The Hindu Business Line : It destroys turned

IF you are confused at the strange title - well, you should be! Just for fun, I took an English phrase and checked what happened when it was translated (by computer) back and forth between seven different languages, and then back to English. This is what resulted. The phrase I took? "Lost in translation." It's like that childhood game, Chinese Whispers, where you begin with something sane and end with quite something else.

A few years ago, I participated in an exercise at my son's school, meant to sensitise parents to the difficulties in communicating with kids. The exercise had pairs of volunteers seated back-to-back. One person had a drawing in her hand which showed a jumble of geometric shapes - and she had to communicate with her partner (sitting with his back to her), who then proceeded to draw it out.

We all believed we were good at communication, but it was unexpectedly difficult to translate the visual shape into descriptive phrases (draw a rectangle, now draw an isosceles triangle intersecting the rectangle with the right ... um ... corner thingy... sitting inside the rectangle, and the top part sticking out ... ). You see what I mean? Then the receiver had to translate these phrases back in his mind and draw them out. As you can imagine, the final product resembled the original drawing only in parts.

Developing new products is sometimes like this. During the last few months, I've been talking to both sides of a new product development team - the R&D boffins and the marketing mavens - and I thought this exercise encapsulated the divide that often lies between these two critical groups.

What struck me was the similarity of the response on both sides - eyes rolled in disbelief at the incomprehension of the other side. R&D showed me a bunch of patents, which had been, in its opinion, unjustly, rejected by marketing as being out of kilter with consumer requirements. Marketing groaned at the final shape of a product idea that hardly delivered on any of its promises. No wonder then that the new product development process is so often mired in confusion - with the resultant damage caused by cost overruns, time delays and sheer frustration.

Marketers want to know what technology can do for their consumers and for their markets. As they are comfortable with abstractions, their desires tend to be communicated in a manner too nebulous for R&D. Research, after all, is manned by scientists, who prefer precision and exactitude in their language. Marketing says, "We want more freshness." R&D asks, "But what does that mean?" Both sides use jargon that alienates the other. If they are to work together, somewhere the marketing mumbo-jumbo of consumer needs has to match the R&D techno-babble.

I recall one ideation session where the R&D guy talked about the role of the container in catalysing oxidation in the key nutrient additives in a fortified food product. The non-technical members of the marketing/agency team looked foxed. And the more confused they got, the more the R&D chap tied himself up in linguistic knots. We asked him to assume he was explaining to a bunch of school kids - whereupon he said, "You can't use this packaging for this product without refrigeration." And things suddenly got clearer.

I have an amusing game which helps - it's a chart drawn like a bingo game in which we put in the buzzwords that both sides have agreed to hate - and if anyone uses them, it gets marked out. The person who identifies all the words spoken gets a prize (usually a chocolate). It doesn't stop jargon from entering the discussion, but at least it makes everyone aware of the danger of obfuscating jargon - and in the process, buzzwords on both sides get clarified and defined.

Another tool I have found useful is a modified version of Ulwick's outcome-based segmentation that forces everyone to look at consumer-based metrics to define outcomes being delivered by the product. I find R&D people gravitate to this quite naturally, with its parallels to quality function deployment, while the marketers are pleasantly surprised to find greater clarity in a confusing bouquet of benefits. It also keeps both teams relentlessly focused on the person who isn't at the table, but whose opinion counts the most of all - the consumer. If R&D can sell its idea to marketing in language that marketing understands, and conversely, if marketing can iterate its product requirements backwards into metrics that are measurable and actionable - well, then, you reduce the scope for miscommunication dramatically.

Obviously, greater communication helps - each team involving the other side as a matter of routine, rather than saving up interaction only for pressure-prone projects with deadline demons breathing down your neck. In the process, sheer osmosis will enable R&D to understand the consumer needs that drive marketing thinking, and marketing will absorb the potential that technology has to offer.

Is your R&D team physically separate from Marketing? Need it be thus? So many of the organisations I have visited have housed the R&D team in a separate lab, cut off from the mainstream folk that run the profit engines. And yet, it's not as if the R&D people were always in the lab or doing experiments all the time. Organisations that have experimented with mixing up technical and marketing folk in the same space have found that communication lines have improved, improving the chance of collaboration.

Do the teams really view the process as a partnership, with each side bringing in pieces that will complete the jigsaw? If the organisation is dominated by either science or marketing, then this unhealthy balance will undoubtedly result in marginalising one set of vital inputs.

Does your new product team have a leader who can be an effective bridge, synthesising both sides? For this, you need a person who is comfortable in both territories - he need not be an engineer, but someone with the intellectual curiosity and breadth to dig down and get comfortable with both sides. It can be done. When a non-engineer manager found herself working on the industry dynamics of a highly technical product, she pulled out IIT's mechanical engineering textbooks and figured out what a `stepless infinitely variable belt' really delivered. Or, it could be a technical person who is comfortable with straddling the other side.

One scientist I know trained himself in interviewing consumers (not every scientist is good at this), and regularly visits Dharavi (once called Asia's largest slum, now home to a growing middle-class) to see for himself the changes in consumer perception. When he showed me his insights, I was struck by how grounded he was in market reality. Dharavi, as he put it, is a microcosm of consumers, and by marinating there, he emerged with insights that infused his development process directly. Even better, he was able to hold his ground in marketing meetings, because of his direct contact with consumers.

Taking an idea successfully from a concept to a disruption needs superb teamwork. For this, the traditional `silo-management' has to give way to a more collaborative model. Training and facilitation can help. But to be truly effective, the organisation has to create bridges between these knowledge silos through more fundamental changes in its structure and culture.

(The writer is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name for strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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