Looking at short cuts to find insights

I recently watched a good Ted talk from Tom Hulme - "What can we learn from shortcuts" - intersection of design and user experience. The talk focuses on where people have developed there own desire paths our of necessity and how designers and architects should evaluate things by observing how people use the product.

Example are shortcuts though fields that show how users actually want to go between places. Which is not the same way as designers actually planned for them to go. Another example is how launching a straw man of a service can teach what customers really want. Tom Hulme goes into a case study of a food truck service that Ayr Muir in Boston used to test before he opened a restaurant. He used a food truck and various menus at different places to dial in to what was the best location and menu.

Iterative design processes are the cause celebre for product development. The general theme is start with an idea, work quickly get product out, and validate with users in the real world. This is characterized by speed, low cost, low risk.
This approach is championed by many famous management thinkers and is called out in several methodologies such as Lean Startup Method (Eric Ries), Design Thinking process, and the Fire Bullets not Cannonballs approach as defined by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen.

What I find interesting is that the approach to embrace validated learning or empirical validation through fast development and low risk seems not to be embraced for the development of internal projects. For these projects the thinking is still dominated by the big bang mentality. Users seem to feel uncomfortable that if they don't get most of their needs accounted for right away and all at once then the motivation or funds will dry up and they loose their shot.

As in many things the fear that internal projects will never get to the good stuff unless it is laid out in meticulous detail and defined into a comprehensive roadmap. This is a shame as the desire paths seem not be well understood by the internal stakeholders which ends up solving problems that real people used to have.