Creative People Must Be Stopped (27 page)

If you have a good sense of the person or people you are aiming at, and know their situation and how they think, you may be able to anticipate the answers to some of these questions in advance. It always helps to start a project with a clear understanding of the goal, and what it will take to reach it, in mind. But as I've discussed numerous times throughout this book, you can easily be biased about your own ideas and how others should embrace them; this means you must actually test the value of your ideas and assumptions with them and other potential stakeholders, on their terms, watching for insights and unanticipated reactions. These tests should also consist of more than simply asking a person if he or she likes it. Simple prototypes or mock-ups of important characteristics of your idea can go a long way in helping you understand how people really feel.

Managing or Leading Innovation?

Business thinkers often draw a distinction between managing and leading. Managing is the work of planning, coordinating, and developing strategy, whereas leading is what must be done in the domains of emotion, motivation, and mission. Although the differences may seem obvious to you, don't make the mistake of thinking that your title as “team
leader
” or “project
manager
” absolves you of the responsibility for the other set of duties. The people who look to you for guidance won't necessarily make the distinction; besides, both types of tasks need to be accomplished anyway. In the next sections, I'll offer some insights into how the work of each of the roles plays into your ability to move your team from idea through implementation.

Managing the Process of Innovation

Think of the process of innovation as simply a set of steps that will need to be accomplished in order to get from the stage of identifying a problem all the way through to implementing a solution. Along this path, there will be a number of management activities that can smooth progress and make for a more efficient effort.

Obviously, an innovation will (and should) have many possible sources of uncertainty. Ideally, all the unpredictable issues will be precisely that: unpredictable. If there are things you can plan or schedule, go ahead and plan for them or schedule them. However, you will also want to keep all the cognitive and other resources of the team focused on the things that cannot be known or determined in advance. For example, a fast-growing consumer products company was having trouble shortening its product development time and fulfilling orders on schedule. I recommended to the president that he consider instituting a “product plan” in the form of a rolling schedule of all the products to be developed over the next six to twelve months. Rejecting the idea, he said, “How am I supposed to know what we'll be doing in six months? This is a fast-moving industry. If you want to know what we need to be doing in six months, just ask me then!”

It is true that we cannot predict the future or fix it into place by writing it in a plan. However, it is also true that we don't need to know exactly
what
we'll be doing, just
that
we'll be doing it. For instance, if you know that for competitive reasons you need to start a big product development project in February, then everyone should probably have taken his or her vacations by the end of January. Or if you know that the retailers need your product on the shelves for the Christmas season, then you should probably reserve manufacturing and shipping capacity, among other things, for use in the months prior. These are the kinds of management activities that can be done in advance, allowing you to drive out needless uncertainty. Why spend November scrambling for a manufacturer when you could be using the time refining your marketing plan or analyzing how to set your price?

Another management function is to control which tasks are being performed and the resources and effort being expended in performing them. Consider
Figure 8.2
, which is based on a study of development projects. It shows how an average project will progress from idea inception on through implementation and launch, as shown from left to right in the chart.

Figure 8.2

Source:
Adapted from Blanchard, 1998, figure 1.5, p. 5.

The dotted line represents the actual expenditures that would have been made on a project at that point in time. In the early stages, very little time and money are spent as the work is mostly conceptual and performed by a small number of people. In the later stages, however, investment soars as items are purchased, manufactured, and staged in preparation for utilization. The same pattern holds true for service development, where the later-stage expenditures might take the form of training and advertising in anticipation of launch.

The dashed line traces the ability a team will have to make substantive changes in a project. Such changes might be, for example, lowering the cost of the product being designed, improving its quality or performance, or setting an earlier launch date; they are much harder to make the closer you get to the end.

Taking the two curves together, you should conclude that changes are far easier and far less costly when performed early in the life of a project rather than later. But, as a thought experiment, consider the behaviors you have actually observed in project teams. Are the levels of activity and effort more like the dashed line or the dotted one? Most people see the dotted line as most representative of actual activity. My experience observing and working with teams has led me to refer to the left side of the chart as the
latte phase
, as in “This is fun; we didn't get much done, but that sure was a good latte.” I think of the right side as the
inferno phase
, as in “Dear Lord, my hair is on fire and we're going to die!” Is that similar to your experience?

If your answer is yes, this is unfortunate, because that pattern is exactly the opposite of what the chart suggests should happen, and that's a problem of management. Teams should be spending significant amounts of time and resources in the early stages when investment is low and when the possibility for implementing valuable changes based on new insights is high. By considering more possibilities and testing those possibilities in more rigorous ways, a team can identify those ideas and concepts that will be most effective and most easily implemented. If you can develop a plan that enforces committed, vigorous, and critical thinking up front, it's much less likely that you'll be running around looking for a fire extinguisher later. And there's a bonus: if your team's most rigorous efforts indicate early on that a project is a likely dead end, the sooner you know, the better. As a manager of valuable organizational resources, you will have conserved them for use on other, more promising projects.

Without an explicit plan for your team, you have to rely on members' intuitive ideas about how the process of innovation should work. Some have probably always viewed the early stage as the fun and mystical, the part where beanbag chairs and an oxygen bar may help, but they are not really sure why. They may not know what else it is they could be doing besides ruminating on the problem and anxiously watching the deadline approach. A plan, in contrast, could show them explicitly which behaviors need to be performed and when.

Leading the Process of Innovation

One of the most important leadership skills is to discern whether the person standing in front of you is asking for your help as a manager or for your attention as a leader. Sometimes explaining the plan, clarifying a goal, or acquiring a resource is enough management to keep team members moving along the path. At other times, they may need something significantly different. They may want to understand whether this mission is truly meaningful given that they heard otherwise over the office watercooler. Or they may need help staying motivated in the face of seemingly endless late nights and setbacks in the project. Although a detailed discussion of the role of leaders in organizations is beyond the scope of this book, there are some dynamics peculiar to the innovation process that are relevant to the job of leading innovation, and a brief examination of them may help you understand what and when team members are likely to ask you for leadership, and what you might do in response.

Just like the targets of your innovations, team members will also need some important answers as a project proceeds toward completion. Some answers will be in response to unease about the assumptions and justifications on which the project was based. Others may be in response to a desire to understand what the
real
chances are that what you are asking me to do now will lead us toward (and not away from) successfully fulfilling the mission of the project and that of the organization.

My study of groups pursuing innovation and my experience working with and in teams have taught me that there is some regularity to the kinds of questions that will come up. The following table presents those that you can expect to arise at different phases in the process;
Figure 8.3
illustrates the corresponding phases.

Figure 8.3

Gene Krantz at Mission Control kept reinforcing the answers to these questions to the team, not because the questions were being asked, but because he recognized that they needed to be answered. Your answers will have an effect on the levels of motivation and commitment by team members. Sometimes you don't need a great deal of commitment, as when you invite some nonmembers to participate in a brainstorm session. But most likely you will need it from those you are asking to stay with you instead of working on other projects and to stay for the duration. It's also important to recognize when the question hasn't been asked but the answer should nonetheless be delivered. Everything we know about leadership suggests that people need reasonable answers to be willing to follow. Of course you can choose not to answer them proactively; but then don't be surprised when rumor, gossip, and hearsay gathered from around the office watercooler quickly fill the void you have left.

The Innovative Organization

The primary characteristics of organizations, as pointed out earlier, are their strategy, structure, and resources. In the matter of developing an innovation strategy inside your organization, you will need to pay attention to all three if you are to drive the change you seek. Beyond the basic constraints mentioned in the chapter on organizations, there are some additional considerations when moving toward this new place.

Your Innovation Strategy

Given that innovation is a hot topic these days, with pretty much every magazine and newspaper touting its value, there can be a desire in organizations to rapidly become “innovative” without a great deal of understanding of what it is and without willingness to practice doing it. One of the first things you should think about is the role that innovation will play in your organization's business strategy.