Purpose

The design of organisations and products →Go uptown The Fender Stratocaster. They got it right first time. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Design Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

For the Purpose of a, NDA, see Purpose - Confi Provision

A typically derivative essay on the wonderful Fender Stratocaster got us thinking about how the design imperatives in a process may differ at different points in that process.

An electric guitar’s overall life-cycle includes its design, manufacture, marketing, use, maintenance and further use in perpetuity to kill fascists. The design imperatives for the different phases of its life are very different: during manufacture, what’s important is cost of components, speed and ease of assembly. During sale it is distribution channels, marketing, branding, and transport. Once purchased, the design imperatives are different again: a single careful owner cares not how easy the tremolo is to set up, or the pickguard harness is to wire: she cares about only how easy it is to make, as Frank Zappa put it, “the disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar”.

How easy it is to make or sell a guitar bears no necessary relation to how easy it is to play or fix. But note: the interests and aspirations of those who interact with the guitar during its production and use are very different. Leo Fender’s real genius was how fabulously his design managed all these interests, so the same thing delivers for all its users: It’s easy to machine, easy to build, easy to set up, easy to fix, easy to play, it looks great, gets the girls and kills fascists.

Hypothesis, therefore: great design works for all phases, and all users, of an artefact throughout its production and use. Nor is there a strict hierarchy of priorities between these users: you might say “it is more important to be easy to play than to build” — but if difficulty of building doubles its production cost — or makes fixing it more difficult — there will be fewer users. These competing uses exist in some kind of ecosystem in which the artefact will thrive or perish.

Ok that is a long and fiddly metaphor. Let us now — sigh — tear ourselves away from Leo Fender’s wonderful creation, and apply the metaphor to the process of preparing, executing and performing a commercial contract.

Who are the interested constituencies when it comes to the production and use of contracts? It is not just Party A and Party B: it isn’t even Party A and Party B, if we take the JC]]’s cynical line that each is merely a husk: a host — a static entry in a commercial register somewhere — unless and until animated its agents.

The constituents who have an interest in a contract being done are those in Sales, Legal, Credit, Docs, Operations, Risk, and Trading — on each side of the table — and their external advisors. We see their interests: what they want out of the contract itself, are wildly different:

• Sales: To Sales, a contract should be a tool for persuasion: it should induce the customer to think happy thoughts about her principal — okay, fat chance with a legal contract, but a gal can dream — but at the very least it should be no less intimidating a document than is being presented by her competitors to the same client. Sales will be specially tuned to the message that all our other counterparties have agreed this should legal or credit baulk at a client request, and will hammer this imperative home, as often as not prevailing.
• Legal:
• Credit:
• Docs:
• Trading:
• Risk: