Chris Writes.

It was entirely due to good luck that I happened to be able to be able to get my bike fit at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. I was in Boulder on other business, and was able to arrange a 2.5 hr fit session with bike fit rockstar Sean Madsen, a guy who undisputedly now knows far more about the workings of cyclist knees, feet, hips, shoulders, backs, and wrists than nearly anybody. I owe him a massive thanks for his time and his help.

Sean Madsen from BCSM looks on as I pedal while covered in tracking dots

This is the part where I say “Well ya know, I did my share of bike fitting way back when I worked in a shop…”  I’ve been riding bikes for the better part of 18 years now, and save for the occasional non-bike vacation or that bit where I was in school, there hasn’t been much “off the bike” time.  And while it’s true, I’ve never actually won a race (though I once got 2^nd), I think I’ve got a decent understanding of bike fit.  Or at least, I thought so.

Side view of the tracking dots - note the red cameras!

In recent years, I’ve learned even more as the science and physiology of biomechanics has blossomed bike fit from a pure art form into a unique science.  It’s a science where the algorithms are well established, yet remain flexible enough to accommodate each individual rider.  Yet despite my familiarity with the concept of fit, and despite my own experience, it was the process of actually going through it that really made me realize how far this has come.  From the physical assessment of flexibility and asymmetry, to being filmed with six cameras and those 3D tracking dots they use to create animated Golem characters, I was in awe at the undeniable precision.  I’ve seen this stuff on paper, plenty of times.  But this time it was me, and those circles being drawn on the screen were the ellipses of my knees, wavering and weaving left to right as I pedaled up and down.  These spiro-graph doodles that the heartless and whirring HAL-9000 machine was displaying were uncaring, ruthless, and perfect.  And they showed me, by exactly how much, that I was not.

I was riding my bike on a trainer under the 6 laser-beam equipped cameras in the lab.  The cameras and their computer tracked the 16 reflectors on my knees, feet, and hips to within a few millimeters in 3 dimensions.  I was pedaling at a fixed 290 watts.  After a healthy sample of about 4800 readings (16 sensors, tracked for about 5 seconds at 60 frames per second), Sean and I reviewed my results: my knees were too bent at the bottom of the pedal stroke, my back wasn’t curving right, and I was pedaling with my heels lifted all the time.  My knees weren’t optimally aligned over the pedals, and because I have a slightly longer left femur (who knew?), I was pedaling slightly crooked, so that my knees weren’t perfectly mirror images of each other.  Basically, I was pretty good from far, but up close, far from good.

We ended up dropping my saddle and my bars (yes, that’s right, my legs were too bent at the bottom of the stroke, but we dropped my saddle).  We adjusted my cleats, and I got back on the bike.  Cameras aglow in their sinister laserbeam red, I spun the bike back up to speed and waited for Sean to bring the wattage back up to 290.  It never happened.  Or rather, it did, but I never felt it.  These few small tweaks let me pedal at the same power, but at a far lower perceived exertion.  It was not subtle.  My center of gravity dropped by more than a centimeter, my bars dropped nearly 2cm, and my cleats now adjusted to accommodate for leg length discrepancies, I was now oddly unchanged, yet stronger.  I didn’t feel like my bike fit differently.  Sean simply unlocked some of my muscles.

6 of these, staring at me.

Apparently there were two big things at work here: one is that I am now able to utilize more of my gluteus muscles, which apparently are the strongest muscles the body has.  Second, because I was always pedaling with my toes pointed down, my calves were never getting a chance to relax, eternally flexed out yet not firing and providing power.  My seat was too high, so I was pointing my toes to reach the pedals. By pointing my toes, I wasn’t getting proper leg extension.  Dropping my saddle let me drop my heels, get better extension, use more muscles, and abuse my calves less.

Had it been up to me, I would have started by raising my saddle.  This would have been exactly wrong.

So what’d we learn?  A few things: first, the science of bike fit has more to say about the interactions of the entire body with the entire bike than it has to say about one specific aspect.  It’s chaos theory and butterflies in the Amazon, but it’s an ecosystem where, at least in a lab, you can clearly see and measure the effects of a change in position on not just that element, but the rest of the rider as well.  And the art form has moved from the knowing glances of a wizened Italian sitting in the corner with an espresso, to a scientist in Colorado who can measure everything, but still has the insight to know what to change to bring the entire system into alignment.

Second, I suspect that this might be uncomfortable for people who’ve been doing this for a long time.  The past generation’s gurus of bike fit, while probably well worthy of the acclaim they have earned themselves, are now at risk of being outmoded by a system that is more ruthlessly reliable, more quickly taught, and more accommodating to specific & individual rider needs (especially when, say, your left leg is 2 or 3 mm longer than your right).  It doesn’t make the Gurus any less talented.  It simply makes them less unique.

Third, this sort of scientific approach feels nothing like the inside of a bike shop.  I walked into the Boulder Center having no idea what to expect, and was rather surprised to find that it felt as clinical as it did.  Apart from a few exceptions I’ve seen (like the fit room at nearby University Bikes), the confidence and assurance of this laboratory was decidedly unlike the archetype of your neighbourhood bike shop.  But the fact that bike shops can learn how to do this, and that this fit technology has become available all over the planet within the past 3 years – well, it’s all rather stunning, and gives me hope about what the future of a great bike shop environment will be.  In some cases, it’s already there.  And that’s just cool.

Three tracking dots per shoe

UPDATE: My computer is now fixed, and the folks at Apple did the right thing, owned up to the situation, and apologized. While my experience was unfortunate, I can’t fault their willingness to deal with the problem head on, and solve it as best as possible.

—–

Below is a verbatim letter I wrote to Apple regarding my current experiences in trying to get my computer repaired.  I’m posting it here because I think the broader heuristic here applies well outside of the world of computers.  Basically: I think it’s often the combination of talented/smart humans, and the appropriate systems that they rely on, that create success stories.  The humans or the systems alone are not independently sufficient, no matter how good the human, or how marvelous the system.

Ask yourself which of the two you might have a hand in improving, then go do it.  K, thx.

____

Dear Apple,

It’s now been 3 weeks since I dropped off my MacBookPro at the Apple Store in Los Gatos, CA to be repaired.  The diagnosis was a failed logic board, and I was told it would take 5 to 7 days to get back.  This would be a good time to cue the ominous, foreboding, DRM-free music.

My complaint is not with anyone at Apple with whom I’ve spoken – so far, I’ve only come across intelligent, reasonable people.  My feedback that I hope somehow makes it through this anonymous web-based radio-button interaction is as follows: your intelligent, reasonable people seem to lack the tools required to answer my single most important question:  “when will I get my computer back?”

To me, this seems like a reasonable question, and one you certainly must anticipate with formidable alacrity.  Yet, it’s impossible to get an answer to it, or at least, so it seems to me.  Here’s an account of what led me to this thinking:

1. The people at the Apple Store (Los Gatos) could not tell me if the parts I needed were in stock.  They could only confirm that they ordered them.  The parts took  10 days to arrive, my daily  calls after day 7 were not able to get a response any more enlightened than “maybe tomorrow or the next day, we never know what we are getting shipped until it gets here”.  I heard this several times, from different people, on different days.  If the computer had arrived on time, I would not have had to go on a business trip to Montreal with a Dell that I borrowed from our IT department, and which lacked any of the programs I rely on.  But I soldiered on.
2. When my parts arrived, it was discovered that other problems existed. My computer would now have to be sent to “depot”, which sounds ominous.  The delivery counter was reset: again, 5 to 7 days.
3. After 7 days went by, my calls to the guys in Los Gatos were met with an equally cryptic confirmation that my computer had made it to the depot as planned, but that it’s status was “awaiting parts”. When I pressed for more info, reasonable questions including “what parts?” and “how long will it take to get these parts?”, they said they could not tell me.  They directed me to the Apple Care 800 number.  I was starting to realize that my next business trip, this time to Europe, was going to involve the same loaner Dell.  The retail store had offered to sell me a new computer, and then waive the restocking fee if I later returned it, but I was not exactly comfortable shelling out over $2k of my money to borrow your computer.
4. I called the 800 number, and had a conversation with a nice woman there who confirmed that she could also tell me nothing about when my computer would be completed and returned to me.  Apparently she had no visibility into the repair any more than the Retail folks did.  “Awaiting parts”, she said.  “But it might be done tomorrow or the next day.”  I told her I wasn’t exactly full of optimism.  I asked her why she couldn’t be more specific, and she said she simply didn’t have access to the information.  I also asked her if we could modify the ship-to address so that the computer could perhaps be shipped to me while I was on my business trip, but this too was impossible.  I asked her if she realized that this policy didn’t make any sense.  She said yes, she realized that.

So you see, it seems as though, in an era of RFID tags, shipping automation, UPS real-time tracking, GPS, and a litany of other advances, we’ve reached an age where we can pretty accurately predict things like product pipeline time, delivery, and other details – if every Apple was hand-made by a team of Swiss engineers who handcrafted not just each computer, but each microprocessor in a bespoke fashion similar to that of High Street wingtips, then I’d have a greater understanding of the situation.  But we’re talking about mass-produced silver boxes that contain other metal bits, all of which come from big factories that likely rival fighter jets in complexity and systems integration.

The fact that you can’t tell me where my computer is suggests only two possible scenarios to me:

1. A concerted effort against me, specifically, for something I did.  I know not what.
2. An utter failure on your part to provide your people with the information and systems they need to do their jobs in a way that makes sense to me, the customer on the other end of the phone.

If it was #1, then please let me know what I did so I can properly apologize.

Thanks,

Chris Matthews

During the two years I spent at the Rotman School of Management, the school’s Dean, Roger Martin, developed a glossy sheen that was applied to many facets of the academic curriculum, and designated to be “Integrative Thinking”. It’s a framework that, while best explained in far more detail than I’ll get into here, basically shone a spotlight on the success that can be found when a problem is not solved by selecting between alternatives, but rather synthesizing the best of all alternatives. Said even more plainly: it’s a systematized way of achieving ‘also/and’ instead of settling for ‘either/or’.

In the not-quite-five years since I graduated, this framework has evolved, earned media praise, birthed books published at Harvard Press, and most importantly, it’s been something I’ve been able to apply in regular doses across the multiplicity of my responsibilities. Now, Roger has expanded his approach into a new realm, termed “Design Thinking”, as something that’s not so much an evolution of Integrative Thinking, but rather as a critical and practical way to bridge the gap between the practicality of integrative thinking, and the possibilities that come out of visionary imaginations. Design Thinking, rather than focusing specifically on decision making and synthesis of options, focuses instead on thinking styles, and synthesis of analytic rigor with the artistry of intuition, thus providing the tools required to actually create something new. Again, please note this definition, and entire blog post, is violently truncated. For the whole story, go read this, and probably this too. And for a single-shot of the whole discussion, created in real-time on a giant flip chart, here’s an overly large picture that you can print out poster size if you want.

On Monday, Roger paid a visit to Jump Associates, a Design Consultancy in nearby San Mateo, just a short few miles from my home in Redwood City. He was there for an evening lecture on Design Thinking in promotion of his new book. I wanted to summarize some of the insights, and where I can, relate some of the key points back to bikes. Maybe, just maybe, this might help to show that while the majority of the cycling world may never talk in the same language of strategy consulting firms, the business model fundamentals, competitive landscape, and strategy dynamics are sufficiently complex to justify application of this level of thought. Bike biz is full of smrt people. Sometimes we don’t give ourselves proper credit. (for extra points, go recruit a Rotman grad or two, k?)

Roger’s talk covered many areas, but two sets of interplayed dynamics seemed key to the topic:

1. reliability vs validity
2. inductive/deductive logic vs abductive logic

PART 1: Business in general tends to prefer reliable results, through broad application of proven templates and template-styled thinking, and data analysis tools like linear regression: give the same set of numbers to a group of statisticians, and ask them to use the data to predict the future trends, and they’ll all come up with *exactly* the same answer, the same confidence interval, and the same measures of statistical significance. Sadly, this does not mean that the data will predict what will really happen. As a bike example: the number of speeds on a new mountain bike has progressed steadily upwards over the years. However, this does not mean that we should expect 56-speed bikes by 2025.

Validity, on the other hand, is being able to look past what might be expected, to apply some insight, outside knowledge, or deep understanding, to adjust strategy to match an accurate future, instead of the one that everyone expects, or that mathematics says it can predict. It’s everything that templates are not. Linear regression-styled thinking, for example, would not have expected the number of speeds on an XC racing bike to go from 27 down to 20, yet SRAM’s new XX component group has done exactly that *and* improved performance for these riders. They did it by understanding what those riders needed, at a very fundamental human level, and it wasn’t more gears.

Good business designers, Roger postulates, achieve validity by applying imagination and creativity to the challenges they face. Designers tend to imagine the future, versus a business analyst who uses linear regressions and data to try to predict it. This is not to say that a good designer simply discards analysis; more accurate would be to say that they still rely heavily on analysis, but in the face of an intuitive notion that conflicts with the data, they simply have the brass balls required to challenge the authority of the graphs.

One good related story here that Roger shared was from his days at Monitor, when he was hired by Rob Harvey, who headed up design at Herman Miller. The project: the Aeron chair. This was a chair that when people first saw it garnered nothing but negative comments, sometimes even hostility. He persevered through the first impressions to create an absolute icon. When Roger asked Rob at the time why he, the head of design, was hiring a strategy consultant, Rob replied “Isn’t strategy a design process?”

PART 2: Typically, the business world relies on inductive and deductive logic, essentially ‘what will be’ based on what we know of causal relationships. As a bike example: gas prices are increasing, so alternative modes of both fuel and transport will be required, leading to the conclusion that bike sales will naturally increase. Seems reasonable enough, right?

Roger made the case that designers rely additionally on abductive logic: thinking ‘what might be’, based on what we know of human behavior, latent needs, and our own intuition. An example here might be to use the same gas price pressures to justify designing villages and neighborhoods that simply require less travel, and to perhaps design them by looking at senior communities (since they’re already low mobility) as models for ways we could better design new family communities that required less transport. That sort of thing.

The refrain here from both sides is that business people claim designers aren’t practical, while design people claim business people aren’t imaginative. To a large extent, these stereotypes are correct. This is probably in part because the business types enjoy their reliability even if it means they’re stuck making relatively safe but boring incremental improvements (ie ‘we made our new carbon race wheels 4 grams lighter’). Similarly, the designers enjoy their claim on validity even if it means being commercially wrong sometimes (ie ‘Trek Lime’).

As people, we all have a personal and immediate reaction to aesthetics, whether it’s a chair or a TT frame – products evoke reactions because they’re immediate and sensory. Business has a similar but less obvious aesthetic, which might be as simple as thinking of as the ‘brand’ as the product, or as Roger put it, to say that managers work in the medium of strategy. The reactions a brand creates, and the relationships that it develops with the people it was designed for: these are what define it as being well designed, or poorly designed. And like the Aeron chair, sometimes first glance isn’t indicative of the future. Just as we’ve seen more recently with fixies & Rotor rings, or years ago with SRAM twist shifters: the initial reaction was a poor gauge of their potential.

It’s worth noting that the business designer, then, doesn’t pick from the business rules or the design rules exclusively. Instead, business design seems to be about using both, and having the wisdom, forsight, and the guts to play both sides of the field. I suppose, then, that Roger has done a particularly good job of combining integrative thinking with design thinking. Integrative thinking and design thinking together create a very robust set of thought principles. It’s likely no accident that they work best in an ‘and/also’ partnership.