Reverse engineering
‘One man’s magic is another man’s engineering.’
ROBERT HEINLEIN
Reverse engineering is a term generally used to describe taking apart a ‘thing’ (whether mechanical or technological) that you didn’t create, in order to understand how it works so that you can then create a replica of your own.
A famous example is cracking the Enigma code in World War II – a brilliant piece of reverse engineering by cryptologists.
Here I mean something slightly different. In problem solving, we can reverse engineer from the solution. In other words, start at the end – with the solution or innovation you want – and work backwards from there.
Visual
The visual shows some of the elements of your business. Working out how to get them to fit together seamlessly is a difficult puzzle, likely to involve trial and error and take an age. But when you’ve seen what success looks like (the square underneath), reverse engineering from there to put every individual piece in the right place becomes a straightforward copying process.
Theory
Consider this joke, voted best at the Edinburgh Festival one year. ‘I’ve heard a rumour that Cadbury’s are bringing out a new chocolate bar for the Asian market. It could be a Chinese Wispa.’ It’s a simple play on words, making a joke out of the fact ‘whisper’ can be used two different ways.
You could create lots of new jokes with exactly the same method. I’ve just Googled ‘clichés’ to give me an existing phrase. Here’s my joke using it:
‘I didn’t have much time for dinner last night, so I just poured it into a padded envelope. I ate it in a jiffy.’ OK, it’s a terrible joke. OK, it’s barely a joke. But I thought it up just now, in about 20 seconds, after looking at the phrase ‘in a jiffy’.
The point is, you can work backwards from your end point with punning jokes, with encrypted war commands … and with business solutions.
The benefit of hindsight
Implicit in this tool is the idea that it’s easier to achieve a goal once you know that goal is achievable. Once Edison had cracked the lightbulb, other people knew it was worth working on too, because they knew it was possible. Before then, well, it might have been impossible for all anyone knew – and that can be demotivating.
So our theory of reverse engineering is that once we know what we want the solution to be – and that solution sounds plausible and realistic – our brains are perfectly capable of stepping backwards from that end point all the way to where we currently are. And then just reversing the steps.
Action
REVERSE ENGINEERING TOOLKIT
- Start at the end: what does the ideal solution look like? Ignore the problem for the time being and focus on what the outcome you want is.
- Gradually step away from that position, so you move from where you want to be to where you are, looking at the changes, in reverse order, required to get there.
- Now look at these steps in order of from where you are to where you want to be, and establish the actions needed to execute them.
This tool has a lovely starting point: you simply ask what would you like to be the case? What would be the dream position, the way you’d love things to be? Write that out, big and bold, for everyone to see and agree.
And instead of focusing on solving a problem, suddenly you’re focusing on achieving a solution.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Sometimes you won’t know what the solution might look like, and that’s when other tools will serve you better, to help you find that answer. But other times, you might already have in mind what you want the world to look like. That’s the time when taking this approach will work for you.
Step by step
There are then two simple ways to look at reverse engineering from your end point – one, as mentioned in the theory, is to work backwards, step by step. Start stepping away, looking at the things you need to begin, change or stop to achieve those steps. Keep stepping further and further out until your reverse-engineered solution meets your current problem, and you know what needs doing to get from the problem to the solution.
So, to be really simplistic, if you came to the view that the solution to your problem was a column that was 100 bricks high, working backwards, you’d decide that the step before that was to have a column 99 bricks high. The step before that, one 98 bricks high. The step before that … and so on, until you’ve gone through all the steps backwards to where you currently are.
Then you can just reverse the order to solve the problem and achieve your goal. In that particular example, by finding 100 bricks.
Holistic approach
The other way to reverse engineer is not to work in a logical one-step-back-at-a-time way, but look at the whole picture and see if it’s possible to engineer the whole environment or system or process to achieve that end point. Dismantle every barrier. Change things so that not only can your dream end point happen, it does happen. Even if you don’t achieve it 100 per cent, you should improve things dramatically.
Either way, it’s a very simple tool – effectively, instead of starting with the problem and looking at how to ‘fix’ it, you ignore the problem, and jump straight to how you want the world to be. Instead of ‘Some customers are unhappy because they’re not receiving their order within 72 hours’, you’re focusing on your ideal, perhaps ‘Every customer gets their order in 48 hours’. Now you just look at what you need to do to make that a reality – at which point you may turn to some of the other creative thinking tools in this book to help.
And it may mean you don’t have to deal with the original issue or challenge at all, because you’ve found a completely new way to achieve your ambitions.
Example
Here’s a story someone who used to work at Boden told me.
They had an objective: maximise their sales. That was the end point. So how could they reverse-engineer from ‘their best sales ever’ to create the environment for that to happen?
One approach was to look at their previous best sales occasions, and work backwards to see how those occasions came about, so they could replicate them.
One such instance happened when they featured, in their Mini Boden catalogue (for children), a Sheriff T-shirt. Although, while it was called a Sheriff T-shirt, it was actually a child’s T-shirt with a picture of a gun on the front (a cowboy gun).
Gun crime
A lot of customers complained. Boden was selling children’s T-shirts with pictures of guns on the front! The Bodenites were enraged.
So Boden did the right thing: they apologised. Unreservedly. In fact, customers got a personal email from Johnnie Boden, which included the line, ‘We made a mistake with this product and we feel stupid – especially me. Please accept my apologies.’ He also said, ‘Keep the feedback coming, good or bad. It’s the only way we can get better.’
Not every customer got the email, but thanks to social media, many more found out about it.
But here’s the thing. Apparently, the following catalogue had spectacular sales. The woman I spoke to said it seemed like being honest and apologising promptly and promising to put things right had actually increased customer loyalty. People were impressed.
To the point where some people at Boden, looking at reverse engineering their great sales … were wondering if maybe they shouldn’t deliberately make another mistake of some kind, which they could then apologise for. (They didn’t go through with it, but it’s an interesting idea.)
Rubbing his nose in it
Here’s one more reverse engineering story for you. The version I’ve heard concerns a businessman named Tim Martin. So let’s start at the end: he wants to rub a former teacher’s nose in his success.
Why? Because that teacher had told him that he’d never be a success, that he’d never make it in business. So Tim wants to prove him wrong. Again and again and again. A frequent reminder of the man’s mistaken negativity.
So how do we reverse engineer from that point, with a businessman who owns 540 pub restaurants around the country?
In this case, by businessman Tim Martin naming those pub restaurants not after himself, but after his ‘inspiration’ – the teacher who said he wouldn’t make it. So that the teacher would see his own name everywhere he went, but know that he didn’t own any of the places bearing his name. They weren’t his successes, but those of the student he’d slighted.
And that teacher’s name was Mr J. D. Wetherspoon.
Summary
Reverse engineering is a useful tool when you’re able to visualise the solution you want. Many times you won’t, and one of the other tools will help you come up with a solution you hadn’t previously considered. But when you know the answer to your problem, reverse engineering can help you work out how to achieve it.
It’s the same with an opportunity or innovation – you might have already had a brilliant innovation idea; now you just want to work out how to develop it. And one answer is by working backwards; whether step by step or by looking at the whole thing and debating what you need to do to your business to create the solution you’ve envisaged.
To use reverse engineering successfully, ask:
- Are we focusing on a problem obsessively when instead we could be just looking at what we’d like to be the case – what we want the world to be like?
- If our world did look like that, how did we get there? Let’s move back from that future, step by step, to the present, noting all the retrograde changes along the way so we can then reverse the steps to get to that ideal future.
- What if we look at someone else? What other company (perhaps in another field) is achieving the success we want? How do they do it? How do they operate? How can we move back, step by step, from where they are to where we are, and then reverse the process in implementation, to take our business to where theirs is?