Working Together: Preventing The Homer Car Through Collaboration


I have an analogy to explain what happens when a user tries to solve a problem on their own without assistance. It’s The Homer Car.

What is The Homer Car, you ask?

This is The Homer Car:

The Homer Car is from an episode of The Simpsons titled, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” (Season 2, Episode 15). In the show, Homer designs his own car, which he believes will revolutionize the industry. The car is a bizarre and impractical creation, featuring outlandish features like: shag carpeting, three horns that play the song “La Cucaracha”, a giant foam-filled frame for comfort, one bubble dome in the front and a 2nd bubble dome just for the kids.

The car is ultimately a failure, with no one wanting to buy it. It is a car made by Homer for Homer. It becomes a symbol of Homer’s lack of understanding and basically not meeting the goals. In short, he created a solution for one person: himself.

I work in the space industry with a distinct persona, the NASA aerospace systems engineer. You may have heard me talk about them at Config last year. The systems engineers are super smart (they can call themselves Rocket Scientists!), love process, and have an entrepreneurial spirit. And, they like to work a problem on their own.

NASA systems engineers EXCEL at outlining a problem, but struggle with resolving it. JPL engineer and author of The Right Kind of Crazy, Adam Steltzner states in his book, “Most of an engineer’s academic training focuses not on problem solving but on problem definition.”

A NASA systems engineer tackles a problem alone, and the outcome is often a complex analysis rather than a practical solution. Here’s an example:

Here’s another example:

I have a growing collection of these drawings, BTW.

Here’s a side by side:

Systems engineers have a hard time explaining their drawings and rationale to others. I’ve listened to them ramble on, weaving together endless parts that only make sense to their mind.

To my mind, these drawings and explanations are a chaotic mess that I can’t make sense of. Sometimes, these drawings end up as a final product. (I wish I could share those with you.)

The final product, as you may have guessed, is an impractical solution that – very much like The Homer Car – only works for one person: the person who created it.

The Homer Car captures this occurrence. It’s a perfect representation of a complex problem that’s heading in the wrong direction due to being tackled alone. (I’m also trying to make The Homer Car a meme.)

The complexity of the problems requires us to work together. Our ability to solve them lies in collaboration.

”Our ability to make tools and solve problems collaboratively is central to why our species has survived for the last 300,000 years.”

Brian Handwork, “An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2, 2021

The best solutions are the result of working together and are the key to preventing The Homer Car.

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