The New Zealand All Blacks’ rugby team exemplifies high performance through a blend of deep cultural traditions, continuous improvement, and exceptional teamwork. Renowned for their winning legacy, the All Blacks have harnessed their unique team ethos and operational strategies to maintain dominance in international rugby.
Deep Dive into the All Blacks’ Team Dynamics
1. The Essence of Their High Performance Culture: At its core, the All Blacks’ success is driven by a strong team culture that emphasizes collective responsibility and personal excellence. Each player is selected not only for their athletic prowess but also for their ability to contribute to the team’s ethos, which is famously encapsulated by the mantra, “Better People Make Better All Blacks.”
2. Leadership and Collective Responsibility: The team operates under a shared leadership model where senior players are tasked with mentoring younger teammates, fostering a sense of responsibility and continuity. This structure enhances cohesion and ensures that the team’s values are imparted effectively across generations.
3. Continuous Cultural and Performance Improvement: Inspired by the concept of ‘Kaizen’, or continuous improvement, the All Blacks strive to enhance every aspect of their performance, from on-field strategies to mental preparation. This approach keeps them adaptable and competitive, regardless of the evolving nature of the game.
Lessons from the All Blacks’ Team Strategies
1. Unity and Shared Vision: The All Blacks’ unity is their strength. A shared vision guided by their cultural values leads to cohesive team efforts. Leaders can learn the importance of aligning team members towards a common goal and the powerful impact of a united front.
2. Cultural Legacy and Identity: The integration of cultural rituals like the Haka into their routine not only intimidates opponents but also strengthens their identity and resolve. This teaches leaders the value of embracing and promoting a unique team identity to enhance solidarity and pride.
3. Mental Toughness and Resilience: The mental preparation of players to handle high-pressure situations is a testament to their resilience. Developing mental toughness is crucial for teams to perform under pressure.
4. Adaptability and Tactical Innovation: The All Blacks’ ability to adapt their game plan in real-time according to the situation on the field underscores the importance of flexibility and innovation in achieving superior results.
5. Empowerment and Accountability: Empowering players to take ownership of their roles and the outcomes teaches accountability and encourages individual contribution to the team’s success.
Reflecting on the All Blacks’ Approach to High Performance
While the cultural and operational strategies of the All Blacks are deeply integrated into the fabric of New Zealand rugby, they provide universal lessons on building and sustaining high performance teams. The key is not merely in adopting specific tactics but in cultivating an environment that promotes continuous improvement, unity, and resilience.
Key Insights for Leaders:
Building a high performance team requires more than skills; it requires cultivating a shared culture and identity that can inspire and unify team members.
Flexibility in strategies and adaptability in execution are critical to staying competitive and relevant.
Continuous improvement and learning are essential for sustaining high performance and should be integral to the team’s operation.
The All Blacks’ method, though deeply rooted in the specific context of rugby and New Zealand culture, offers great insights for leaders in any field aiming to build high performance teams.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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The first principle of managing innovation is that there are three distinct returns on innovation one can invest to achieve.
They are:
“Unmatchable” differentiation, which confers enormous bargaining power as customers who want what you have “must” select you and “must” pay a premium for your offer. We call this DIFF for short.
“Speedy” neutralization, which catches you up to some new market norm set by a competitor, thereby enabling you to stay in the game rather than be eliminated for lacking this feature. This is NEUT for short.
“Rigorous” optimization, which extracts high-value talent and other scarce resources from non-differentiating work in order to free up investment in highly differentiating work or high-speed neutralization efforts. This is OPT for short.
The second principle is that these three outcomes are mutually exclusive, meaning you do not want to combine any two of them into the same work stream. Most innovation programs bind DIFF objectives with NEUT objectives, tying both to the same release cadence. This either slows down NEUT or dumbs down DIFF, both of which outcomes are painfully counterproductive.
The third principle is that most innovation investment is wasted (which is actually good news, because it means you can get a much bigger bang for your innovation buck once you learn how to avoid the waste). The three great sources of waste are:
DIFF initiatives that do not result in “unmatchable” offers that create unequivocal customer preference. You end up being different but not different enough to gain real bargaining power.
NEUT initiatives that take too long or go too far (or, more typically, both). Here the team has become obsessed with its competitor and is doing extra work that the customer will not value, meanwhile delaying the “good enough” state that the customer would value.
OPT initiatives that do not address “sacred cow” resources. You end up moving around a lot of junior resources, meanwhile leaving the senior ones trapped in context instead of being deployed against core.
A corollary that can help teams avoid waste is to pay attention to their reference points.
If your goal is DIFF, then your reference point should be a prospective customer’s use case, one where purchase preference will be determined by you achieving “unmatchable” performance in your key area of innovation.
If your goal is NEUT, then your reference point is a competitor, then your innovation focus should be to get “good enough” fast enough.
A behavior you must avoid is to use a competitor as a reference point for DIFF. The all too likely outcome here is that you will create a difference that the customer either will not notice, will not acknowledge, or will not value. Meanwhile, the competitor will debate the fact that you even achieved it or that it is relevant if you did.
Finally, in light of these principles, the role of the leader is to deconstruct the overall workload of the team to tease out the DIFF from the NEUT from the OPT, and to charter specific work-streams accordingly. This rarely results in a perfectly pure outcome, but the more pure it is, the more productive your team’s efforts will be.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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If you have more features, I will beat you with fewer.
If you have a broad product line, I will beat you with my singular product.
If your solution is big, mine will beat you with small.
If you sell across the globe, I will sell only in the most important market and beat you.
If you sell to many customers, I will provide a better service to your best customer and beat you.
If your new projects must generate $10 million per year, I will beat you with $1 million projects.
If you are slow, I will beat you with fast.
If you use short term thinking, I will beat you with long term thinking.
If you think in the long term, I will think in the short term and beat you.
If you sell a standardized product, I will beat you with customization.
If you are successful, I will beat you with my hunger.
If you try to do less, I will beat you with far less.
If you do what you did last time, I will beat you with novelty.
If you want to be big, I will be a small company and beat you.
I will beat you with what you don’t have.
Then, I will obsolete my best work with what I don’t have.
Your success creates inertia. Your competitors know what you’re good at and know you’ll do everything you can to maintain your trajectory. No changes, just more of what worked. And they will use your inertia. They will start small and sell to the lowest end of the market. Then they’ll grow that segment and go up-scale. You will think they are silly and dismiss them. And then they will take your best customers and beat you.
If you want to know how your competitors will beat you, think of your strength as a weakness. Here’s a thought experiment to explain. If your success is based on fast, turn speed into weakness and constrain out the speed. Declare that your new product must be slow. Then, create a growth plan based on slow. That growth plan is how your competitors will beat you.
Your growth won’t come from what you have, it will come from what you don’t have.
It’s time to create your anti-product.
Image credit: Pixabay
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There’s this simple misconception when it comes to burnout. We tend to think that burnout comes from just working too hard—putting in too many hours per week, exerting too much energy, and tipping your work-life scale out of balance. As a result, leaders and companies have sought to combat burnout by offering “rest” as a generic cure-all for their drained and disengaged people.
They’ve added greater flexibility programs (even before the pandemic), brought self-care opportunities into the office, and some have even become more serious about vacation time. And these programs aren’t without benefit, but it became obvious fairly quickly that the returns on the rest investments were limited (again, even before the pandemic added new stress).
The reason is that burnout comes from many sources—and anti-burnout efforts need to address all of these sources to truly be effective. So in this article, we’ll review the six true causes of burnout and offer some practical tips for leaders to mitigate the damage from these causes.
1. Excessive Workload
The first cause of burnout at work is excessive workload—and at first glance excessive workload looks like too much work. But excessive workload refers to juggling multiple projects, not having clarity on which one to focus on, and not knowing what next steps are for some. It’s not about hours worked, but rather the feeling that no matter how many hours are worked, work isn’t getting completed.
Excessive workload often sneaks up on the best performing people, because as they do good work, more work gets assigned to them. To prevent this, leaders need to keep track of how many projects they’re asking their people to take on. And if adding more to the workload, leaders can make priorities clear—even going so far as to state which projects are no longer a priority can go a long way to reducing excessive workload.
2. Poor Relationships
The second cause of burnout at work is poor relationships. Even if the workload of employees isn’t overwhelming and the project requirements aren’t confusing, doing the work with toxic colleagues can quickly lead to burnout. Poor relationships not only trigger feelings of dread as people begin the workday, but during the workday toxic coworkers can trigger many of the other causes of burnout on this list by being too demanding, too critical, or too lazy and adding to the workload of their colleagues as a result.
That’s why smart leaders focus on the relationships and cohesion of a team even more than they focus on whether the team is stacked with talented members. They know that individual performance is a function of team dynamics and work to build bonds on those teams. Leaders can help repair some of the relationship damage by seeking to create shared understanding between the team around differences in personality, preferences, and other contextual factors of the team. In addition, creating shared identity among members reinforces the idea that they’re truly one team and need to put personal differences aside.
3. Lack of Control
The third cause of burnout at work is lack of control. Lack of control refers to how much (or rather how little) autonomy employees have over their work. When individuals get to have a say in what projects they take on, or at least how, when, and where they tackle those projects, they’re more motivated and produce better quality work. But when a micromanager is hovering over their shoulder (or virtually hovering via constant check-ins or monitoring software) then those same people become demotivated and burnt out.
Leaders can’t always decide what projects their teams work on, but there’s always creative ways to increase autonomy on the team. If the project itself is a must-do, then leaders can discuss with the team who does what to get it done. If the deadlines are nonnegotiable, teams can still decide what the checkpoints or smaller deadlines look like. It may not seem like much, but a little autonomy goes a long way toward soothing burnout.
4. Lack of Recognition
The fourth cause of burnout at work is a lack of recognition. When people feel like they’re good work isn’t noticed, it becomes harder and harder for them to motivate themselves to keep working. And when they’re juggling multiple projects through excessive workload or juggling multiple toxic coworkers because of poor relationships, a lack of recognition compounds the problem. It’s difficult to take the time each day or each week to recognize each person’s contribution, especially when the demands of the work keep rising.
But it’s essential that leaders find time to praise the people on their team and express gratitude for their contribution. Moreover, it’s vital that leaders connect that recognition to the work with as little delay as possible. Just keeping track of wins and sharing them later in the annual performance review may get those wins documented, but it won’t reduce burnout in the people performing the work unless those wins are praised in the moment as well.
5. Lack of Fairness
The fifth cause of burnout at work is a lack of fairness. Doing great work and having it noticed is important, but feeling like that work is not getting as much notice as mediocre work done by another person or team can quickly diminish any positive effect from recognition. Likewise, feeling like another person or team is cutting corners or breaking rules and not being sufficiently reprimanded can spike feelings of unfairness that lead to burnout.
Depending on their power or place in the organizational chart, leaders may not be able to do much about an overall lack of fairness in the company. However, that doesn’t mean they’re powerless. In situations of unfair recognition, leaders can fight for the team to get greater notice and make sure people notice the fight. But in situations of unethical behavior, sometimes the best thing is to lead their team to a more just organization.
6. Purpose Mismatch
The final cause of burnout at work is a mismatch between the company’s purpose and the personal purpose or values of the individual. We want to do work that matters, and we want to work for leaders who tell us that we matter. But often in the quest to define an organizational mission statement, grandiose visions about stakeholders and society can actually blur an individuals’ ability to see how their work contributors to something so big. Or, if they see it, they may not feel as inspired about it as the senior leaders who wrote it during a consultant-led offsite and the lavish retreat center.
Smart leaders know their people’s values and what aspect of the work resonates most with them, and they know how to reinforce how the day-to-day work meets that personal desire for purpose. Most often, this is best done by connecting the team’s tasks to the people who are directly served by the team. We often think of purpose as “why we do what we do” but for many people, purpose is better stated as “who we help through the work that we do.”
Conclusion
Looking at the full list, it becomes apparent why merely reducing hours worked or adding a few self-care programs falls short of banishing burnout. Leaders need to take care of more than just the physical when it comes to keeping people productive and healthy. They need to talk about purpose, and make sure that purpose is being served in fair way. They need to make sure people have a clear picture of expectations and are recognized when they meet those expectations. By addressing all of these causes, leaders can turn their culture from one that drains people to one that leaves them feeling more energized than when they started. And that will make a huge difference in whether or not people feel burnt out or whether they feel like they’re doing their best work ever.
If you prefer a video version of this article, you will find it here:
Image credit: Pexels
Originally published on LinkedIn on December 21, 2021
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What if you could see everyone as doing their best?
When they are ineffective, what if you think they are using all the skills to the best of their abilities?
What changes when you see people as having a surplus of good intentions and a shortfall of skills?
If someone cannot recognize social cues and behaves accordingly, what does that say about them?
What does it say about you if you judge them as if they recognize those social cues?
Even if their best isn’t all skillful, what if you saw them as doing their best?
When someone treats you unskillfully, maybe they never learned how to behave skillfully.
When someone yells at you, maybe yelling is the only skill they were taught.
When someone treats you unskillfully, maybe that’s the only skill they have at their disposal.
And what if you saw them as doing their best?
Unskillful behavior cannot be stopped with punishment.
Unskillful behavior changes only when new skills are learned.
New skills are learned only when they are taught.
New skills are taught only when a teacher notices a yet-to-be-developed skillset.
And a teacher only notices a yet-to-be-developed skillset when they understand that the unskillful behavior is not about them.
And when a teacher knows the unskillful behavior is not about them, the teacher can teach.
And when teachers teach, new skills develop.
And as new skills develop, behavior becomes skillful.
It’s difficult to acknowledge unskillful behavior when it’s seen as mean, selfish, uncaring, and hurtful.
It’s easier to acknowledge unskillful behavior when it’s seen as a lack of skills set on a foundation of good intentions.
When you see unskillful behavior, what if you see that behavior as someone doing their best?
Unskillful behavior cannot change unless it is called by its name.
And once called by name, skillful behavior must be clearly described within the context that makes it skillful.
If you think someone “should” know their behavior is unskillful, you won’t teach them.
And when you don’t teach them, that’s about you.
If no one teaches you to hit a baseball, you never learn the skill of hitting a baseball.
When their bat always misses the ball, would you think the lesser of them? If you did, what does that say about you?
What if no one taught you how to crochet and you were asked to knit scarf? Even if you tried your best, you couldn’t do it. How could you possibly knit a scarf without developing the skill? How would you want people to see you? Wouldn’t you like to be seen as someone with good intentions that wants to be taught how to crochet?
If you were never taught how to speak French, should I see your inability to speak French as a character defect or as a lack of skill?
We are not born with skills. We learn them.
And we cannot learn skillful behavior unless we’re taught.
When we think they “should” know better, we assume they had good teachers.
When we think their unskillful behavior is about us, that’s about us.
When we punish unskillful behavior, it would be more skillful to teach new skills.
When we use prizes and rewards to change behavior, it would be more skillful to teach new skills.
When in doubt, it’s skillful to think the better of people.
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One of the things that all sound innovation processes have in common is some way to iterate. To repeatedly work through a process that allows you to refine whatever you’re trying to create.
That might be building a prototype, testing it and building another version based on what you’ve learned. It might be gathering customer feedback and making adjustments that are more appealing or solve a problem more effectively. It might be exploring more than one business model or marketing strategy until you find one that works.
We tend to think of those iterations as making refinements to a product or strategy, but more than anything, it’s refining your own thinking. It’s being willing to change how you understand the world, by challenging your assumptions and beliefs—your mindset.
We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of learning as mastering a set of already well-defined concepts, like how to solve a math problem or memorizing facts from history. But innovation—and life in general—requires a different kind of learning. More like gradually mastering how to play a sport or musical instrument, or drive a car. This kind of learning is a more incremental process. One that prompts questions like:
How might I be wrong, and need to correct myself?
What do I not understand as well as I could?
What are some alternative beliefs and opinions, to the ones I have?
How might someone else see things differently and what could I learn from them?
The ability to iterate your own thinking, by being open to new interpretations of what you experience, is crucial to innovation. It’s also a good strategy for ordering your life, so you don’t lock onto a mindset that may not be the most effective for you.
Mental iteration is a powerful life skill—and healthy innovation habit—that also helps you innovate yourself.
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What are the traits and characteristics for a new generation of leaders, those who will shape the future in this sea of uncertainty?
To me, this is more about mindset than age. However, the mindset which I hint at below and that I believe we need more of reside well within the younger generation.
Thus, we could see a higher number of younger executives in the coming years even though they lack the leadership experience and skills that have been normal for leaders in their roles. They need to learn fast and hopefully do this while being surrounded with experiences in different ways.
I think this will be most prominent in Asia and even parts of Africa and South America where there is a stronger belief in the future compared to Europe and even the USA with its stronger sentiment of complacency as well as many overwhelming challenges.
Many current executives will of course also develop in good ways so I suggest we look for traits and characteristics in both groups such as:
Holistic point of view (intrapreneurial skills)
Understanding of psychological safety and the growth mindset (and ability to lead with and through this)
Ability to constructively handle conflict
Optimism, passion and drive
Curiosity and belief in change
Tolerance for / ability to deal with uncertainty
Adaptive fast learner with sense of urgency
Talent for networking / strategic influencing
The desired end-game? Leaders who are capable of the almost super-human task of both managing day-to-day activities and shaping the future.
By shaping the future, I mean the ability to thrive with transformation/change, apply new ways of working and improve collaboration capabilities while pursing new business opportunities and innovation.
Just a discussion starter. What do you think?
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Unintended consequences often catch us off guard despite their predictability. The moment they occur, we gasp in shock, shake our heads, and look at each other in wide-eyed horror at this thing that just happened that we could never ever ever have anticipated.
Yet, when (if) we do an After-Action Review, we often realize that these consequences were not entirely unforeseeable. In fact, had we anticipated them, we might have made different decisions.
The Unintended Consequences of Spreadsheets
In 1800 BCE, ancient Babylonians started recording data by scratching grids and columns onto clay tablets, and the spreadsheet was born. Over the millennia, we went from clay tablets to papyrus to parchment and then paper.
Fast forward to 1963 when R. Brian Walsh of Marquette University ported the Business Computer Language (BCL) program to an IBM 7040, and electronic spreadsheets became a reality. The introduction of VisiCalc by Apple in 1979 revolutionized spreadsheet capabilities, followed by Lotus 123 and Microsoft Excel. Today, spreadsheets are ubiquitous in education, business operations, financial markets, budgeting, and even personal inventories.
Unintended yet predictable consequences
While spreadsheets have undoubtedly enhanced efficiency and accuracy compared to traditional methods like clay tablets or hand-drawn tables on parchment, their ease of use has inadvertently led to complacency.
We stopped engaging in a multi-millennial habit of discussing, debating, and deciding before making a spreadsheet. We started flippantly asking people to create spreadsheets and providing little, if any, guidance because “it’s easy to make changes and run scenarios.”
This shift resulted in a reliance on automated models and a lack of shared assumptions or analytical rigor in decision-making processes.
Of course, these behaviors were never intended. They were, however, very predictable.
Research spanning disciplines as varied as network scientists, anthropology, neuropsychology, and paleontology shines a light on how truly predictable we are.
Emotions before Reason: Ask someone if they make decisions based on their motivations, aspirations, and fears and use data to justify the decisions, and they’ll tell you no. Ask them the last time someone else made a decision that “made no sense,” and you’ll listen to a long list of examples.
Small gains now are better than big gains later: Thoughtfully planning before using solutions like spreadsheets, word processing, email, and instant messaging could save us time at work and help us get home 30 minutes earlier or work a few hours less on the weekend. But saving a few seconds now by brain-dumping into Word, setting up a “flexible” spreadsheet, and firing off a text feels much better.
Confidence > Realism: We’ve all been in meetings where the loudest voice or the most senior person’s opinion carried the day. As we follow their lead, we ignore signs that we’re wrong and explain away unexpected and foreboding outcomes until we either wake up to our mistakes or adjust to our new circumstances.
Predict the 93%. Create for the 7%
Acknowledging the predictability of human behavior is not an endorsement of stereotypes but a recognition of our innate cognitive processes. By incorporating this understanding into design, innovation, and decision-making processes, we better anticipate potential outcomes and mitigate unintended consequences.
While 93% of human behavior may follow predictable patterns rooted in evolutionary instincts, focusing on the remaining 7% allows for the exploration of unique behaviors and novel solutions. By embracing both aspects of human nature, we can navigate challenges more effectively and anticipate a broader range of outcomes in our endeavors, leading to informed decision-making and value creation.
Now, if I could only get Excel to stop auto-converting numbers into date/time format.
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The team at FROM has worked with dozens and dozens of companies to create innovative new products, processes, and channels to connect with customers. It’s very rewarding work for many reasons, one of which is the incredible people we get to work with at our clients. In fact, we find over and over that our clients have teams with tremendous knowledge, vision, and passion to serve their customers. And yet, it can sometimes take an outside force (like us) to unleash their full creative potential or to catalyze the action need to move an idea forward along the pathway of value. Why is that?
Having observed many companies go through transformations that yielded massively innovative thinking and action from teams that were previously struggling, the difference usually boils down to something that had been missing in the company’s culture, processes, or environment. But what?
Consider this analogy. To create fire you must have three key ingredients:
Some type of fuel
Oxygen
A spark or source of heat to start the reaction.
These ingredients are all necessary for the reaction to occur. If any is missing, nothing happens. The dormant potential is not realized.
It’s a similar pattern with sparking innovation. There are three key ingredients. When these are present, amazing things can happen. And when any is missing, there’s no reward structure or corporate mandate that can create the magic.
The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal.
1. Focused Objective
The first ingredient is a Focused Objective. This is the SPARK of innovation. The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal. Defining the right objective that you want your innovation team to churn on is the first step in empowering them. If you want your team to create a more innovative doorknob, that’s somewhat specific. However figuring out how to create a doorknob that looks like brass, lasts for at least 10 years with normal residential use, and can retail for no more than $19.99 is a much more specific objective. The brain is more resourceful when it really understands the target it is shooting for.
Where does such specificity come from? We use a concept in our innovation framework that we call Cascading Innovation.
It might have been a prior team’s innovation output to figure out that a $19.99 “faux brass” doorknob is what the market wants. Their specific objective might have been to determine what gaps exist in the doorknob market where the company could generate at least $50M in incremental sales by 2014 through existing retail channels.
That input might have come to them from yet another team whose focus was to figure out which market in residential hardware has the greatest potential for growth over the next 5 years, perhaps they concluded it was doorknobs.
Constraints
When articulating a focused objective, it is very important to clearly define the correct constraints.
On one hand, we want to drive innovation, and so we want to be careful not to state the objective or the problem too much in the terms of the current “legacy” solution to the problem. Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they want, they’d have said a faster horse.” So avoid defining the problem as “a faster horse” versus “a faster way to travel.”
At the same time, all creativity exists within some kind of framework, whether it’s the structure of a haiku poem or a painting created within a defined frame.
What’s fabulous about clear constraints is that once all the constraints are clear, then we can tell the teams with confidence that any solution which solves the problem within the constraints is fair game, even if it looks nothing like what anybody expects. That is very liberating.
Henry Ford said “If I’d asked people what they want they’d have said a faster horse.”
2. Information
The second ingredient to ignite innovation is Information. Relevant information is the FUEL of innovation. Our doorknob team is hopefully populated with some individuals who have some of their own stored information in the form of personal experience in the doorknob biz. But collecting the right additional information and making it easy for the team to organize and internalize it is key. Information might include: competitive examples of other low cost doorknobs which have or have not been successful; market research about consumer needs; materials prices for a variety of different low cost metals along with information about their durability. Figuring out the right information with which to FUEL your team will allow them to burn hotter and longer on the problem.
There are three ways to get the information to feed your team:
The people you choose for the team bring different backgrounds and experience to the table. On the projects on which we consult, significant thought goes into the right composition of the client’s innovation team to bring different backgrounds, knowledge, personalities and perspective to bear.
Once assembled, each team member’s individual knowledge will be an information resource to him/herself, as a member of the team. The team’s collective knowledge will be a resource to the entire team if you structure the collaboration to foster knowledge sharing.
Secondary research such as market studies, government statistics, materials analysis, etc can provide critical reference. Gathering the full gamut of available information and structuring it so that it is easily digested and referenced can be a sizable undertaking, but is critical to giving the team both information that may yield flashes of valuable insight as well as the tools they need to evaluate and prioritize ideas as they are generated.
Primary research that your team participates in, such as talking to customers and building and testing physical prototypes, is another way to get the information to fuel your team. There is no substitute for personal experience.
You can also think of two key “buckets” of information that together form the ideal fuel.
1. Knowledge of the problem space
Who are the users for whom we are innovating? What do we understand about their needs?
Has this problem been solved before or have prior attempts been made? What was the approach and what were the results?
How can a potential solution’s effectiveness be measured? How will we know when the problem is solved?
Has anyone solved or attempted to solve a similar problem which may be instructive?
2. Knowledge of the resources that are available to create the solution
Details on the rules regarding any constraints that must be met for a successful approach (e.g. regulatory restrictions or distribution restrictions)
Specific characteristics of different materials or processes, that either enable or hamper their use in particular ways
Information on new technologies that can be leveraged in the solution
There is a wonderful scene in Apollo 13 where the team has to figure out how to keep the astronauts alive until re-entry even though the Co2 “scrubbers” in the command module have failed, causing the air to become slowly poisoned. The leader of the Mission Control team tasked with solving this problem dumps onto the table all the “stuff” they have in the command module and tells the team “we have to figure out how to make this (the large square filters they have) fit into the hole for this (the smaller round filters that have failed) using nothing but this (the pile of miscellaneous stuff on the table which mirrors the available material in the command module). Watch this one minute clip it’s a great example of a clear focused objective with clear information about the resources available to solve the problem:
3. Freedom
And so what is the OXYGEN we need to finish the recipe? Freedom is the OXYGEN of innovation. What do we mean by freedom? In daily “business as usual” there are a variety of things that hold us back — which suppress the natural release of our latent creativity just as lack of oxygen snuffs out a campfire. Here are a few of the barriers to freedom and how we overcome them.
Fear. Fear of looking foolish and fear of political repercussions are the two greatest risks to innovation. These fears hold back new ideas and honest discourse regarding ideas that do come forth. These are best overcome with culture. In our innovation workshops we stress rules such as “leave rank at the door,” and highlight the value of bad ideas.
Patterns. We all have certain patterns we follow. Those patterns are the grooves in the road that make it hard to find a new path and they are the shackles that keep us from thinking freely. There are many ways to break patterns. Some techniques we use in our innovation frameworks and workshops include: working in a different type of workspace, music, toys, time compression, physical activity/games and mixing teams in unexpected ways.
Assumptions. People have assumptions about what can or can’t be done, what the company will or won’t allow, what the market will or won’t accept. However most successful innovations break existing assumptions. One of the reasons its important to state the problem and its constraints with great care is that in doing so we let the innovation team know those are all the assumptions they should respect, anything else should be challenged. We also conduct exercises specifically designed to remove assumptions. One great example is the “Google exercise.” It works like this. People perceive Google as innovative. So we tell people: “Google just bought your company, and they put their most innovative team on the problem. How would they solve it?” (and it can work with Apple or Facebook as well). This context puts people outside their normal assumptions about what is possible in their environment and even, strangely enough, frees them from their own limiting beliefs about their own imaginations. The team may come back and say, “Well the guys at Google would do this wild innovative thing, but that’s the sort of thing we’d never come up with here at Acme corporation.” Uh oh, tricked you! You just did.
Faith. The last component of freedom is faith. A lack of faith can stifle innovation. Teams must believe that solutions to the challenge exist and that they are more than capable of arriving at them.
So those are the three ingredients to ignite innovation: a clear set of objectives to spark the FIRE, a rich set of information to FUEL it, and an atmosphere of freedom acting as OXYGEN so the flame can breathe.
This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash
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