MacGuffins

Harry and Jorge discuss one of the latter's favorite means for gaining traction: the MacGuffin, a concept with a storied pedigree in cinema.

Show notes:

• Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill
• Trim tab
• The New How by Nilofer Merchant
• Human-Centered Security by Heidi Trost
• Tempo by Venkatesh Rao

Transcript

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Jorge 0:00

I don't mind spoiling such an old movie. At the end of that movie, the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled off into this warehouse to ostensibly never be seen again. Because it didn't really matter. Like, the whole point of the Ark of the Covenant was not the ark itself, it was to precipitate the story.

Narrator 0:25

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:35

Hey Harry. Good to see you again, sir.

Harry 0:37

It's a pleasure as is always. Delighted to have an opportunity to chat with you today.

Jorge 0:43

I'm delighted to talk with you as well. I've brought a reading for us to discuss. And this reading, I'm gonna break up into two parts because if I read what I wanna focus on today, we won't have enough context. So I'm gonna read a little bit from one part of the book...

Harry 1:03

Okay.

Jorge 1:04

and then I'm going to read the part that I actually want us to focus on. And it's going to feel a little bit disjointed, I suspect, but that's okay. I think we can talk through it.

Harry 1:16

Sounds good.

Jorge 1:18

"Strategic design, the focus of this essay, is focused on the systemic redesign of cultures of decision-making at the individual and institutional levels, and particularly as applied to what we can think of as the primary problems of the 21st century." So I'm gonna stop there. That is the kind of framing. And this is a short book, when the author says "this essay," he's talking about the book. Okay. That sets the context, this is a book about strategic design. And now I'm going to jump into one of the tactics that he lays forth, and this is actually what I want us to talk about today. Okay? And the tactic, which he calls "plays" in this book, is the MacGuffin. "The MacGuffin comes with a particular provenance. The phrase is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock and has become associated with him ever since. The dictionary defines it as 'An object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion, despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.' And in Hitchcock's words." Now, the author is quoting Hitchcock. "A MacGuffin you see in most films about spies. It's the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Rudyard Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Khyber Pass, it would be the plans of an airplane engine and the plans of an atom bomb. Anything you like. It's always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story." That's the end of the Hitchcock quote. And now I'm going to tell you how the author of this book uses the MacGuffin, because that's like the introduction to what a MacGuffin is. And that's what I'm hoping that we'll talk about today, MacGuffins. And I'll tell you what the book is called. This is called The Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, and the subtitle is A Strategic Design Vocabulary by Dan Hill. And Hill describes the MacGuffin as a play that allows designers to affect transformational change by focusing attention on something that isn't the actual focus of the change. And, this sounds a little bit mystifying, I guess. But the example that he uses is a particular building. And he was working in one of the Scandinavian countries at the time, and there were laws in the books there were very old laws in the books about how big timber buildings could be. And technology, timber construction technology, had evolved a lot since the laws were written, to the point where now they were safer to build at scale because of new fire prevention techniques. And Hill writes about this project that the team worked on that was ostensibly about a building. So they propose this very attractive timber based building. And the object of the building, as I recall, was to be compelling enough that it precipitated a discussion about changing the laws. So like the building was such a compelling project that the legislators were forced to confront the fact that there was this really outdated law in the book. And in fact, as I recall, the laws were changed as a result of this project. Anyway, I thought it was a really interesting way of getting unstuck or getting traction because sometimes you're dealing with a problem that seems to be like a structural problem or a system-wide problem, and if you try to tackle it directly, you're probably going to face a lot of opposition. Maybe the thing to do is to rather than force a change to happen at that level, you can pick a catalyst, something that is emblematic or representative, the thing that will cause the change to happen.

Harry 6:02

I have a number of thoughts. The first is, I'm really glad you brought this topic up 'cause people wield that term, MacGuffin, all the time and outta context I often struggle to remember like how to think about it. And so I'm glad to have a more functional definition, just show up in the foreground again, as a reminder that there is a thing, that is a device that is not the thing itself, but it has a role and it has capability in helping people get traction and generating change. So I just appreciate that because it's, like this key idea. So beyond that, I had two other things smacked me in the head. One of them was like, there's an odd relationship between a MacGuffin as a change catalyst and a trim tab, which I think we might have talked about at some point, which is the notion of, if you have a large ship and a ship is moving in one direction and if you were to turn the rudder to try to turn the ship, there's so much force on that rudder because that ship is so large, the rudder would simply fail. And so they determined that you can put a very small rudder on a rudder, and it's called a trim tab, and you can move this small rudder and you can use that To adjust the larger rudder to get the change to happen. So there's some kind of strange relationship or analogic relationship between a trim tab and a MacGuffin as a vehicle for change. So that was the second thing that popped into my head. And, then the third thing is, wow, I love the idea of intentionally selecting a MacGuffin as a change vehicle, and I suspect I've done it by accident in the past, and I suspect that I've participated in efforts, whether they were product design and development efforts, or whether they were digital transformation efforts or whatever, where people had done that, whether they had done it surreptitiously and intentionally, and knew what they were doing, or whether we just ended up picking something that forced this reveal of these structural limitations that demanded then that we attend to the deeper elements that needed to be addressed and changed in order to get where we wanted to go. So I love this idea. I think it is very powerful. And I'm not quite sure how to use it on purpose yet.

Jorge 8:51

That resonates with me. I've stumbled more into MacGuffin-like situations than I have intentionally used them, but I suspect that there are some folks who've worked with me that if they are listening to our conversation now, they're gonna be chuckling because they've heard me talk so much about MacGuffins because I do think it's such a useful idea. And I'll tell you about an example from my career. And we may have talked about this situation before, but I think it's a perfect example of a MacGuffin. Many years ago, I was doing work for a large financial services company as part of a design team. And our client was the design team in the financial services company, It's a highly regulated field, right? And design and compliance have different objectives. The designers want as smooth an experience as possible, they want users to be able to go through very easy, let's say onboarding flow, for example, right?

Harry 10:00

Yeah.

Jorge 10:02

The compliance people, those are the folks who are looking after ensuring that the company is following all the laws. And that often entails presenting things like very long terms and conditions, texts and stuff like that, which by necessity slow down the process, right? So there's an inherent tension there. And we had a workshop where we were to map the ideal user journey for something. I'm not going to get into details. But this was in the before times, right? So before the pandemic, when people did these things in real life. So we got folks from the various teams, including design and compliance, into this room, and we worked together on making this journey map. And the journey map, as often happens, went on to inform the design of certain products. So it was an artifact that had value per se. But the thing that was so insightful for me being part of that process is that in the course of those two days when we had people working together on making that artifact, the two teams that were previously in tension with each other started collaborating more effectively because they were now focused around a specific challenge that almost like forced them to align, to see things through the perspective of an end user. And to me that was a retrospective MacGuffin, right? This was an example of a project where the journey map, the artifact that we drew, had value per se. But I would argue that the bigger value out of that engagement came from improved communication between teams that were previously at odds with each other. I think that's a difference with the trim tab, which is a concept that I associate with Buckminster Fuller.

Harry 12:14

Mm-hmm.

Jorge 12:16

The trim tab is an integral part of the design of the rudder, as I understand it, right? Like the trim tab is there to get the rudder moving.

Harry 12:24

That's right.

Jorge 12:25

To create the momentum necessary to move this enormous thing against the resistance of the water. The MacGuffin, I think of it as a more disposable thing. Like to me, the classic MacGuffin is the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I don't mind spoiling such an old movie. At the end of that movie, the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled off into this warehouse to ostensibly never be seen again. Because it didn't really matter. Like the whole point of the Ark of the Covenant was not the ark itself, it was to precipitate the story to lead Indy and his friends on that adventure. And in some ways, I think that the difference between the MacGuffin and the trim tab is that we were done with the journey map and we could use it, but the journey map had a limited shelf life in some ways, whereas the improved relationship between the two teams had lasting value in much the same way as the, the story of Raiders has value that transcends whatever role the Ark of the Covenant played in the story.

Harry 13:36

Yeah. And you make good points here, and I recognize the analogy between the MacGuffin and the trim tab is loose at best. I think for the purposes of just highlighting the characteristics and attributes of the MacGuffin, having something to oppose it to that also generates change is maybe where I was thinking, although I'm not sure I was as clear about that upfront. Just to create some contrast. But I love the distinction that you made about the MacGuffin being disposable and the trim tab being integral to the design. And we started this conversation with the notion of strategic design, right? And what's interesting about the notion of strategic design and goes back to this, book I worked on with with Nilofer Merchant, it was called The New How. It was basically on collaborative strategy, a book that we wrote for O'Reilly sorry, Lou. And one of the key ideas there was wherever you are in an organization or in an effort, when you look up, you see strategic, and when you look down, you see tactical. And it doesn't matter where you are in that, unless perhaps you're at the very top and you look up and what is effectively the market, and that's what you might characterize as the big S strategy, right? But I think keeping in perspective that where you are determines sort of what is it that's gonna help you win versus what is it that's gonna help you execute is a useful fulcrum or point of view to take through this. And your example about the sort of the compliance and the finance example, which we had talked about before, reminded me of Heidi Trost's new book on human-centered security, where there's a tremendous tension in design between what you need to do to give people not only the impression, but the actual benefit of both being in a secure and potentially private environment versus being one that is low friction and easy to accomplish the desired outcomes that you have. And then this also reminded me, I know we've talked about this in the past, is this experience that I had at Rackspace, where I was chartered with understanding how to, from a design point of view, how to unpack and operationalize and then build a design team to infuse Rackspace's products with their ethos of fanatical support and the idea that we finally were able to reveal through many, many conversations with folks in the support organization, the executives, like looking at the history of the company, talking to customers and clients and whatnot, was that the notion of fanatical support was the idea of getting the customer or client and the customer support agent and the company Rackspace on the same side of the table, so to speak, and to get the problem itself on the table so that you could work together toward this solution. But the real benefit wasn't the solution. The real benefit was the relationship. Because there are always gonna be more problems, right? And even the problem that you're working on at any given time isn't necessarily gonna be put to bed if, for example, it's a predicament that is to say a problem that cannot intrinsically be solved, but needs to be managed, right? Emphasizing the quality of the relationship by working on the problem together toward this ultimate solution is where the energy needs to be put. So seems like there's this relationship between the MacGuffin and the sort of the temporary nature of a problem in the context of a relationship that if you can rotate around to get on the same side of the table with whomever you are collaborating or partnering or working with, and then look forward toward whatever you're trying to solution toward and work through whatever the challenges are to get to the other side, everybody comes out better.

Jorge 18:15

What you're pointing to is the idea that whatever you're working on, you can frame at different levels, right? Look, you can frame whatever you're doing at a very low level in terms of the transaction or the thing you're making, in the example that I used. And then there's the level of what is that thing in service of, right? In the case of the fanatical support thing, maybe, the thing you're working on is resolving an outage for the customer and that is in service of keeping them as a customer, keeping them happy, and with the acknowledgement that things happen, things are gonna go wrong, and the question is, how do you address them? And if you address them correctly, you will ultimately be building that relationship. The relationship is what the support incident is in service of. Keeping the customer satisfied is what the service...

Harry 19:25

Ethos?

Jorge 19:26

Well, not ethos, the thing that you're doing for them, right? I'm thinking in terms of a ticketing system. It's like the case, like this particular problem, is like, "We will resolve it, yes. And that's going to be important." More important, it's that it's in service of building this relationship with the customer that is, in the case of Rackspace, integral to who we are as a company, integral to our brand. And that's how you build a brand over time by showing up and and making choices like that. I'm thinking again with your, to your analogy with the trim tab, because I'm a big Buckminster Fuller fan, and I had not connected those two, but you're right that they are connected. And where they're connected is that what you're trying to do is you're trying to move things forward at that higher level. At the higher level of like building the relationship or changing the building code or whatever. That's a higher level, the strategic objective. You're trying to change things at that level by tweaking things at a lower, more accessible level. Because if you try to tackle the strategic level head on, you're probably not going to make much leeway. Because you'll find... I was gonna say unmovable. What's that saying, it's like an unmovable object? Like, the water that a trim tab looks to move is not unmovable, but at the volumes that a rudder needs to move, it's much more challenging, just like If you're trying to tackle the building code head on, you might end in a space of debate, like where people are talking, talking, talking and defending their positions intellectually. You're going to face a different level of resistance than if you come to the table with a practical, clearly defined, clearly valuable outcome that we can work on together that will help set the larger changes in motion. Does that make sense?

Harry 21:47

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think you brought it right up to the edge of, in order to get traction, the key to put in that lock is to ask the question like, if you, start to notice that you're dealing with some kind of immovable object or something like that, the question could then become a version of this, which is, what could we work on that would reveal the structural limitations or constraints that need to be made visible and discussed?

Jorge 22:25

And I've had those conversations explicitly with clients before, you know, 'cause like I said, I've stumbled into situations where in retrospect it's like, that thing was a MacGuffin. And we ended like we ended up driving this bigger change. But to your point earlier, we can approach the situation if we have an understanding of where we want to change things at the higher level. We can ask the question, what thing could we build? What thing could we work on that is tangible and dare I say tactical, that will move tactical things forward, that will also help move things at the higher level? And you can be quite intentional about picking those.

Harry 23:10

I think that maybe the bridge between what you're suggesting and what I was trying to get to and maybe didn't do such a good job is emphasizing that the idea is to find the MacGuffin that would reveal the structural limitations or constraints. It's not necessarily to solve for them, because what that does is it pushes the problem into the conversation and it becomes then a dialogue with the stakeholders and an it becomes an exploration space or an expedition space, or an innovation space, without necessarily being a solutioning activity.

Jorge 23:57

You wanna make things that you can put into the world where you start gauging how useful they are to people in real life as opposed to in theory. And the MacGuffin, to your point, like it's a great way to transcend dialogue to a space where we're actually making useful things in the world that also help move things strategically.

Harry 24:22

I love this idea. This is just amazing and I think it's gonna change how I look at problem solving going forward. I think this has been super useful.

Jorge 24:31

The book, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, is very short and it's chockfull of stuff like that. So the MacGuffin is one of the plays. Unfortunately, it's out of print. It has been out of print for a while. The publisher, my understanding, is they're no longer in business. I think there are used copies available for very expensive. I hope that Dan finds a way of making this text available again, because it is a really valuable book. And it's not just a book for designers. I would say anyone in a position of leadership who is trying to affect change, could benefit from designerly approaches, and that's what this book does. So anyway, highly recommend it if you can get, your hands on it.

Harry 25:17

It's funny, it reminds me just a tiny bit of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao. I don't know if you've ever read that, but it takes a very different approach because it looks through the lens of time and timing versus through the lens of things and objects. But these books seem complimentary to me.

Jorge 25:39

I've read other books by Venkatesh Rao. I have not read that one. And I will put it on my list because if it borders this territory, it's definitely up my alley.

Harry 25:48

Fabulous. seems like that might be a good place to put a pin in it for the day.

Jorge 25:53

Let's put a pin in it.

Harry 25:55

Really, great conversation. Thank you.

Narrator 25:59

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.