The Surprising Hero Behind the Book Cover for Wiring the Winning Organization: ChatGPT!

Most authors will likely agree: we probably spend too much time and emotional energy on the book cover. For a lot of books I’ve read, I don’t remember the book cover. And a great book cover will never compensate for a poorly written book.

However, for my favorite books, I can remember the book cover. For instance, when we set up this stage for virtual events in 2021, my wife and boss, Margueritte, organized books by color. Despite how shocking this was to me, I was surprised that when she asked for more, say, red books, I knew exactly which books to find.

I’ve written seven books, including the upcoming Wiring the Winning Organization. Looking back, I think The Phoenix Project was an amazing and iconic book cover. It inspired the cover for The DevOps Handbook and The Unicorn Project.

Going through my notes for all of these previous projects, we decided upon the design for the book cover more than six months before the publication date. Sure, there were many changes, but the major design elements were decided—we mainly were futzing with smaller details. 

But for Wiring the Winning Organization, it was July 2023, the book manuscript was already late, the cover needed to be printed in less than three months, and Steve and I still didn’t love any of the book cover concepts. 

Somehow our design process had led us to a dead end.

Using the language of our book, we needed an alternative to the longer iteration cycles of working with the designer. In other words, we needed to slowify the problem by going back to low-fidelity prototypes that we could more quickly iterate on. We also needed to simplify the problem so one person could experiment solo, as opposed to requiring higher levels of communication and coordination.

Out of frustration, on the Fourth of July, I opened up a Google Doc and started from scratch, writing down what we knew about what we wanted out of our book cover: We wanted a very simple and clean cover, similar to Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow and Michael Lewis’ book The Undoing Project.

But the question then became: What object would be suitable to feature on the cover?

I’ve already posted an article about how ChatGPT helped confirm that “slowify” was a good word choice to use in the book, because no other English word captured the notion of “slow down to speed up.”

So maybe ChatGPT could help with book cover ideas.

I gave it the following prompt: 

“Please suggest a description of an amazing book cover for a book with the title: “Wiring the Winning Organization: Unleashing Our Collective Greatness through Simplification, Slowification, and Amplification.” The summary of the book follows: …”

After a bit of fumbling around, I asked it to generate a list of 40 objects that would nicely represent the concepts in the book. Here are some of them…

• Light Bulb: Symbolizing ideas, creativity, and innovation.
• Gears: Representing collaboration, teamwork, and interconnected processes.
• Lighthouse: Represents guidance, vision, and the ability to steer through challenges.
• Bridge: Symbolizes connection, collaboration, and overcoming obstacles.
• Circuit board: Indicative of the wiring within an organization, complex yet crucial.
• Stopwatch: Representing the slowification process, taking time to improve and evolve.
• Jigsaw puzzle box: Represents the complexity and interlocking nature of tasks within an organization.
• Lever: Can symbolize the mechanism of control, adjustment, and change in processes.

I asked for other objects, asking to focus on themes of connection, architecture, wiring, collaboration, connection, and so forth. But I didn’t love any of the ideas it came up with.

But then I asked it: “Please give twenty pairs of simple notional objects representing great vs. terrible wiring/connection/collaboration. Some of the amazing responses include:

• Unravelled knot vs. tangled knot: The unraveled knot symbolizes smooth collaboration and clear communication, while the tangled knot represents confusion and poor communication.
• Light bulb glowing brightly vs. burnt-out light bulb: The brightly glowing bulb represents a successful idea or connection, while a burnt-out bulb represents a failed connection or unsuccessful collaboration.
• Fully charged battery vs. drained battery: The fully charged battery symbolizes high energy and efficient collaboration, whereas a drained battery symbolizes low energy and ineffective collaboration.
• Clear path vs. blocked path: A clear path symbolizes smooth workflows and successful collaboration, whereas a blocked path represents obstacles and failed collaboration.
• Open book vs. closed book: An open book represents transparency, knowledge sharing, and effective collaboration, while a closed book symbolizes a lack of communication and poor collaboration.
• Handshake vs. crossed arms: A handshake symbolizes agreement and successful collaboration, whereas crossed arms represent disagreement or resistance to collaboration.
• Complete circuit vs. broken circuit: A complete circuit represents successful connections and efficient collaboration, whereas a broken circuit represents failed connections and ineffective collaboration.
• Smooth highway vs. road full of potholes: A smooth highway represents seamless and efficient collaboration, whereas a road full of potholes represents obstacles and challenges in collaboration.
• Interlinked chain vs. broken chain: An interlinked chain symbolizes strong connections and successful collaboration, whereas a broken chain represents weak connections and failed collaboration.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

I had just watched a bunch of videos on using generative AI tools for image generation, such as DALL·E and Midjourney. So maybe these could help generate images of the ideas above. However, I gave up in less than 30 minutes. The problem was that it took too long to generate the images, and I just didn’t have enough experience to get good results.

What was super useful? Google Image Search! It was so quick to be able to create “mood boards” of images that could generate reactions and feedback.

• Light bulb glowing brightly vs. burnt-out light bulb: The brightly glowing bulb represents a successful idea or connection, while a burnt-out bulb represents a failed connection or unsuccessful collaboration.

• Unravelled knot vs. tangled knot: The unraveled knot symbolizes smooth collaboration and clear communication, while the tangled knot represents confusion and poor communication.

• Bridge vs. broken bridge: The intact bridge symbolizes strong connections and successful collaboration, while a broken bridge represents failed connections and poor collaboration.

I liked the idea of the light bulbs, so I wanted to create a higher-quality mockup. I used PowerPoint to mock up a cover of a light bulb using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, tracing over one of my favorite images of a glowing lightbulb.

I posted this in our Slack channel. We all seemed to like the direction this was heading. We discussed this during our next meeting and then gave this to the professional designer. The designer brought their skills in typography, layout, and so forth, to take it to the next level.

The key takeaways:

• LLMs are good at language and concepts, as I discussed in my previous post on “slowify.” My friend James Cham said about AI, “LLMs are so good at making connections that we normally don’t see.” Highly recommended!
• AI-generated images were not as helpful to me. This was due to my inexperience and because the speed of image generation was too slow. It was far easier to look at page after page of images on Google Image. It was so fast to quickly scan and pick promising candidates. 
• Speed matters: Creating quick mockups was critical to getting fast feedback and reactions. Once we picked a promising concept, we quickly rallied around a good idea and then brought in functional experts like designers. (In our book, we talk about this as a critical capability of incrementalizing, one of the mechanisms of simplifying.)
• Some self-service matters. In DevOps, we talk a ton about “you build it, you run it.” This is that developers don’t just write the code but test the code themselves, deploy it themselves, and run it themselves. This is as opposed to relying on distant silos who introduce lags into the process, and prevent the developers from getting the feedback they need to create good outcomes. Instead of relying on the multi-day cycles of getting ideas to a designer, in this case, it was easier to create very low-fidelity prototypes by myself. In our book, we used the metaphor of moving a couch. Working with a designer involved four people moving a couch, with slow feedback cycles. By simplifying the process, instead of moving a large couch, we made a small low-fidelity couch that one person could move by themselves. It allowed for much faster iteration.

If you’re a fan of book covers, you may find this of interest. Here are the best book covers according to LitHub for 2021 and 2022.

And here is the entirety of my ChatGPT session from July.

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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