To Create Something New, Not Every Piece Has to Be New

I have been into LEGO since childhood. For those who know me, “into” is probably putting it mildly. I am a LEGO lover. Ever since I was three I would tip the bricks out in front of me and build whatever came to mind. I enjoyed the games that came out of the pieces my imagination put together. As I grew older, what the model on the box looked like mattered less to me than what I could do with those bricks. One day a piece was a car door, the next day part of a building, and another day a whole world I had made up. That is why my relationship with LEGO shifted a little as I grew up. First I would try to understand what the designer had in mind, why the pieces had been put together that way. I started building the model exactly as the instructions said. Even so, I could rarely stop myself from making one small change at the end. I would add a detail of my own, or a while after finishing I would take the model apart and build something completely different out of it. Looking back today, I realise this was not just a hobby that began in childhood. It was actually my way of thinking — a way of thinking that runs from LEGO to CRM, and from CRM to building innovative software.

First understand the system. Then see its parts. Then put them together again.

And I don’t think I ever stopped playing with LEGO in my working life either. Only the pieces changed; the game did not. One of the first places I noticed this was while preparing presentations. Sometimes I would still be working on a deck minutes before an important meeting. I admit this is not a working method to be proud of. The last ten minutes do not count as a project management methodology. Please do not take it as advice. What is interesting, though, is that these presentations put together in a very short time sometimes produced far stronger results than I expected. Because most of the time I am not really preparing that deck in the last ten minutes. I have been collecting its pieces in my head for far longer. A screen I saw months ago, a problem we ran into at another client, a solution we built years ago, a sentence I heard in a meeting, a business model I came across in a different industry, an article I read, an app I use. All of these sit in my mind as separate pieces. When I meet a new problem, instead of trying to think from scratch, I tip those pieces onto the table. And sometimes I notice that two pieces which looked entirely unrelated form something very meaningful when placed side by side. Perhaps that is why I have never seen innovation as merely inventing something new. I think innovation has another, far more common form: building a relationship between existing pieces that nobody has built before. I have always liked Steve Jobs’ idea of “connecting the dots”. Anyone who has heard that talk knows he describes how experiences that seemed unrelated at the time form a meaningful whole years later. The more I listened to it, the more I began to think something else as well: perhaps it is not only about waiting for the dots to connect one day. Choosing which dots to connect is part of the design too. Because even when the same dots are in front of us, we do not all draw the same lines. One person connects technology with retail. Another connects game design with education. Another connects a structure they saw in the investment markets with a global procurement problem. The dots may be the same. The connections we draw are different.

A very early example of this in my own life goes back to my school years. I studied at a commercial vocational high school. In those years I took classes in entrepreneurship, law, accounting and business administration. Honestly, at the time I had no idea how those separate dots would come together years later. But once I entered working life and started my own company, I realised that none of those classes had been independent of each other after all. Accounting, business administration, labour law, entrepreneurship and much more — when you start a company they all end up at the same table. Law comes into play when you draw up a contract. Financial thinking when you make an investment decision. Business knowledge when you grow a team. Entrepreneurship when you weigh up an opportunity. And in the end they all become part of a single structure. Looking back today, I think those vocational school classes did not only give me knowledge. I suspect the foundations of becoming an entrepreneur — and of enjoying the act of building something through hard work — were laid there too. Just like LEGO, they taught me to see different pieces as parts of the same system. Back then I did not know how the dots would connect. But years later, when I founded my own company, the line became visible. Perhaps that is the curious part of life. We do not know why we are collecting some pieces while we collect them. We usually work out what they mean much later.

Sometimes the solution is hidden in another industry.

As I worked on projects in different industries over the years and picked up different domain knowledge, I began to notice something. A method that has been accepted as normal in one industry for years can look like a radical idea in another. Because industries build their own language within their own domain. They create their own concepts, screens, processes and habits. After a while everyone starts to see the problem the same way. Worse, they come to believe the solution can only take the shape that industry is used to. With the advantage of working across industries, I have often preferred to ask a different question. Instead of “how do they do this in this industry?”, sometimes: “where else have we done something structurally similar, and what did we do?” That small difference widens the design space enormously. We realised that a solution we had built for an education company rested on the same structural foundation as a problem we came across years later while listening to the needs of a large white-goods manufacturer. The industry was completely different. The concepts were different. The users were different. But the pieces? A concept that meant one thing in education corresponded to another concept in procurement at the manufacturer. We changed the names. We reinterpreted the relationships. We adapted the flow to the new problem. Just as the same LEGO brick is a wall in one model and a wing in another. The piece was the same. Its job had changed. I think one of the most valuable skills in software development shows itself exactly here: being able to look at the structure of a solution rather than its name.

Then I met CRM.

When I entered the world of CRM, what struck me was not customer management alone. In time I even realised that CRM’s value for me went far beyond the definition of “customer relationship management”. I saw something else behind CRM: the concept of XRM, “anything relationship management”, which was fashionable for a while. Looking through CRM glasses, what I saw in industries and businesses was a set of pieces I could build something with. A customer is an entity. A company is an entity. An opportunity is an entity. A product is an entity. An activity is an entity. I could build relationships between entities. I could define processes. I could create rules. I could change screens. I could design workflows. I could make them talk to other systems. And most importantly, I could add new pieces on top of the ones I had. That was exactly one of the things that struck me when I met Microsoft Dynamics. Instead of a closed piece of software that was finished and told you how you would use it, I had a platform that offered a strong standard while also letting me build my own world on top of that standard. That felt very familiar. Because it was what I had done as a child. The pieces had a certain harmony. There were rules for how they connected to each other. But LEGO did not tell me what to build. My imagination did. There is one more important thing I have learned over the years. Freedom does not mean the absence of rules. That is perhaps the finest thing about LEGO. You can combine the pieces however you like, but there is a very clear system that lets the pieces connect. Even the dimensions of those little bricks are fixed. It is precisely because of that standard that thousands of different pieces can work together.

I think good software platforms are similar. The data model has a logic. The security model has rules. Workflows have a way of running. In short, the platform has boundaries — and rather than reducing creativity, those boundaries actually let us design more freely. Another fine thing about working across industries is being able to show people solutions they are not used to. Sometimes when you show a client an example from their own industry you do not get a surprising result. They have already seen something like it. But when you bring a model that works in another industry and adapt it to their problem, the conversation changes shape. The first reaction is sometimes “that is not how it is done in our industry”. That is one of the sentences I find most interesting. Because there is a very good question that can follow it: “why?” Because it genuinely cannot be done? Because of regulation? Because of the nature of the business model? Or because nobody has thought differently for years? There is a big difference between these. Sometimes you really do find a rule that cannot be changed. But sometimes what you run into is simply habit. And design usually begins right there.

When I look at how CRM technologies have evolved over the years, I see a similar shift. At the start our focus was mostly on the classic CRM concepts: customer, sales, activity, service and campaign. Today the world around CRM platforms is far bigger. Cloud services, low-code tools, mobile apps, payment systems, data platforms and, of course, artificial intelligence. It is no longer just about adding a new field to a CRM screen. We can now define a customer’s entire journey from a single point. We can let one event trigger another system. We can connect a movement in the physical world to a digital process. We can gather data from different systems and make sense of it, then turn that meaning back into action. So the LEGO box has grown. Considerably. But a new problem has appeared. The difficulty is no longer finding a piece. In today’s technology world there is a piece for almost every problem. You can even put together in a few minutes a prototype that would once have taken days. That is an incredible opportunity. But it is also dangerous. Because having a great many pieces does not mean you know what to do with them. Having ten thousand LEGO bricks in a box does not automatically make you a good designer. The real question is still the same: which piece, why, and what will you combine it with? I do not think technical capability loses its importance as technology advances. The real value lies in being able to connect technology with business, one industry with another, data with process, and a requirement with the real problem behind it.

Perhaps the most valuable people of the coming period will not be those who know every technology down to the last detail, but those who can understand different worlds and connect them. A little technology. A little industry knowledge. A little customer experience. A little design. A little data. A little commerce. A little human behaviour. To my mind, innovation will increasingly happen here. Even today, when I build with LEGO, I first try to understand the system. Then I move a piece, add a detail, put in my own interpretation. We do not have to build everything from scratch. Understanding the systems built before us is valuable. Knowing the standards is valuable. Using the structures that strong platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics give us is valuable. But none of this replaces thinking. Because in the end somebody has to pick up the pieces and ask: “what else could we build with this?” When I played with LEGO as a child, I had no idea that what I was doing would one day become a big part of my profession. Back then there were coloured plastic bricks in front of me. Today the pieces are a little different. There is the experience we have gathered over the years. There are successful projects. There are mistakes. There are good ideas we have seen at other companies. But I think I am still doing what I did as a child. I tip the pieces onto the table. I look at them one by one. I look for connections between the ones that seem unrelated.