Thinking Faster

Lead, Follow or get out of the way

Productivity and innovation require change, and change requires courage.  I wanted to write today about the leadership and insight required to continually improve productivity and innovation.

Leaders are often people who are thrust into circumstances or situations they didn't expect, and are the ones who can convince others which path to take to resolve the situation.  Many leaders never had the "rank" given to them, they assumed it because it was clear something had to be done.

It is definitely hard to consistently evaluate and change your business processes, organizational structure and company goals, but that's what it takes to continue to grow in productivity, efficiency and effectiveness.  Leaders are people who - at all levels of the business - recognize the need for change and ask, "Why not?" rather than choose to stay in the safe but dead-end capabilities and processes.

Productivity comes from making people and processes at all levels of an organization - individuals, work teams and the enterprise - more effective and efficient in their work.  Leaders at each of these levels must step forward to take up the challenge of change and evolution.  Many of these leaders will be people who simply ask the question - "Why must we do it this way?" and have the courage of their convictions to make the change happen, regardless of the title on their business card.

What are we doing to sponsor individuals at all levels of the organization to become the "change agents"?  What happens to people in your organization who challenge the status quo?  Producitivty and innovation is hard work and requires people who are willing step forward when others don't.  Are you the lead dog?  Otherwise, the view and the opportunity never changes.

If not forbidden, it's permitted

I want to write today about taking the initiative and creating a culture that encourages risk taking and innovation.  Too often in our corporate bureaucracies, those who step up and take initiative with new ideas or new products are shunted aside.  It can be truly difficult to innovative and to change corporate processes if the culture and management team don't support innovation and change. 

My father was a Marine, so maybe I'm biased, but there's a long running joke about how Marines see the world and how soldiers see the world.  Marines are taught that they must be prepared to improvise.  One of their core maxims is: "That which is not forbidden is permitted".  Its often been said that the Army mantra is:  "That which is not permitted is forbidden".  Now, this is merely illustrative and not meant to reflect anything but respect on both services.

Note the difference.  If my organization embraces a culture which says that whatever is not forbidden is permitted, the organization opens the door to innovation and enterpreneurs to improvise, to change and grow.  If my organization embraces a culture which says that whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden, then the culture draws bright lines around what is acceptable and stifles creativity and innovation.

I've argued earlier that we need to provide our "troops" with clear goals and communicate those goals frequently so they are understood.  However, we don't always have to dictate HOW the work gets done.  In fact, left to their own devices and with a supportive culture, people will improvise and figure out the best ways to accomplish their tasks. 

What's the culture in your organization?  Do innovators and risk takers thrive, or does the culture knock down those who attempt to create new ideas and change business processes? 

First and Goal

To become more productive individually and collectively, we need to establish expectations and goals and measure achievement against these goals.  The problem with measuring productivity, especially in a knowledge-based business, is that there are rarely any "widgets" or units of production that should result after a certain amount of work or inputs.  Can preparing a legal brief really be quantified and measured?  Can a marketing campaign be made more "efficient"?

I think too often in business we shy away from establishing "soft" goals that are difficult to measure but are often important for the business.  Quantifiable goals are easy to measure - sales people who sell on quota are the easiest employees to evaluate.  They made their numbers or they didn't.  But take marketing for example.  Should a marketer drive 100 leads or 200 leads with the budget she's been given?  And how "warm" should those leads be, and how do we measure how "warm" a lead is?  However, some of these metrics should be at least as important as the sales quota, since marketing leads help sales achieve their numbers.  Do we simply throw up our hands and decide that marketing can't be held to goals and measurements?

I think we have to get into the mode of asking two questions of every employee:

1) What could you be doing more efficiently, that would help you become more productive?  If the answer is a work around or a short cut to an existing process..well you know how I feel about those.  But every employee of any business should be motivated to find the most efficient way to do what they do, and encouraged to change the process or system to achieve greater productivity.

2) How could you achieve more productivity?  This is the innovation question.  Each person in your business should be motivated to change the way they do business, to innovate the process or the product.

Now, if we agree the questions make sense to ask our employees, why not attempt to set some goals based on these questions and measure the results.  If we as managers establish that productivity and innovation are important, and we establish goals that make clear our commitment to these principles, who's not going to get behind that?

The right to be wrong

I'd like to introduce a new rule - something similar to Moore's Law that computing speeds will double every 18 months.  Except mine has to do with the impact of change.  The Phillips rule of change states that for every time unit of change it takes to implement a new system or process, it will take three units of time to become productive.  For example, if it takes my team 3 months to implement a new business process, it will take approximately 9 months before everyone involved is comfortable with the new process and it works as advertised.  Significant process challenges remain two or three years after large enterprise systems like SAP are installed, and even simple reporting changes can cause problems several months down the road.

The dramatic length of time before a new system or process is successful is not simply because of change.  Sure, new systems and processes can dramatically change the way we work.  However, people are exceptionally adaptable and deal with change (birth, marriage, education, kids, new job, death) literally every day.  Frankly, there are many people who have acquired the NIH (not invented here) syndrome, so that any new idea introduced to the process must be isolated and killed like a virus.  Finally, good training can improve the adoption of a new process or system. But in reality, change, NIH and a lack of training aren't the big contributors to slow adoption.  In my opinion, fear of being wrong is the biggest roadblock - and slows productivity in the process.

When systems and processes change, the chance that any person in the process will do something "wrong" - misplace an order, enter the wrong set of keystrokes, store data on the wrong server - increases dramatically.  In most organizations, there is very little tolerance for doing something "incorrectly" and therefore individuals are fearful of change more for the chance that they will do something wrong, rather than their concern about change in and of itself.

Most very productive firms are highly adaptable to changes in their marketplace.  They have to encourage individuals within organizations to take risks, to make changes and to place bets on the direction of the market.  This means that they encourage ideas and risk taking, and don't punish people who do something "wrong".  To encourage greater innovation and risk taking in any organization, change the mindset and the culture to reward people who take risks and are willing to embrace change.

What's the Phillips rule in your organization?  How long will it take for a change in a business process or a new system to be fully accepted and productive?  Do you reward people who make positive mistakes working with a new system or process?

Short cuts, Work Arounds and Dead ends

My current project is updating the corporate website to ensure our messaging and differentiators are clearly defined.  I'm working with an HTML editor that on ocassion will switch fonts or not accept a style sheet.  The gentleman at the next desk ("The Boss") has suggested a few workarounds.  Does that ever cause the hair on the back of your neck to go up?

Short term, I guess, productivity is increased when we find ways to "work around" the existing processes or systems.  Over time, however, these work arounds or short cuts become ingrained in our operations, so that even when we have new tools and processes, we keep the old work arounds because we've become accustomed to them.  I'll give you an example.  I did some consulting for a firm that created designs for hotels.  As we were working to document the existing process, one of the managers noted that "Doris" would need to be included in the process, because she had always reviewed the documents in the past.  When we investigated, we discovered that the reason Doris had reviewed the designs in the past was based on the fact that numbering schemes had changed in the past and Doris had always ensured the numbering systems were correct.  Instead of ensuring that all individuals worked with the new design system and new numbering system, Doris had become a stop-gap when the numbering system changed, and her review step in the process had become ingrained over time.

Work arounds and short cuts may seem like productivity enhancers in the short run, but over time they become part of the process and create evolutionary dead ends to the existing process and make it even more difficult to simplify and streamline a process later on.  When you encounter a "work around" or a "short cut" in a business process (usually documented on sticky notes inside someone's desk drawer), find out why it exists and take steps to eliminate the bottleneck or shortcoming it was built to address.  Taking the time to improve each step of the process and optimize the steps rather than allow creeping incrementalism and ad-hoc work arounds will ensure each process flows smoothly and efficiently.