Archive for innovation
This Little Piggy: Autonomy and Innovative Problem Solving
Posted by: | CommentsWhat’s 100 pounds, barely fits in a freezer locker, and tastes delicious when cooked? Expand your mind beyond Silence of the Lambs. Try the large swine I had the opportunity of roasting this weekend for a Stanford University event. For a professional, this is an undertaking, certainly, but not one that involves more thought than manpower. Our exercise answered the age old question: how many university students does it take to roast a pig when not one of them has done it before and they are equipped with only the most rudimentary of tools?
Each step was a process. Did we have a spit? No. Someone went to the shop in the middle of the night and welded one (I’m told this is typical of Stanford students). How will we rig the spit? Clamps attached to sideways picnic tables. The pig is too heavy to be spun on the spit…the pole is just turning inside the pig and now the back of the beast is completely charred without cooking the rest of its insides. Get the grate off the grill that’s sitting next to the pit, rest it on top of two wooden planters and another picnic table, and make sure to flip the thing every two hours. Oh, and to make sure the skin stays moist? Spray it with Sprite every ten minutes or so.
MacGyver would’ve either laughed or applauded. As the fire was dying down one girl rigged up a fan to the bottom of the grill pit to ventilate, and the rest of us went at the coals with lighter fluid and the used paper towels with which we had wiped the pig seasoning off our hands. We then made a makeshift oven with huge sheets of aluminum foil held down by broken brick pieces around the pit. No object was too small to contribute.
The final result? Delicious. The entire pig team, myself included, felt ridiculously accomplished. A professional may have gotten it done faster and more effectively given their experience and technology, but we accomplished the same results with a high level of innovation.
Autonomy breeds innovation and lateral problem solving skills. Throughout the roast, our instinct was to defer to someone who knew better, but no one had actually undertaken the task before. When faced with a task that is completely unfamiliar to us, the first thing we want to do is turn to someone who has experience with the task to tell us how to navigate. But when a task has to get done and the novelty is not unique to us, it’s our job to reach outside conventional methods of problem solving to get the task done. All because no one is standing over our shoulders telling us how to do things.
Learning often comes from doing. Being thrown into the thick of things is par for the consultant’s course. The key is to determine what you want the eventual outcome to be–what success looks like for your client–and from there begin to formulate strategies to get there. As easy as it would be to ask for a superior to give you a well-trodden path to get there, it is ten times more rewarding to try and discover your own way through. Remember, though, you don’t have to go it alone; your team acts as a valuable resource, even when the rest of them are just as new to the process as you are.
It takes four people to flip a 100 pound pig. It takes 50 dinner guests to even make a dent in the meal. But all it takes is one collective open mind to an unfamiliar task to get an unprecedented job well done.
To our readers: how did you tackle an unfamiliar task?
Wanted: Open Doors in Times of Crisis
Posted by: | CommentsWe hear the word at least once every day: Crisis.
“Economic Crisis”
“Budget Crisis”
“Mid-Life Crisis”
“Automotive Crisis”
“Environmental Crisis”
“CRISIS!”
The shock! The horror! Grab your children and hide! Turn on the news and you would think that the whole world is coming to the end. The news ratings race aside, the word crisis and its negative connotation are impossible to avoid. Is the world really in this dire of a state? Is there no hope for the future?
This past weekend I attended a session on Psychology and the Economic Downturn given by Dr. Michael Frese. As you would guess, the initial discussion centered on the financial banking crisis. What happened? Who failed? Is the future bleak?
The answer: NO! Just look at the idiom “When one door closes another door opens.” Look at the Chinese characters for the word – the first character signifies danger and the second character signifies opportunity. I think we all tend to forget that there can be a positive side to a crisis. A crisis is an event that can act as a game changer, an unfreezing event, or something that just says, “Hey, something here needs to change.”
When organizations reach crisis-level, the tendency is to constrict decision-making and risk taking. Organizations become more centralized, more formalized, and less flexible. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be the worst thing that an organization can do. A crisis calls for flexibility and adaptability, and error management instead of error prevention.
A look to past organizations in crisis can demonstrate how innovation and growth can occur if the crisis is handled correctly. Out of the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol crisis in 1982 came tamper-proof packaging and out of the Jack in the Box E. Coli crisis in 1993 came new standards for food safety. While it is true that these were horrible incidents that I would never wish on any organization, the point is that a crisis can be used to spawn positive implications for the future.
The future implications of the recent banking crisis have yet to be seen. Hopefully the leaders in charge of the financial institutions can get beyond the initial recoil of the crisis and turn this event into a learning opportunity and positive change.
As for me, whenever I hear the word crisis I’m going to look for the open door and repeat the old Chinese proverb “A crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind.”
Guest Blog! Chris Botti: Lessons in Innovation and Leadership
Posted by: | CommentsChris Botti: Lessons in Innovation and Leadership
By: Rich McLaughlin
Tuesday, November 9, 2010, Princeton, NJ.
There are lessons for all of us around innovation, teamwork and leadership if you watch good jazz musicians do their thing. Last night I got to see some wonderful creativity in action. I went with my oldest son and a friend to see Chris Botti, jazz trumpeter, and his band perform. I’ve been a fan of Jazz since grad school and been fascinated watching good jazz groups perform. Botti has a knack for recruiting great talent to play with him and bringing out their best, and if you pay close attention, you can pick up the subtle things he (and all the players) do to help make it a memorable performance. Including:
1) Surround yourself with people who have talents and strengths, you don’t. Each of the people up there with Botti are exemplary musicians in their own right. Many could headline their own shows and have Botti playing for them. In the corporate world, it takes a leader with a clear sense of him/herself to be courageous enough to surround themselves with people of equal talent – people who are not afraid to share their divergent views and ideas for making something meaningful come from their collaboration.
2) Be humble – Botti feels no need to make it clear “who’s in charge” up there. If anything, he’s gracious to a fault, constantly pointing out the individual player’s contributions while not even mentioning his own. This rubs off on the others as well. No one on the stage last night tried to hog the limelight. They were all quick to deflect attention from themselves and point to the others. Another way a leader shows the importance of the team (vs. him or herself) is by letting the others have their moment in the sun. While for most of the songs, Botti would start out and “set the tone”, he would quickly allow others have their own solo moments so they could showcase their unique talents. This would be the equivalent of a leader in a team meeting letting each of the members assembled a chance to express their complete thoughts on a topic/idea and take the time to make sure it is understood and considered.
3) Care - It was clear watching Botti and his band that there is genuine affection for each other. They all seem interested in each other’s success. When one member was doing a solo, you see the others show some very specific non-verbals. The members not playing will:
- move out of the spotlight, so it’s only on the player of the moment.
- look down or away from the audience to signal that the attention should be on the other member, and “not me”.
- stay “present” and pay attention often nodding along with the music as a way of saying “I’m listening.” They are not, to use a corporate analogy, checking their blackberries, starting distracting side conversations, tuning out, etc. In many ways it is a fundamental show of respect that is understood and reciprocated when it’s their turn to “speak.”
4) Encourage play – Botti encourages the others to play and experiment within the boundaries of the song. First and foremost by doing it himself, and by smiling and nodding when he sees his bandmates doing it. And like all good improv artists, one member’s experimentation leads to another picking up on it and expanding it, until they’ve created something new within the framework of the original.
It is out of this mutual experimenting (while staying within the confines of the song), that the listener gets a whole new experience – a song that is familiar yet, at the same time feels fresh and different. Much like what many of us try to do every day with our own customers – give them an experience with our product or service that is comfortably familiar AND at the same time different and unique.
Monar would like to thank Rich McLaughlin for letting us use his article as today’s blog. We share his vision and see innovation and leadership as working hand-in-hand in successful organizations. More on Rich here.
Making Yourself “Unuseless:” The Art of Innovation Implementation
Posted by: | CommentsNot all these inventions are helpful. In fact, some of them seem to create more problems than they solve. One curious chindogu, the “Hay Fever Hat,” aids any outdoorsman prone to seasonal sniffles, but then also poses the slight problem of having to wear a toilet paper roll atop his head. Another, called the “Sweetheart Training Arm,” rids young lovers of the “awkwardness” of holding hands–sweaty palms, deciding when to disengage–by allowing one of the partners to attach a prosthetic on to their original arm for their partner to hold instead. A great idea, I’m sure, until trying to explain to your parents and friends why you’re dating a guy who thinks it’s okay to wear a third, fake arm off the side of his body. Maybe this is just a cultural difference that I’m not being sensitive to, but seeing as how every Cubs fan boyfriend I’ve had has been given the evil eye by my South Side father, I can only imagine how an explanation of the “sweetheart training arm” would fare.
Innovation, defined as any new idea, practice, or object, seems to be a big buzzword in business. Everyone wants to be up on the latest trends, and everyone wants to come up with the most creative way to satisfy demand, both internally and externally. Being the most innovative in your field provides you with a competitive edge, not only because you can inherit a large customer base, but also because you attract invaluable talent for your team. But what people often fail to realize is that just because an idea or practice is innovative doesn’t automatically mean it’s good. It’s just new. Chindogus are innovative, designed to help people with what seem to be common problems. But are they good? (Who knows what the kids are wearing these days?)
The question is–what is important for innovation? What takes an innovation past the distinction of “new” and into the realm of the useful? And what are characteristics of highly innovative organizations? What must we do right?
The theorist Everett Rogers mentioned five characteristics that were important to consider while determining the merit of an innovative idea. First, Relative Advantage: is this better than what we’re doing now? Compatibility: will it work with what we already have? Complexity: How difficult is it to figure out how to use it? Trialability: to what extent can we try this innovation without permanently adopting it? And Observability: how quickly will we see the benefits of this innovation? In sum, this innovation has to be beyond what has already been produced, easy to integrate, easy to work, easy to discard if it doesn’t work, and quick to improve whatever it is designed to improve.
Mr. Rogers (the aforementioned theorist, not the sweater-and-Converse neighborly man) also noted three characteristics of highly innovative organizations. The organization must have permeable boundaries–they have to let a lot of new ideas in. This can be accomplished through diversity in hiring, networking with other innovators, and environmental monitoring, or hiring people to keep an eye on what their competitors are up to. Another important factor is external accountability. Stakeholders are integral; if your customers are important to you, you’ll change to make them happy, the one time where that line of relational defense can be invoked and not result in separate bedrooms. And finally, the organization should aim to have slack resources. Within the organization there should be a certain supply of unused resources that can be committed back to the organization. This includes budget surpluses and productivity, and the key is to strike a healthy balance of both. If all of your money is spent and all of your people are 100% productive, 100% of the time, you’ll need to free up money and people to facilitate innovation. (You’ll probably also need a reality check.) By that same token, if you’re swimming in dollar bills and your people are slackadaisically performing their jobs, innovation will be equally hard to come by. At least with regards to innovation, the Notorious BIG had it right: mo’ money, mo’ problems. Biggie Smalls–always the forward thinker.
Innovation isn’t always good, but it can be. It is entirely possible to transform a new idea into a good idea as long as certain factors are taken into consideration. Chindogus are a great idea in theory, but in practice, each invention rests at “innovative” and cannot push forward to “useful” or “well-received” or even “not a complete joke.” The idea is to bring a positive connotation back to innovation, and that might not begin with TP hats or even superfluous limbs. But it can begin with your organization.
If only there were a chindogu created to do my job…
To our readers: what do you think is important to innovation? What do you think your organization is doing right?
