Stop wishing you were them. They are envious of you. Small, agile you is a scary thing.

They wish they could be like you.

But sometimes you'll wish to be where they are and think you need to be like them to get there.

You can't, and this week in a design session we had a good reminder as to why you should limit your admiration for the competition.

When we're designing workflows, we always aim for perfection. Somewhere along the journey to figuring things out, you go and look at the competition.

How does Goliath do it? With their $150M in funding, what solution did they come up with?

Or in this case, we got presented with how Goliath did it for another brand by a key stakeholder. A proper impressive brand in terms of being well known. So we spent 30-minutes remarking on the detail of the solution and considered what it might take to get there.

($150M might do it.)

But what we realised is that you'd also need to be prepared to move slowly because the brand that used that workflow moves slowly. Like dinosaur slow. 🦖

We all know what it looks like when a dinosaur moves in. First, the dinosaur decides that too much is going on. Then decides to stop making decisions because a few mistakes get made.

Oh man, it is a fine fricking line between gaining some control and grinding things to a halt.

Do you know what is more challenging than freewheeling?

Trying to get momentum.

So when you have it. Move on it. Use it. Design your systems and workflows around it because if you systemise that flow....things will continue to go and go and go and go.

Goliath didn't build for flow. They built for computer says 'No'.

You win because you're not them. You're forecasting growth in a recession because you're not them. Suppose you don't want to end up like them; stop imitating their moves. You don't know it all, but neither do they.

We are all just making this up.