototyping process to begin with! Build the functionality that is the foundation for proving your theory. This way you can test it out before investing more time and money.
2. Fake It: Some functionality is easy to fake or mockup. We originally were only going to ping an existing database of Grocery UPCs for Flow #1. However, we found it easier and quicker to create our own database and leave integration with the universal database for the next iteration of the fridge. If it’s expensive to build and you can fake it in some way, do it. Just make sure that the prototype still tests what you’re after.
3. Be Flexible: If something is not working, or is taking too long, don’t be afraid to work around it or scrap an idea. Again, the entire point of this process is to test an idea cheaply, quickly and easily.

At a high level, we can agree that, as Hayles pointed out in a comment, “leadership sets direction and tone, then smart people plan and execute great work”. Continuing to think about these things, in this piece I offer some illustrations about what the relationship between culture and strategy, at the most basic level, might look like. These preliminary diagrams might move this conversation forward by visualizing where and how the two exist within an organization.

Epilogue: Visualizing Balance

1. The Venn

Thinking about the relationship between culture and strategy via a venerable old Venn representation (Figure 1) highlights the contact surface between the two, proposing innumerable feedback loops. For instance, a strategic decision to outsource a function to a more cost effective market without compensating for the distance with stricter quality control processes can send a strong signal to the rest of the organization about values and priorities, directly transforming culture by embedding these new sentiments into it. This illustrates a reflexive relationship between the two, where each element informs the other as it changes. At the intersection of the two circles representing culture and strategy shows not so much an overlap between areas of interest or concern as a feedback loop passing information between the two domains. The arrows represent the influence between elements; a loop communicates that every element acts as both cause and effect.

Figure 1. The Venn (click to embiggen)

The end goal here is not to reach a complete overlap, because strategy and culture both need their own protected space with dedicated resources for development and course correction. Rather, we should think about how to find a balance between the two where a healthy connective surface is formed for them through which they can communicate. Significant overlap might be good, however, assuming the two elements are well-aligned, as it would mean that there is a lot of opportunity for cross-pollination and interaction via a continuous, connective flow of information.

(If you’re interested in learning more about feedback loops, and the greater systems that they’re part of, you should read this presentation that I co-wrote with my friend Amy Rae)

But, imagining the relationship between culture and strategy as a Venn model fails to speak to the hierarchical structure of organizations, or the responsibility of executing on strategy.

2. The Intersected Rectangle

Revising this idea we can instead think of the relationship between strategy and culture by thinking about how the two are concentrated within the organizational body. The white line in Figure 2 serves to illustrate where layers of the organization are exposed to either culture or strategy. No matter where you make the cut, however, both are still present (any organization will have its own distinct culture whether good or bad, even if nobody actively thinks or cares about it, and most organizations will have some sort of strategy in place, whether good or bad).

Figure 2. Intersected Rectangle (click to embiggen)

Two examples help us explore this further. Zappos is characterized by an incredibly vibrant culture present across the entire organization. As a policy, Zappos will only hire people whose personal values match their corporate values to ensure that the entire team is “living the brand”. That culture is tightly integrated with a strategy that is devised by, and thus concentrated to, top management (even if the entire organization is charged to carry it out).

Google too keeps its employees close to its core strategy, chiefly via the “20 percent time” initiative. These side projects start out as a manifestation of Google’s culture. But projects that show potential are given more resources and might be transformed from a prototype or small-scale initiative into an actual product. Born from a culture informed by strategy, the most promising 20% projects with time grow to fit Google’s greater strategic approach. An interesting and crucial aspect of this initiative is how it fosters a culture of curiosity and innovation, further blurring the lines between corporate beliefs and guidelines, and the actions taken to fulfill the Google’s corporate mission (which is as directional as it is visionary: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful).

3. The Projection

The most sophisticated of these three models, the Projection combines the first two in service of describing the relationship between strategy and culture while also illustrating the level of overlap and the ratio of both within the organizational body. It also speaks to where they connect to create a well of bi-directional feedback.

Figure 3. Projection (click to embiggen)

Using this model, a small overlap might indicate that the organization should think about how to grow the contact surface between strategy and culture to foster more organizational awareness about how well the two jive together, so that better alignment can be reached.

Moving forward

Rather than debating the respective virtues of either, and thereby setting ourselves up to explore the false question of whether strategy trumps culture or vice-versa (the answer is neither will win out alone), we should try to better understand how to intelligently connect the two so that they productively advance each other, and thereby the organization, in the right direction. Developing some basic thinking tools that help us reflect on and talk about where these two elements live and connect within organizations can be a small first step to building some initial understanding of how they operate not as separate agents but as an integrated system.

What do you think? Can you think of a better way to visually explain how these two can co-exist and influence each other, in order to help organizations understand how to reach better strategic and cultural alignment?

Meanwhile, the rest of the company stopped operations to focus on upset customers. Even CEO Andy Dunn pitched in, coordinating efforts, keeping morale high, and taking customer phone calls late into the night. It was an all hands on deck effort that Bonobos, despite financial losses, views as a positive learning experience.

Was this the result of some brilliantly devised strategy? Or can Bonobos’ success during the Cyber Monday crisis be traced back to its culture?

A Tale of Two Elements

Organizational culture, broadly defined, is the set of assumptions, beliefs, and guidelines shared by an organization. It’s the connective tissue and core essence of any team, shaping how they interpret and make sense of the world, and guiding how they go about getting things done. Culture has great longevity – just look at Goldman Sachs. Culture is easily seen, heard and felt. Think about your own office and what happens there – the stories that get circulated, the way decisions get made, and the behaviors that are encouraged and rewarded all reveal something important about your particular corporate culture.

Strategy is the practice of figuring out the best way to get from a current state to some ideal state. For instance, if you’re out hiking and come across a current preventing you from reaching your final destination, you’ll be forced to figure out a way to get across. Your strategy is the approach you choose, whether simply walking along the bank until you find a safer crossing, or attempting to cross the stream directly by feeling for stepping stones near the surface. A good strategy relies on a deep understanding and actionable articulation of the critical challenges ahead (“I need to cross this stream to finish my hike”), carried out through a set of coherent actions specifically designed to overcome the identified obstacles (“I’ll walk up the river until I find a narrow section that I feel comfortable crossing, and if this fails I’ll have to re-examine the situation”).

Culture and strategy are balanced and expressed differently by every organization. Both, if used right, are important drivers of business success, albeit in different ways. Strategy is mostly responsible for “hard” success metrics closely related to the bottom line: customer acquisition, sales, margins, and market position. Culture is mostly accountable for “soft” metrics: the speed and quality of internal communications, pace of innovation, retention rates, and reputation in the market. Some important characteristics, like product quality, the ability to grow your team and to scale your operations – really, many of the factors that determine whether you can foster and growth –  depend on strategy and culture working in tandem.

Defining the relationship between culture and strategy and unpacking how they work together is tough. While the two concepts look like they should work together to move an organization forward, they end up being the concerns of different parts of the company. The commonly employed organizational design principle of centralization, where the organization is divided into departments with firm divisions (marketing, human resources, sales, etc.), is often a complicit factor.

The best organizations use both strategy and culture in tandem to achieve success.

Centralization introduces a mental model of the organization as a set of functions with their own distinct roles and responsibilities. This mindset has a debilitating effect on an organization’s ability to see the whole picture: in terms of systems. And what’s worse, when strategy becomes the expressed responsibility of one group and culture the expressed responsibility of another, territorialism is implicitly encouraged. Add to this that strategy development, because of its perceived stronger tie to bottom line results, is generally the responsibility of top management, and you’ve got a situation where strategy and culture are effectively decoupled and competing for the same resources.

Better Than A Plan

Let’s return to Bonobos for a moment. What is most impressive about how Bonobos handled their Cyber Monday crisis is that the entire effort was uncoordinated. There was no crisis plan. Everyone just knew what to do. A Bonobos representative who discussed the situation on Quora pointed to the company’s practice of only hiring good people as a crucial contributing factor to how well the situation was handled. But Bonobos also has a clear strategy of providing superior customer service (the company’s customer service motto is a powerful statement that is just as actionable as it is empowering: “People before profit”) as a means of creating sustainable competitive advantage. This strategy guides their culture, and their culture of customer service informs their strategic decisions. Where the company’s culture enabled autonomous rapid and coherent action, its strategy provided a clear recommended direction.

Strategy + Culture = Success

In summation, it’s impossible to separate the contributions of either strategy or culture. The best organizations use both in tandem to achieve success. Culture and strategy are symbiotic: they’re perpetually stuck in a a cause-and-effect relationship in which both, as they change, inform the other. That is why, ultimately, you’ll need both to win in the long-term. Setting up a healthy, and connected culture that is aligned with the overarching purpose of your organization is really a strategy for growth.