The Human-Scale Principle

I’m reading a great book titled “Made To Stick” by Chip & Dan Heath. The book describes why some ideas survive and others die. If you would like a great business book to read…pick up this NY Times best seller.

Back to why I’m writing this particular post…

One of the chapters discusses how to sell an idea and make it credible. So many times IT sells statistics to get new technology implemented. It’s a tough sell to the business community because IT folks forget to use the “human-scale principle.”

Here is an example from the book:

…take a mundane situation: figuring out whether a particular technological upgrade is worth the money. One example comes from Cisco, when it had to decide whether to add a wireless network for its employees. The cost of maintaining a wireless network was estimated at $500 per year per employee. The price sounds hefty–on the order of adding adental or vision insurance for all employees. But it’s not a benefit, it’s an investment. So how do you compute the value of an inestment? You’ve got to decide whether you can get $501 worth of additional value from each employee each year after adding the network.

One Cisco employee figured out a better way to think about the investment: “If you believe you can increase an employee’s productivity by one or two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of wireless.” On this scale, the investment is much easier to assess. Our intuition works at this scale. We can easily simulate scenarios where employees can save a few minutes from wireless access–for instance, sending someone a request for a forgotten document during a critical meeting.

Avoid statistics…it’s the scale and context that makes the idea conceivable and acceptable to the business community.