“We’re all habit monsters.” - An interview with Tim Vang

From a sunny garden in Singapore, expert pretotyper Tim Vang recently caught up with The Official Pretotyping Podcast to share insights gained across 7+ years of industry experience. Like Leslie, Tim was trained in the pretotyping method by Alberto Savoia himself.

Throughout the interview, Tim and podcast host Jonathan Sun discuss his early involvement with Alberto, his most memorable innovation and coaching experiences, and his ardent belief that successful pretotyping comes hand in hand with multiple mindset shifts.

Some of his key insights are:

1. Low cost doesn’t necessarily mean low quality.

One of the key aims of pretotyping is to test your ideas as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Tim explains that sometimes this has caused apprehension with clients as they associate the low experiment costs with the test then being of little to no value. “You can do small experiments for small amounts - we did something like that for a big client, actually. [...] And people were like, no, you can’t do it for $3. We were almost kicked out because we said $3!”

Why? “The problem is that we think that if I say $3, I deliver low quality.”

The key to resolving this issue, Tim explains, is in helping people to understand that “this is a new methodology, it’s a completely new mindset”, and then providing the framework and tools people need to see value in a new way. It can be slow going to start with, but once people experience the value themselves, it is difficult for them to go back to the method they were using before.

2. Switching from a ‘failure’ mindset to a ‘learning’ one.

As those familiar with pretotyping will know, implementing the method means that you have to unlearn the idea that failure is a bad thing. Tim takes this mind shift a step further by stating that you need to redefine failures as learnings, and good ones too. This redefinition has become particularly important now that he lives in Asia: “People are afraid of failing. It’s really part of the DNA out here that you don’t fail.”

But when you switch out the word “failure” and say “learning” instead?

“I mean, wow, it’s good,” Tim exclaims. “Instead of calling the iteration based on a failure, you call them based on a learning or key learning or a pickup or key takeaway or whatever it will be.” This change in wording helps innovators put a new lens on failure, reorienting their brain to see failure as something to be celebrated and learnt from (if you’d like to learn about why this is so important, you can read more here).

3. People are creatures of habit.

For Tim, pretotyping makes complete sense: “in my eyes, it’s pure logic [...] it’s math, it’s science. Prove it [your idea] or don’t go with it.” But convincing others of this has sometimes been a challenge. Throughout his career, Tim has worked with entrepreneurs and businesses who say that they love to fail, but when it comes to showing this in action, they fall short. “It’s lingo, it’s words. It’s not action” he says, of companies who promote their willingness to experiment and fail but who don’t actually follow through.

“We are habit monsters, all of us”, says Tim, going on to explain that “until we are feeling super pressured, we won’t change.”

4. Size doesn’t matter.

Tim has worked with businesses of all shapes and sizes across his career, from individual entrepreneurs to some of the largest companies in the world, and no matter their size, he has seen pretotyping work for them. “Nobody is too small or too big to pretotype,” he says, “because it’s about doing it. It’s not about talking [...] it’s about just trying it once and then trying one more and then one more time.”

And once you’ve got it? “You get hooked and then you wonder ‘why haven’t I done this all this time?’”

You can listen to Tim’s interview with The Official Pretotyping Podcast in full on Spotify, Google Podcasts or Youtube.

Interested in how pretotyping could help improve your innovation strategy? Contact us to learn more or sign up for a free preview of our online course to get started!  

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