Pop quiz: what’s the common thread between Air Force One, the Coca-Cola bottle, and the Shell Oil logo?
The answer: Raymond Loewy, one the most influential American industrial designers of all time.
Although Loewy did most of his work from the 1930s to the late 1960s, the brilliant fundamental principle by which he operated — the successful introduction of a new concept to eventual widespread acceptance and acclaim — is still applicable today. The principle is called “MAYA”: “Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.”
The Brilliance of MAYA: Reaction, Not Action
To paraphrase an insightful 2017 blog post, the MAYA principle speaks to the fundamental tension between being too familiar and therefore boring, vs. being too different and therefore alien & repellent. In between those two areas lies what is regarded as “cool”. The huge business benefit of being “cool” (in addition to its innate desirability, of course) is its ability to reduce the barrier to entry to adoption of a product or service. This in turn allows the utility value of that product or service to truly shine, which drives further adoption. A virtuous cycle.
We believe that MAYA is a brilliant concept for one fundamental reason: it focuses not on the technology that can cause change, but on the extent and pace of the reaction of human society to that change. And unlike technology, which can be incremental or wildly disruptive and therefore unpredictable in terms of its pace, the reaction of human society is a lot more constant when aggregated across time, because human beings overall embrace change at a certain pace. Therefore, MAYA offers a strikingly predictable way to intuit an optimal product introduction path that takes advantage of the virtuous cycle of adoption.
The Illusion of (Widespread) Progress
Today, as AI makes the news everywhere, we believe that those who can thread the needle between “boring” and “alien” are those best positioned to drive the virtuous cycle of adoption for their offerings. This is also where the worldview that is often seen on curated social media feeds is an illusion. Interestingly enough, there are two distinct types of illusions: (a) “AI can’t do X, so it’s completely useless”; (b) “AI is going to do everything for us”. And then there are sub-illusions for (b): a utopian view is that this is going to be amazing for everyone, and a dystopian view that this is going to be bad for everyone. For various reasons, we see a lot more of Illusion (b) and both its utopian and dystopian offshoots in our own feeds.
As with so many things, we believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. AI can absolutely do some things extremely well and many things not well at all today (the “jagged frontier”). There will be a benefit to the end user who now has access to the things it does well, that are valuable, but were previously inaccessible. The extent and timing of that benefit still remains to be seen, but how wide it spreads still depends on how open a target market is to adopting your product or service.
Applicability to Legal Practice
The legal profession has historically been a late adopter of advanced technologies, and not without reason. Legal professionals, by definition, deal with situations where the stakes are high for the parties involved and where playbooks have been developed over years and decades to work through these situations. If something comes along in an attempt to upend that playbook, it is inevitably going to face resistance because of the unknown risks of using that thing. And if something is so incremental as to be indistinguishable from the current approach of doing things, well, then why bother with it?
This is exactly the narrative of “alien” vs. “boring”, and the reactions of the intended recipients of the technology, that MAYA helps us understand.
At Threadeo, we’re constantly thinking about how we can help make attorneys’ lives easier in a meaningful way. A way that augments how they operate, that enhances and accelerates their case prep in a tangibly and significantly positive manner. In our case, today, that means providing legal professionals with human expert-quality, insightful, and trustworthy summaries of depositions, arbitrations, and trials, delivered in minutes instead of hours. There’s lots more to come, of course, but we want to be measured about it, and closely aligned with how attorneys think.
We trust that Raymond Loewy would approve.