Nov 11, 2010 | Innovation
By definition, Innovation exists in situations where there is little information available to make an objective assessment of risk, rather than one where you can assemble a range of data to make that risk assessment.
Submitting innovation ideas to a data driven test defeats the purpose, as there will not be appropriate data available, so the effort encourages useless activity, procrastination, and hubris, even though it may satisfy the bean counters.
Innovation requires a joining of seemingly unrelated dots to come up with something genuinely new, and usually the only “data” available is instinct tempered by some qualitative feedback.
Nov 9, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Skunk works” is a term most are familiar with, indeed, so familiar that the pros and cons, and the do’s and don’ts are debated endlessly. Weather a Skunk team separated from the main operations of an enterprise “delivers” or not is generally a function of the leadership, culture and resource allocation processes of the parent, not just of the excitement and freedom of the works.
Sometimes it is useful to go back to the original. The term “skunk works” emerged when the Allied war effort needed a very quick response to the threat posed by the German development of jet fighters in the latter stages of the second war, and Lockheed Martin won a contract to do the work against what was considered an impossible timetable.
To meet the demands, LM created a separate development unit, rapidly taking on the now familiar nomenclature, originally an in-joke where members of the team considered themselves as popular as a skunk in the halls of the existing parent company.
Creating skunk works is only one of many strategies that can be employed to rev up the innovation effort, and it is no more or less successful than others, it is all a matter of the context.
Nov 8, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Social Media
A community of practice used to mean a small group of specialists who engaged in face to face consideration of issues of mutual interest, resulting in innovative solutions to issues concerning their area of speciaisation.
Interaction between “connectors” with similar interests who inhabited other communities occurred in a limited manner, often at gatherings such as industry conferences.
The application of the term now has been substantially widened by the use of social networking tools in ways that are completely new, to the point where we now have communities of interest in areas that would never have supported a community of practice.
Sites like Flikr are a great example, ranging from broad communities of interest to very narrow communities of practice in highly specific techniques where the chance of a pre-net community of practice forming would have been virtually zero.
Nov 7, 2010 | Collaboration, Leadership, Operations
What a nice term to describe the process of improvement that can occur in a voluntary manner, where the reward is not monetary, but the recognition of peers that you made a contribution to a worthwhile outcome. The value of “I did that”!!
Linux and Wikipedia are both examples of peer production that have changed the way the world works, but there are many others. The core of successful continuous improvement is the willingness of people to take individual responsibility and do something better than it was done yesterday, not because they have been told to do so, or paid to do so, but because it is worth doing.
In operational situations management often tries to encourage the evolution of these systems, but most fail, simply because they are “managed” rather than led.
Leading means facilitating the culture that nurtures the undirected and common accountability necessary, rather than thinking they can direct the processes and outcomes.
Nov 4, 2010 | Change, Operations, Personal Rant
Last week talking to a colleague, we agreed that a skill that seems to have been lost in the rush to electronic aids is being able to look at a bunch of numbers and know if it is approximately right or wrong. It seems that many over 50 just “know” if the column is OK, whereas a youngster who has all the electronic skills has no idea.
There seemed to us to be something cognitive at work that we did not have a grasp of, then I came across this article on the impact on learning of writing, and realised that the same phenomenon is possibly at work with numbers.
As kids at school, we worked with numbers, wrote down all the exercises, before we worked them, I can even remember not being allowed to bring a calculator into exams because they just gave an answer when understanding the process of arriving at an answer was as important as getting the right answer, so we had to show the workings to demonstrate understanding.
When involved in improvement projects in factories, I often find the default position is to buy some software, when time and time again the best outcome is achieved with simple visual recording and labeling. Now I understand a bit better why that is.
