What is Set-Based Thinking™?

Set-Based Thinking™ is the first giant step in the Learning-First Product Development journey.

In a nutshell, Set-Based Thinking™ is a complete system of tools, practices, and processes for the front end of the product development process, replacing what most people call their "fuzzy front end" with something not-so-fuzzy. The Set-Based Thinking™ process is designed to methodically identify the gaps in your knowledge that will later turn into expensive design loopbacks, and then learn-first to eliminate those gaps, and thereby eliminate the later loopbacks. The goal of this process is to be able to prove that you will be able to satisfy your customer interests in the desired timeframe such that you can answer, "Success is assured!", very early in the process.

With Set-Based Thinking™, you stop building to specifications as design inputs; in fact, the specs emerge along with the design, based on your learning about your customers, your products, and the technologies your products are based upon. Replacing specs at the beginning of projects are targets: targets express sets or ranges of customer interests that you want the product to end up within, though you may not yet be sure what is possible or compatible.

That lack of knowledge about what's possible given today's technology, what's compatible within a single product design, and what are the most desirable trade-offs to your customers, we call "Knowledge Gaps". The first step in planning out a development project will be indentifying those Knowlege Gaps so that you can make plans to close those gaps; and so that your design efforts can proceed forward, leaving open sets of possibilities until those gaps are filled.

Furthermore, by learning in a set-based manner and capturing the resulting set-based knowledge properly (such that you can use that knowledge later in the project), you can also use that knowledge in the next project. In that way, your organization will only need to learn a particular set once and will be able to use that set-based knowledge in every project that follows. Toyota is able to produce superior designs in a fraction of the time as their competitors because they've effectively been developing the next Camry for last 50 years.

We have developed sophisticated tools and methods to help engineers map out and capture their Set-Based Knowledge such that it will be reusable. We have incorporated the essential elements of Learning-First Product Development, such as the LAMDA learning cycle and A3 thinking, to form practical approaches that you can apply immediately for Set-Based Problem Solving and Set-Based Trade-Off Analysis.

We offer Set-Based Thinking™ Workshops to fully teach this system, including all of the needed skills, tools, and techniques. We also offer Set-Based Thinking™ Tools, a sophisicated software solution, to help pull the right behaviors and to take what was learned to the next level. Our software is not necessary to implement what you are taught in our training; but we do believe the value added by the software will make it a compelling choice to all graduates of the Set-Based Thinking™ Workshops.

After some time of building up its Set-Based Knowledge, your team will be able to move to the next level of capability, Set-Based Convergence™, allowing them to fully leverage that knowledge into their product designs (and the end of specifications as you know them).