"There falls a shadow between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important."
T.S. Eliot quote from Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs
Increase refresh frequency
We advise clients to refresh their schedules twice a week (at a minimum).
Often, we observe that teams only seem to look at their schedules once a week, when they do the refresh. So increasing the frequency increases the awareness of the schedule, and time in general.
Best-in-class teams do refreshes three or more times a week. The fastest teams we’ve worked with do it every day (<15 min/session). One client recently had six teams doing it twice a day on a very time senstive program.
Un-Bridges
Problem: Create a means to get across a waterway (without getting wet)
Solution: Build an un-bridge
I love the solution that RO&AD Architecten came up with (above) for the Municipality of Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands. It is a great example of looking at the problem differently and of not using “conventional wisdom” to solve a problem. Their site is as clever as their bridge.
This “contrarian” bridge reminds me of corporate examples of technology solutions we’ve been involved with in Silicon Valley. These business and technical solutions came from people who were able to conceptualize problem/solution differently. Some organizational cultures encourage this behavior and others aggressively discourage it (knowingly and unknowingly).
Why isn’t contrarian thinking the norm?
- con·trar·i·an [kuhn-trair-ee-uhn] noun: a person who takes an opposing view, especially one who rejects the majority opinion
In our experience, we’ve seen lots of bad decisions (we know in retrospect they were bad because of the measurable failure they caused later on); but at the time they were made, they were “excellent decisions” made by “subject matter experts” that could not be challenged.
So how does this happen?
Why What How Decisions
Simon Sinek’s “start with why” concept works well to describe the three elements of a decisionAccelerator model.
Sinek’s idea is that the “Why” defines the Purpose, Cause, and or Belief of what you are trying to achieve. Often we find that this is not clearly articulated or commonly understood by a group of people, yet without knowing the “why for” of something, it is very hard to define the steps to get there and it is hard to motivate people to extraordinary performance. We all need to know why we are doing something; just knowing what we are doing and how it is done is not enough.
Often we see clients focused on the HOW (i.e. the technical solutions), yet they have not reachded consensus about WHY they are doing it and WHAT they must accomplish through the technical solution options (or the HOWs). The models are simple, the group thought process is the value.
So lets look at this idea as it is applied to a decision model (below). The Goal statement is why we are doing it, the Objectives outline what we want to achieve, and the Alternatives are how we’re going to accomplish the Objectives.
Rate of adoption... to becoming autonomous
Recently, we were asked by a client to define the factors that determine the duration needed to create sustainable change.
The key is to jolt the system, transfer, and exit rapidly. We know that any sustainable change must come from within the organization and can't be forced from the outsitde. We also know from experience that we have to place enough external pressure, for a sustain period of time, in order to change behavior patterns. We've learned that it is essential to leave behind the capability for continuous improvement.
The factors that contribute to becoming autonomous include:
- Desire to improve (organizational seriousness and awareness/recognition of the current problem/need)
- Full executive participation/engagement
- Engagement of key technical stakeholders (team members)
- Problem/project complexity
- Skills of internal process owner(s)
More on this topic at my Sustainable Change post.
