Innovation and Creativity in Motion

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

Many of the activities and strategies we use to innovate and manage are actually road blocks to creativity and innovation. Certainly, the enforcement of a time line and being cost conscience, are important, but only in respect to their appropriate place in the life cycle of a product or service. When applied to the creative and innovative phases in this life cycle, they are disruptive and cause sub-optimization.

Innovation is a creative process that requires open-mindedness and a safe environment. Creativity and innovation are processes that rely upon failure and the ability to learn from failure. You cannot create or innovate where failure is unacceptable or penalized.

Formatted business meetings and project management meetings are not events for innovation. They are events for business management. Important? Yes, but not in the innovative process. In these venues, failure is a negative thing and, “when will the project be completed?”, is the primary question. In the innovative stages of a project “what to do?” or “how to do it?” are the main questions. Other thoughts get in the way.

What I am about to say will make control oriented managers uncomfortable. You cannot control creativity, you can only feed it or starve it. When a work group or team is in the creative or innovative mode, just get out-of-the-way. Command and control must give way to facilitation. You are better off guarding the door to keep creativity starving people and systems out until it is time for them.

When a work group or team is working in the creative and innovative phases of a project, questions like who gets the credit, cost, who is smarter, and how fast can we get done, take a back seat to collaboration. It is an inclusive environment instead of an exclusive one.

Here are some ideas to support creativity and innovation. First, casual dialogue centered loosely around a topic opens up the possibility of seeing things from multiple perspectives, thus eliminating an error in parallax. This is the way great minds like Einstein’s worked. It is also how high-performance work teams think.

It’s not about discussing a specific aspect of the project so much as it is a general meandering dialogue. There is more storytelling and analogies than would take place in a typical development or project meeting. Meetings away from one’s work desk or controls are great for this type of thinking.

It is a safe environment where people are allowed to get out of the box. People who are not the exerts on a particular topic get to offer their perspective, forcing the experts on that topic to think through a response to their questions and suggestions. It is a movement away from what we think we believe, to true understanding. The result is innovation and creativity in motion.

Second, there need to be creativity/innovation zones in the work areas. These are spaces where folks can talk, argue and “sharpen the sword” with each other. Employees do not go there to work, they go there to think creatively. This space is divided into group “think tank” areas and individual “thinking out of the box” areas. They are not anyone’s personal space, they are not scheduled spaces, and they are only for the creative/innovative processes and folks.

Lastly, encourage dialog between workgroup/team members that have little format, other that a place and time. As a line manager, you may want to stay out of these meetings and be informed by way standing project meetings later. This is definitely a “watched pot never boils” situation. Manage creativity and innovation by staying out of the middle of it. This means facilitation instead of control.

The Reverse of Business Intelligence

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

We don’t know what we don’t know.
We can’t do what we don’t know.
We won’t know until we measure.
We don’t measure what we don’t value.
What we don’t measure we don’t do.
We don’t value what we don’t do.
Therefore, we will continue to not know what we don’t know.

High Performance Work Group Manifesto

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

High Performance Work Group Manifesto:

Reject the “Box”. We do not want to be categorized into anything normal or stationary.
Do not seek what is easy or comfortable.
We value problems, roadblocks and change. We expect and seek out problems, roadblocks and change.
We value the team.
We value diversity of opinion.
We value the “and” and reject the “or”. We want it the way we want it.
We enjoy being told that something can’t be done. Then going out and proving the “teller” wrong.
We are pirates. Not conformists.
We are arrogant and difficult for conformists to get along with.
We believe we can do it.
We reject traditional thinking and embrace creating our own future.
We are not afraid to fail. We are afraid of people who are afraid to fail. They are the bad apples that can spoil the whole barrel.
We do not focus on addressing wrong answers. This is the purview of the small minded. Instead, we focus on addressing the wrong questions. This is the venue of really smart folks.

Managing Innovative Businesses

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

Engineers want to build things and scientists want to understand things. It takes both to successfully innovate. The ability to dream a concept and build it into reality requires both a drive to understand the science and challenges, and the desire to build this understanding into reality.

Managing this kind of effort is not easy. Both creativity and curiosity are desired and rewarded, even when they may seem in conflict with established business paradigms. Sometimes you find that you are managing a very focused effort, single minded in its desire to achieve a goal. Other times you are managing chaos. Both are essential to innovation in some balanced dance of interplay.

When you set a high importance for creativity into a business, it has its own operational form, fit and function. It is different from the form, fit and function found in service delivery and production operations. It is different still from the form, fit and function found in a business’s financial, HR, and sales & marketing operations. This is why there can be conflict, and a lack of trust, between these fundamental pieces of an operating business.

The secret to success, I have found, is to build a shared vision with folks in leadership that cherish the goals, culture and the people who work in the environment. You wind up managing the interface between the groups, and between technology and people. This means managing processes that are designed to harness the energy of all these diverse pierces to achieve the business’s purpose. That purpose being to achieve financial success and to create positive change in its ambient environment (internal and external customers and stakeholders).

These processes are also designed to keep folks focused on the short term and long term objectives of the business and their contribution as a team member. When these process begin to break down, individuals begin to think more about themselves, and promoting themselves, than they do the team or its objectives. This leads to sub-optimization. Sub-optimization is just another way to describe self-promotion. This can happen at the personal level and at the department level. Either way it is destructive.

One characteristic that defines high performance teams is a movement away from command and control, to a more cellular approach to managing. Command and control being more focused on people, and cellular being more focused on processes. Cells are self-contained and self-managed, but depend on other cells for survival (business success in this case). Control is maintained by keeping everyone’s eye on the ball (the vision) instead to of trying to control individual behaviors. In an innovative environment you want constructive debate and diversity of opinion (some allowance for individual behavior). Sounds a little like herding cats, and maybe it is. Maybe it is also why innovative businesses often fail. Failure being an offspring of innovation. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, but they aren’t.

Great Teams

Posted on October 18, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

Getting the most out of yourself and others.

Perspective is nearly everything when it comes to accelerating your performance, or someone else’s. Human motivation is more art than science. No matter what I believe or expect about the natural laws, for example, my opinion has no impact. Gravity does what gravity does, no matter what I think.

Human motivation is different. What you believe about yourself, or others, has an impact on your behavior or someone else’s behavior. The self-fulfilling prophecy does not apply to natural laws, but does apply to us lowly humans. This is both good and bad.

We are unfinished beings. We are deflected and controlled, to some degree, by self-talk and the opinion of others. We evolve, or de-evolve, every day according to circumstances and conditions. This is why negative self-talk and overly critical communication with others is so destructive.

The difference in effect between leadership and supervision is so profound in this dimension. Leadership instills value in others, and their work, thereby increasing their motivation to follow. Great leaders focus this value, not on themselves, but on the individual and the business or project. Leadership starts with a commonly accepted value proposition and “leads” others to fulfillment.

Great teams have three creative qualities:

Creative Abrasion: Different experiences lead to different points of view. None may be completely correct, none are completely wrong. Folks need to listen to others and to have others listen to them, in a safe environment. In other words, agree to disagree. Not being able to listen to others leads to the “emperor in his new clothes” syndrome. Look this up if you don’t know what I am talking about.

Creative Agility: The ability to test and refine our processes and ideas. To align our creative effort toward the ultimate objective. For us, this is fulfilling customer expectations, which leads to customer retention and profit. It simply is not about us. We are not at the center of things, the customer is.

Creative Resolution: Making a decision. In most cases the best solution winds up being a combination of several solution ideas. When done right, we hear the word “we” a lot more often than the word “I”.

All of this boils down to a relatively simple concept. Successful innovation requires a sense of community. Working together nearly always leads to success. Working as individuals nearly always leads to failure (or at best, limited success).

What does this mean to you? See the operation of the business and its functions as a dance that requires partners. Find ways to work together. Focus on how we are doing with satisfying internal and external customers. Quit focusing on other people’s performance and think on how to improve yours.

Great teams are made up of a group of individuals who have a shared vision, an expectation of success, an understanding of their role, and are focused on execution.

Building an Elite Operations Function

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

One of the first things I look at when hired as an operations consultant is whether managers are managing people or processes. Successful, growing companies spend 80-90% of their “managerial” time managing processes. Struggling companies spend most of their time managing people. It really is a leadership paradigm.

The graphic below is one I use to help businesses develop their operational focus.

Many times, when things go wrong, they have lost control of their processes and are now spending a lot of time talking about people. Process changes and reassignment of people must be planned out from left to right (above). This means being customer centric. “How will this action effect my internal and external customers?” This also requires an intimate knowledge of our processes and why they are structured the way they are.

Continuous Improvement, Working Without a Safety Net

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

What gets in the way of improvement? Stated differently, what gets in the way of on-going success? Understand that today’s success is tomorrow’s mediocrity. I believe the answer is related to our clarity of vision, our focus. We have heard the cliché, “Keep your eye on the ball”. The question is which ball?

I believe that the answer is also related to how much energy we spend on maintaining the status quo. We can easily create an overload of rules, processes and metrics that keep us from doing our best work. Like the swimmer who spends their energy treading water to avoid drowning, instead of swimming to shore.

Compare that to the stories behind Lockheed’s Skunk Works and the Manhattan Project. These folks embraced the horror of working without a safety net (the status quo). The risk of failure became the challenge and the motivation to accomplish great things.

Consider the following questions:

People do what you incentivize them to do, so are we incentivizing the maintenance of the status quo? Or for seeking excellence? Do we spend energy defending our performance? Or for striving to get better?
Are we accountable for maintaining the targeted goal? Or accountable for pushing past it?
Focusing on who to blame, or reward, will prevent us from winning the race. This is called siloing. “This is my sandbox, stay out”. Do you welcome ideas from outside your group and seek constructive criticism?
What do you spend your time doing? Are you making a case for why you are OK? Or what you intend to do to make it to the next level of performance?

Here, I believe is the secrete sauce:

Cooperation. Working together to drive improvement.
Open mind to the ideas and criticism of others.
Willingness to fail, in order to succeed.
Getting out of your comfort zone. Comfortable folks are those to whom the status quo is a good thing, and change is a bad thing.
Being just a little bit dangerous.

In my life, I have been most successful when failure was a real possibility. It makes you come alive to potential. Answering the difficult questions and tackling the difficult problems give the biggest rewards. Let’s become dangerous to the status quo.

Seeing the Big Picture

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

Be aware of how much of the “Big Picture” you and your direct reports see. A common mistake in organizations trying to improve is the assumption that everyone gets it. The diagram below shows how our scope of vision (how much of the “big Picture” we see) can be affected by our place in the organization.

This phenomenon leads to sub-optimization and silo’ing. For example, one department applies 5-S strategy by moving their stuff into someone else’s area, or throws something important away. Another group optimizes a value stream at the expense of other value streams, or the business in general. Buy-in is weak at best.

We overcome this by communicating. Make sure your group understands the relevance their work has on the big picture. This is a process of adding the “Why” to the dialog. Take the time to explain why we do the things we do. You may discover that you don’t know “why” either. This is a good thing.

If you do this, you’ll discover a diversity of opinion. This is not a problem. In fact it is healthy. Leverage the intelligence of the collective.

Employee Engagement

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

Engagement is about respect. I can tell you from experience that someone from outside a business can come in and see internal engagement problems in less than a day. It is all about respect, which is easy to observe.

A University of Berkley study, which focused on the survivability of marriages, found that the common denominator of failed relationships was the existence of a condescending attitude. Our relationships at work are the same. When there is a lack of respect between individuals or groups, there will also be silo’ing and sub optimizing.

I call this gap in respect the “Identity Gap”. It is based upon the feeling or belief that an individual or group is more important, smarter, or better than another group. This creates dispersed thinking. Dispersed thinking leads to poor cooperation and performance.

The smart leader does what they are uniquely qualified to do and delegates to others what they are uniquely qualified to do. Additionally, the smart leader appreciates others for what they bring to the table. I can remember when Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears bought his offensive line Rolex watches because he realized that he could not be successful without their help. This creates parallel thinking.

If we want to improve our employee engagement, we must decrease the Identity Gaps that exist between us. Respect is the lubricant that helps us function as a team.

Teamwork

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Walter McIntyre

My great grandfather had a team of mules he used for farming. He was the envy of the other farmers in the area because, as I learned, it is difficult to get mules work together as a team. Just because you have two mules, you don’t automatically have a team. As a freshman in college he would tell me stories about his mules and how he managed them to become a team. He would also show me letters from all over the mid-west offering to buy his mule team. They were something rare and valuable.

We are not mules. We make up the human capital of this business. Human capital is our most valuable asset. As Michael Gurz is fond of saying, machines depreciate in value over time, but people increase in value (and cost). We are worth even more as a team than we are as individuals. So how do you move from a group of individuals, to a team, to a high performance team?

Warren Bennis, in his book “Organizing Genius”, states, “Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning”. This is about giving purpose to our work. In my experience, after being exposed to purpose, everything changes.

One of the best opportunities we have in continuous improvement, in my opinion, has more to do with our people than it does our processes. Notice that we use the phrase “continuous improvement” not “continuous process improvement”. I encourage all of you to invest more into developing your team. This means listening with the intent to understand, asking their opinion, and working to get their buy-in. Leadership is always more effective than supervision.

It is similar to the goose and the golden egg. If you want more golden eggs, invest in the goose.

Walter McIntyre Lean Six Sigma