You’ve distilled your ideas into a designing principle. You’ve found their one-line, strategic heartbeat.
Now, it’s time to build.
You have a crucial leg up on everyone else trying to bring their ideas into the world. Because you started with the designing principle, you have focus.
Everything you build from this point on will be tied to this elemental idea. It will have the designing principle’s meaning woven through it.
Think back to Speedland and their hyper-performance trail shoes. Their name, shoe design, distribution strategy, and more are all pieces of a larger, cohesive unit.
So how can we do this — build around a designing principle — in practice? That’s the subject of this chapter.
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Growth Maps
Building around a designing principle starts with growth maps. These are visual representations of your ideas: abstract views of how things link together, operate, grow and decay.
Growth maps can be used to visualize many things: a new business idea, a fiction novel, a one-off product, the structure of a company, and more. Here’s a very basic example of what they can look like:
Notice how this basic growth map is oriented.
The designing principle is placed in its center so that everything else can be built around it. These areas of growth all stem from the designing principle. They are extensions and reflections of this core idea.
Using visual maps in this way allows you to retain focus. You can see how your ideas all hang together, and importantly, where they all originate from.
The growth map above is ambiguous by design in order to place focus on its structure. Let’s look at a more concrete example from business: Apple.
At the time of writing, Apple’s market cap is $2.1 trillion and yet they’re a shockingly focused company for their size.
If we travel back to the heyday of Steve Jobs-led Apple, they were even more focused. Their designing principle sounded something like “Apple will bring the power of personal computing to the masses”.
At the time, Apple was:
- Accessible
- Beautiful and design-led
- Whimsical
Apple was not:
- Corporate (ie. IBM)
- Boring
- Highly technical
How did Apple use their designing principle to inform their company-wide strategy?
Let’s start again with names. Apple is friendly and whimsical, particularly for a computer company. It doesn’t quite fit and yet it feels perfect at the same time. It sits in stark contrast to names like Intel and IBM (International Business Machines).
Apple extended their values further into product design. Earlier iMacs bore friendly shapes, soft color palettes and carved handles in their backs. They were computers, sure, but they were also objects meant to live in a home and be touched. (Personal + Computing)
How about distribution? Apple was never one for boring ads. But if you look more closely at their content, you’ll actually see their values woven throughout their media.
- Their famous 1984 ad spoke to the “misfits and rebels” who helped drive the beginnings of personal computing.
- Later iPod ads used bold colors and contrast to show the personal relationships between the device, the music it held, and the end user.
- Mac vs. PC ads made it very clear what users of the two competitor machines valued. Where PC was stodgy and corporate, Macs were young and entrepreneurial.
What’s the important takeaway? Apple built themselves into one of the leading brands in the world with focus and cohesion.
They achieved this with the help of a designing principle. By always keeping this brand vision in mind, Apple wove its values through every arm of their company.
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Designing principles aren’t just for business. They can be used for anything that you want to bring into reality and grow.
How might the growth map above work for a story? Let’s look at one of the greats: The Godfather.
Good stories are focused and cohesive. They’re built around designing principles, from their settings, to their characters, straight through to the shapes of their plots.
In The Godfather, the designing principle goes something like this: An innocent son is corrupted by the world of the mafia when taking revenge on his father’s killers.
How does this designing principle weave itself through the rest of the film?
The setting of The Godfather is the world of the 1940’s mafia on New York and Long Island. We see gated compounds, private rooms and a broader mafia system at work.
Michael Corleone is not a part of this system at the beginning of the film. The youngest son of the Corleone family, he chose a career in the military instead of his family’s operation.
But Michael is drawn back in when his father is shot and ultimately succumbs to his injuries. Michael’s narrative arc — the main through-line of the film — is itself an embodiment of the designing principle.
Michael starts the film an innocent outsider (albeit a warrior). He ends the film a broken killer that has assumed power over the family business.
Where else does The Godfather’s designing principle make itself known? In the composition of the film’s characters.
The Corleone crime family has three sons who are all reflections of their father: one (Sonny) is bold and charismatic, a second (Fredo) is sweet and beloved, a third (Michael) is ruthless.
Combined, these traits can build a man capable of leading the Corleone family. But apart, they all have weaknesses that hold them back from ever leading successfully.
This is Michael Corleone’s ultimate downfall. He is ruthless enough to be Godfather, but goes so far as to lose himself and his family.
We also see The Godfather’s designing principle at work in its book and poster design: puppet strings imply a larger crime web that Michael Corleone has become trapped in.
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Such is the power of growth maps. They work equally as well for a technology business and a film about a crime family.
Both started with a designing principle — a one-line statement of strategy — and build themselves around this core idea.
This is how large, complicated things grow and maintain a sense of cohesion. It’s how our favorite products, brands and stories maintain their focus.
If you want to bring your ideas into the world, find and remember the designing principle that runs through them. It’s the essential building block that everything else will grow from.
