Joe: Most businesses that fail don't fail because of a bad product. They fail because they're solving the wrong problem. The fatal flaw is often hiding in plain sight, in a completely different department, and today we're exploring a tool designed to find it before it's too late. Lewis: Okay, but is that just a fancier way of saying "think outside the box"? Because I feel like every business guru says that. What makes this different? Joe: It’s different because it’s not about a flash of creative insight. It’s about a systematic way of seeing. That's the core idea behind the book The Grid by Matt Watkinson. Lewis: Watkinson… he's the customer experience guy, right? The one whose first book, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, won that big Management Book of the Year award, even after getting a ton of rejections. Joe: Exactly. He’s got this reputation for practical, no-nonsense advice. And his motivation for writing The Grid is fascinating. It didn't come from a boardroom or a business school case study. It came from a crippling knee injury that doctors couldn't fix. Lewis: A knee injury? That seems like a strange place to start a business book. Joe: It’s the perfect place to start. Because that personal story is the key to understanding this whole framework. It’s a powerful metaphor for why so many smart people and smart companies make disastrously bad decisions.

Lewis: Alright, I'm intrigued. A business philosophy born from a bad knee. Tell me the story. Joe: So, Watkinson was a pretty active guy—lifting weights, cycling, running. And he develops this severe pain in both of his knees. It gets so bad he can barely exercise. He does what any of us would do: he goes to a top surgeon. Lewis: And the surgeon says, "Let's operate." Joe: Of course. The diagnosis is focused right on the site of the pain. He gets arthroscopic surgery on both knees. He goes through six months of recovery, and... nothing. The pain is still there. He's frustrated, so he tries everything else—physiotherapists, osteopaths, foam rollers. Still nothing. Lewis: That’s incredibly frustrating. You trust the experts, you do the expensive, painful procedure, and you're right back where you started. Joe: Exactly. And this is where the story pivots. He finally gets a recommendation to see a sports rehabilitation expert named Nicole Parsons. She takes one look at him and doesn't just focus on his knees. She looks at his whole body, his posture, his alignment. Lewis: She zoomed out. Joe: She zoomed way out. And her diagnosis was that the problem wasn't in his knees at all. The knee pain was just the symptom. The root cause was a series of muscle imbalances that started all the way up in his shoulders and ran down to his feet. His body was a system, and one part being out of whack was causing a crisis in another. Lewis: Hold on. So the surgeons, the specialists, they all missed it? They were just looking at the flashing red light on the dashboard, the symptom, and trying to fix the light itself instead of checking the engine. Joe: That is the perfect analogy. They were practicing what Watkinson calls reductionist thinking—breaking a problem down into its smallest parts and fixing the one that's screaming the loudest. But Nicole Parsons used a holistic approach. She gave him a set of exercises based on the Egoscue method, designed to rebalance his entire musculature. And within a few weeks, the pain was gone. He could run again. Lewis: Wow. That’s a powerful story. And I can already see the business parallel. Joe: It’s a direct one-to-one. Watkinson realized that businesses are run the same way. We see a sales problem, so we hire more salespeople or offer discounts. We see a production delay, so we buy a new machine. We're constantly operating on the 'painful knee' of the organization. Lewis: Right, we're treating the symptom. The sales team might be struggling because the product isn't desirable, or the marketing message is confusing, or the customer service is terrible. The problem isn't the sales team's effort; it's a weakness somewhere else in the system. Joe: Precisely. And we rarely have a tool that forces us to zoom out and look at the whole, interconnected system. We have departments, we have silos, we have specialists who are experts at fixing their one little piece. But who is looking at how all the pieces fit together? Lewis: Nobody, usually. Or at least, not until the whole thing is on fire. It's like trying to fix a flickering light by changing the bulb over and over, when the real problem is faulty wiring deep inside the wall. You can change the bulb a hundred times, but the flicker will always come back. Joe: And that’s the blind spot Watkinson is trying to fix. He quotes the statistician George E. P. Box, who famously said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." He’s not claiming to have a perfect representation of reality. He's offering a useful model, a map, to help us see the whole system at once. Lewis: Okay, I get the diagnosis. The metaphor is strong. We're all running around fixing knees when we should be checking our posture. So what's the cure? How does this 'Grid' actually prevent us from making that same mistake?

Joe: This is where the tool itself comes in. The Grid is deceptively simple. It's a 3x3 matrix. Think of it like a tic-tac-toe board for your business. Lewis: A business tic-tac-toe. I like it. What are the squares? Joe: The three columns are the three fundamental, non-negotiable objectives of any successful enterprise. First, Desirability: does anyone actually want what you're offering? Second, Profitability: can you make money doing it? And third, Continuity: can you sustain it over the long term? Lewis: Desirability, Profitability, Continuity. Okay, that makes sense. You need all three. A desirable product that loses money is a hobby. A profitable product nobody wants is a fantasy. And a business that can't last is just a flash in the pan. Joe: Exactly. And the three rows are the three levels where change is always happening. The Customer level, the Market level, and the Organization level. When you put them together, you get nine boxes that are all interconnected. For example, in the top left, you have Customer Desirability—what are their values, their goals? In the bottom right, you have Organizational Continuity—how adaptable is your company? Lewis: This sounds a bit abstract. I need to see it break. Give me a story where someone ignored this grid and it all went spectacularly wrong. Joe: I have the perfect one, and it's a case study from the book that is just heartbreaking. It’s the story of a startup that set out to build the 'perfect wheelchair'. Lewis: The perfect wheelchair? That sounds like a noble goal. Joe: Incredibly noble. The founders saw that most wheelchairs were clunky, medical-looking, and unattractive. They wanted to create something beautiful, a high-end, innovative product that people would be proud to use. They focused entirely on the Desirability box. They designed this stunning wheelchair made from custom-molded carbon fiber. It was sleek, modern, and highly configurable. Lewis: So far, so good. They're nailing the 'Desirability' part. Joe: They were. But they ignored the rest of the grid. To get that perfect carbon fiber, they had to partner with a leading UK manufacturer, but as a tiny startup, they had zero negotiating power. Their costs skyrocketed. This meant the final selling price was astronomically high. That's a hit to Profitability. Lewis: Okay, I see a problem emerging. Joe: It gets worse. To save money, they decided against a showroom. Instead, they'd do personal demonstrations. But many potential customers were uncomfortable having a stranger visit their home, so demos were happening in public places like coffee shops, which was awkward and inappropriate. This hurt the customer experience, another part of Desirability. Lewis: A huge misstep. They didn't consider the customer's actual experience of buying. Joe: And here's the final nail in the coffin. The product was only compliant with EU regulations. It couldn't be sold in the US or Asia, two of the biggest markets. They completely failed on the Continuity front by limiting their market and scalability. Lewis: Oh, that's brutal. So what happened? Joe: They aimed to sell one wheelchair a week. In two years, they sold only a handful in total. The company was bleeding cash and on the verge of collapse. Lewis: Wow. So they built this incredible, desirable thing that almost nobody could actually afford, test, or even buy in most parts of the world. They fell in love with their own creation and forgot about the entire system it had to exist in. That’s a huge warning. Joe: It’s the perfect example of optimizing one box on the grid at the expense of all the others. And you see this pattern everywhere. Think of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, 'Dieselgate'. They were so obsessed with Profitability—hitting sales targets, becoming the world's largest automaker—that they decided to cheat. They installed 'defeat devices' in their cars. Lewis: They sacrificed Desirability in a huge way. Not the desirability of the car's performance, but the desirability of the brand's values. Honesty, trust, environmental responsibility—all of it went out the window. Joe: And the fallout was immense. Billions in fines, recalls, a collapse in the value of diesel cars, and a brand reputation that was shattered. They prioritized one column of the grid and it almost destroyed the entire company. The system always rebalances itself, sometimes violently. Lewis: It's like that quote from the book, "a smart business decision is one that improves all three or that poses the right trade-offs between the three." They made the worst possible trade-off. Joe: They did. And that's why the grid is so powerful. It's not about finding a perfect, magical answer. It's a tool for thinking. It forces you to ask the right questions before you commit.

Joe: And that's the power of the Grid. It's not a magic formula that spits out answers. It's a mental framework, a pre-flight checklist, that forces you to ask: 'If I change this one thing to improve our profits, what does that do to our customer's trust? If I make our product more desirable, what does that do to our costs and our ability to scale?' Lewis: It forces you to see the whole system, to acknowledge that you can't just fix the knee without checking the shoulders. It’s a tool against wishful thinking. You can't just hope that a decision in one area won't have disastrous, unintended consequences in another. Joe: Exactly. The book makes it clear there's no single 'correct' strategy. Every successful company, from IKEA to Apple, is a unique configuration of these nine elements. The Grid doesn't tell you what to do; it illuminates the field so you can make a better, more informed choice for your own unique situation. Lewis: It makes you wonder what 'knee pain' we're all trying to fix in our own work or lives, while the real problem is somewhere else entirely. What's the thing we're not looking at because we're so focused on the immediate symptom? Joe: That's a powerful question. And it's one that applies far beyond business. It's about seeing the connections. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. What's a 'holistic blind spot' you've seen in your own experience, at work or otherwise? Let us know. Lewis: This is Aibrary, signing off.