Finding the Gap
Like weaknesses, humans view gaps as something to be filled or covered. We are drawn to make things gapless, seamless, and superfluous to improve the quality and quantity of our everyday activities.
We can find gaps surrounding us in every aspect. We view rivers between lands as gaps; therefore, we build bridges. We consider oceans and the distance separating citizens across the world as gaps; therefore, we make airline systems to connect the world. Gaps can be seen as problems, but good problems allow us to thrive and upskill.
Business is one of our efforts to fill those gaps, sometimes literally, sometimes philosophically. In doing so, we gain economic profits as society's token of gratitude for making their life smoother. Generally, in the case of Shape of Thoughts, we fill the gap that arises from the demands for a multidisciplinary studio. For creative thinkers, we serve it with strategic minds that can help clients create interesting solutions across a broad spectrum of problems.
Our work for AKAR Bar & Restaurant involves a holistic and multidiscipline approach that formulate a way to make the restaurant stand out without losing its soul during the pandemic.
Yet as businesses are breeding and thriving around the world, we find most people racing to create enterprises for sole profits, despite there having been no gaps they have found to fill or bridge. Although there is a limited amount of space to give solutions to people, we can still consider it a race if we want to make a profit. But in the entrepreneurship world, this often becomes a clue whether a business or entity will survive the tides of times or not. It's unlikely that a company will persist for a long time if it's not solving any problems or bridging any gaps.
So, where to find these gaps? Gaps typically come out of demands and lack of supply. We can find it in the arena of everyday situations, from momentous happenings, from what's forgotten, or from what can probably happen in the future. The next question is how to find these gaps? Of course, we can start by pondering on everything we come across by thinking, "does this thing I'm doing or about to do have enough supply?" But we want to propose a more structured approach with the human-centered approach often equipped in design practice.
A human-centered approach is a design method by understanding people, stakeholder engagement throughout the process, and a systems approach towards developing new products, services, and strategies.
Let's try to sink a little bit into each aspect. First, how to understand people? We can do this by observing our environments, outwards and inwards, and observing them well from many aspects, such as actual behavior versus needs, spontaneous emotional responses versus over time, internal goal versus collective, and more.
From that observation, we can then proceed by questioning the problems we've found to expand the scope of the problem, diverging to examine all the fundamental issues that underlie it.
Questioning also functions as a way to break our assumptions and reveal the actual reasons behind what we have found. Because what is true is often obscured by layers of reasoning that can be unnoticed by the bearer of the motives. For example, there is a story of mothers in a remote village who walk for miles just to get clean water. People outside this community see this as a gap to fill. They immediately think creating a water system where mothers live is best. But unfortunately, after being built, it's unused. People don't know or even care to ask these mothers before because apparently, these mothers like to walk for miles because they have time to talk with their friends. Yes, maybe we can still build the water systems, and perhaps they can be used by some. But the effort isn't worth the investment. Without being used, no value in the effort is increased and will diminish over time sooner than expected.
What should be understood in finding the gap is that it's not enough to observe and question only once. Gaps are like living things because they're created out of the needs of human life. It moves position, it changes shape, or it breeds itself. We should do our due diligence over time, so resilience is highly needed. So, in case what we've found has turned obsolete, we keep moving to try to find it again. Building a business' resiliency will result in a company that lasts. Even more so, it can be the catalyst of innovation.
Many think innovation, finding problems, or gaps per se, is a eureka moment, but this is far from reality. To make gaps that we've found their way to be labeled as "innovation" takes enormous effort and patience. On the way, we'll find a new bunch of gaps.
The second human-centered approach is finding gaps in early and continuous stakeholder engagement. Because when we can borrow perspectives, we may discover new gaps. Why are new and constant gaps needed? It will ensure our solution remains relevant by altering it.
The story of Gojek is one example, from finding the gaps of ojek drivers versus people who need rides to gaps of public acceptance versus compliance with government and societal rules that resulted in many public strikes. By involving and acknowledging them continuously, the initial gap changes shape and breeds itself (or they simply find new ones along the way). Now we find Gojek as one of Indonesia's biggest pride.
The third aspect of the human-centered approach is the systems approach. This approach refers to the reality that any solution is a system. A system is constantly interacting with other systems at different levels. These levels include other people, technologies, and myriads of tasks (physical, cognitive, behavioral, and organizational) that perform to produce an outcome for a solution.
Understanding this lets us observe deeper at a micro level the gaps that need to be bridged to produce a favorable outcome that will become the best solution.
It seems that gaps surround us every day and anywhere. We meet them casually and bridge them often spontaneously to make our days go well.
But it certainly takes more than encountering gaps accidentally to build businesses that thrive; We need a conscious and continuous collective effort that requires high resiliency within people that are actively looking for an opportunity to bridge gaps that lasts.