Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 11:36 AM
Wondering why your teams aren't more creative and innovative? Maybe they are stopping themselves.
When it comes to innovation "what really matters is not getting many good ideas, but getting one or two exceptional ideas. That's really what innovation is all about," says Terwiesch.
But if you're getting lots of ideas, shouldn't that naturally lead to more "exceptional ideas?"
Not necessarily.
"The evaluation part is critical.," Terwiesch says. "It's no good generating a great idea if you don't recognize the idea as great. It's like me sitting here and saying I had the idea for Amazon. If I had the idea but didn't do anything about it, then it really doesn't matter that I had the idea."
And project teams are not very good at recognizing and developing great ideas. For example, here are 4 reasons that team dynamics can get in the way of innovation:
- Team members self-censor themselves to avoid upsetting a colleague or to go along with the status quo
- Too many people in the room doesn't provide enough time for everybody to be heard and have their ideas discussed
- "Build-up" or the tendency of people to expand on ideas that have already been accepted by the team at the expense of considering other ideas
- The tendency to defer to authority or up the hierarchical team structure, i.e. "the boss is always right"
Also, Terwiesch says, "We find huge differences in people's levels of creativity, and we just have to face it. We're not all good singers and we're not all good runners, so why should we expect that we all are good idea generators?"
What are some things that teams can do to work around the innovation-killing team dynamics?
In their book "
Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities," Terwiesch and Ulrich suggest that putting more structure around the early idea generation process can help ensure that quality ideas bubble to the surface. They recommend using a virtual "suggestion box" to collect ideas and "coordinated competitions" to filter exceptional ideas.
Terwiesch adds, "People like having a process because they understand that it's fair. In a typical brainstorming meeting, it's not fair and everybody knows it: The boss is always right."
He also says that it is important to prevent the group dynamics in brainstorming sessions from killing early ideas. "Your initial thoughts are very vital to the company because they are your unbiased opinion."
According to Ulrich, "We have found that, in the early phases of idea generation, providing very specific process guideposts for individuals [such as] 'Generate at least 10 ideas and submit them by Wednesday,' ensures that all members of a team contribute and that they devote sufficient creative energy to the problem."
The next time you're looking for innovative ideas, consider trying the virtual suggestion box, and then focus on evaluating the ideas that were generated. If you have a large team, consider breaking the team into smaller groups while being conscious of the social and organizational hierarchy and personalities within each small group.
Finally, consider using a "Positive, Negative, Interesting" (PNI) parallel thinking structure around the discussions. Using this approach, the team evaluates each idea in only one area at a time. So when the "Positive" idea characteristics are evaluated, only positive attributes of the idea are discussed and recorded, and when "Negative" characteristics are evaluated, only the downsides of the idea are discussed and recorded. The "Interesting" characteristics are the neutral or "just the facts" attributes of the idea.
Once teams get used to this approach and experience the value in it, they become more self-directed and peer pressure alone keeps the discussions on-track.
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Posted by George Huhn on Tue, May 25, 2010 @ 12:19 PM
I was talking with a friend of mine, Dr. Richard Flanagan, a psychologist and co-author of the book The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results, about his recent election to a non-profit Board of Trustees. Our discussion quickly turned to the number of new acronyms that he had heard being bandied about in his first meeting.
"I know what you mean," I said. "I often have meetings with clients where the acronym flow becomes too fast to follow."
So Richard told me how he solves that problem: he raises his hand and says that he is sorry that he can't understand because he is "dysacronymic."
"Most people at first express their sympathy, even though they don't know what 'dysacronymic' means."
So he explains:
"I coined the term "Dysacronymic" to mean confused by or unable to understand acronyms, an impairment in the ability to understand or interpret acronyms. I use the term especially in new settings where internal acronyms are bandied about: any company, government agency, or technology group being prime offenders, but all human systems seem to be afflicted with shortcuts assumed to be known and understood by all. I guess we also need a diagnostic term and description for human systems that are overburdened or blessed with many acronyms - maybe hyper-acronymic systems!"
"After I use it I always confess to making up the term and meaning no offense and then request acronym interpretation or explanation. Very often others express gratitude for the intervention - even insiders sometimes don't know the meanings but don't want to look bad by asking. I have found that sometimes the acronym users themselves can't explain them very well and have often forgotten the exact terms that the letters stand for."
The project management and project portfolio management fields are loaded with acronyms; this page from Project Management Knowledge lists 87 project management related acronyms. And, of course, many acronyms have multiple meanings. Our Data Machines website gets hits from people searching for information about "parts per million" as it shares the same acronym as "project portfolio management" (PPM).
Richard told me that he is planning to write up a "clinical" description that "will follow the DSM-IV diagnostic descriptions model." For those of you like Richard and me, who are dysacronymic, DSM is the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" of the American Psychiatric Association."
So, are you dysacronymic, too? If you are, thanks to Dr. Flanagan, at least now we'll have a clinical diagnostic model to point to that explains our affliction.
But does anybody have any cures?
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Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 09:55 AM
Looking for new and better ideas from your project team? Thinking about having a typical "
brainstorming" session? Don't bother. New research shows there's a better way.
"Brainstorming" usually consists of people meeting specifically for the purpose of coming up with new ideas around a specific topic. Any and all ideas are recorded, and evaluation of individual ideas is postponed so as not to inhibit idea generation or discard ideas prematurely. Brainstorming is proposed to work on the basis that ideas from each person in the group will stimulate new and different ideas from others, therefore, more ideas will lead to better ideas. That's the theory, anyway.
However, in a recent article published in the
INFORMS journal
Management Science entitled
"Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea," researchers found that most of the literature on brainstorming focused on the number of ideas generated, but not the quality or the selection of the best ideas. Furthermore, they found that the literature showed the opposite of what brainstorming promised: "research has unequivocally found that the number of ideas generated (i.e., productivity) is significantly higher when individuals work by themselves, and the average quality of ideas is no different between individual and team processes."
In other words, brainstorming produces fewer ideas than individual efforts, but about the same quality of ideas.
1) the average quality of ideas generated,
2) the number of ideas generated,
3) the variance in the quality of ideas generated, and
4) the ability of the group to discern the quality of the
ideas.
In their study, they compared two processes: a typical brainstorming structure and a "hybrid" structure. In the brainstorming structure, each team of 4 was given 30 minutes to complete an idea generation challenge. At the end of the 30 minutes, each team was given 5 minutes to develop a consensus-based selection and ranking of the team's five best ideas. In the hybrid structure, individuals were asked to work separately on an idea generation challenge for 10 minutes and then asked to rank their own ideas at the end of the 10 minutes. These individuals were then randomly placed in teams of 4 to share and discuss their ideas and generate new ideas for 20 minutes. At the end of this phase, each team was given 5 minutes to develop a consensus-based selection and ranking of the team's five best ideas.
The ideas were then evaluated by a panel of 41 MBA students who had received formal training in the valuation of new products.
Their conclusion? They found the "hybrid structure" produced 3 times as many ideas per unit of time compared to brainstorming, and the average quality of the ideas was significantly higher.
So, the next time you're trying to generate some breakthrough ideas on your project team, be sure to let your project team members generate some new ideas on their own before you try to do it together as a team. This research shows you'll get much better results doing it that way.
And if you're involved in
project portfolio management, be sure to share this information with your project managers. Sometimes it only takes one breakthrough idea to make the difference between a project that is delivered on-time and on-budget and one that fails to meet its goals.
Follow-up: Two of the researchers who wrote this brainstorming article were interviewed to discuss their work in developing systems to help teams find great ideas.
Read more about it here.
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Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 12:54 PM
The Gantt chart was introduced to the world by Henry Laurence Gantt between 1910 and 1915. He described his invention quite simply in his book Organizing for Work published in 1919:
"…the following principles upon which this chart system is founded are easily comprehended:
First: The fact that all activities can be measured by the amount of time needed to perform them.
Second: The space representing the time unit on the chart can be made to represent the amount of activity which should have taken place in that time."
In addition to inventing this staple of project management, Organizing for Work shows that Gantt was a strong proponent of social responsibility for engineers and industry and the idea of an honest and democratic workplace:
"Industrial control is too often based on favoritism or privilege, rather than on ability. This hampers the healthy, normal development of industrialism, which can reach its highest development only when equal opportunity is secured to all, and when all reward is equitably proportioned to service rendered. In other words, when industry becomes democratic." (Organizing for Work, 1919)
"The business system must accept its social responsibility and devote itself primarily to service, or the community will ultimately make the attempt to take it over in order to operate it in its own interest. (Organizing for Work, 1919)
Doesn't that last quote sound a little bit like it came from the current healthcare reform debate?
I also thought that it would be great if these words from Gantt were hung in a prominent place in every project and project portfolio management office:
"First: We have no right morally to decide as a matter of opinion that which can be determined as a matter of fact.
Second: If we allow ourselves to be governed by opinion where it is possible to obtain facts, we shall lose in our competition with those who base their actions on facts.
The substitution of fact for opinion is the basis of modern industrial progress, and the rate of this progress is controlled by the extent to which the methods of scientific investigation supplant the debating society methods in determining a basis for action." (Organizing for Work, 1919)
The Henry Laurence Gantt Medal was established in 1929 by the American Society Of Mechanical Engineers is given for "distinguished achievement in management and for service to the community."
Mr. Gantt is one of those people that I like to imagine what more he might have done had computers been around when he was!
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Posted by George Huhn on Thu, Dec 17, 2009 @ 05:43 PM
Sunk costs are the costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. We aren't supposed to consider sunk costs when making rational investment decisions, only the future costs.
But people do anyway.
How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, since we've already spent this much on it, we might as well finish it." They're making their decision based on sunk costs.
Ideas have sunk costs, too, only they're different from economic costs. When we spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a new idea, it is hard to let go of it in our minds, even when it proves unworkable or unfeasible. So we keep mulling it over and eventually we can become over-invested in it.
And then we can't evaluate the actual outcomes rationally.
Take the current Health Care Reform debate. Some people have so much sunk into the idea that Health Care Reform must be passed that they want to see anything signed, regardless of what is in the final bill. Others have so much sunk into the idea that Health Care Reform can never be good that they don't want to see anything signed, again, regardless of what is in the final bill.
Both of these groups are basing their positions on their sunk investments into their ideas of Health Care Reform, and not necessarily on the future costs and benefits of what is actually currently being discussed.
About 12 years ago I worked on a potential new treatment for AIDS. It was a unique molecule that ultimately failed in clinical trials. Since then it has wandered as a potential treatment from one disease du jour to another and failed each time. Recently, I heard that it had been proposed as H1N1 flu vaccine booster, again, with no plausible scientific rationale.
So now it is just an interesting molecule with no proven clinical application or clear rational for using or trying it as a future treatment for anything else.
It is an idea whose time came and went more than a decade ago, yet the inventors just kept trying. They can't let it go, regardless of the fact that the odds for success are much longer now than they ever were. But the accumulated sunk cost of their initial promising idea keeps driving them to continue investing in it.
"If we only keep trying…"
Sometimes it is useful to deliberately stop and consider if you're continuing to work on an idea because of what you have already mentally and emotionally invested in it or because of its actual future potential.
And sometimes the only way to avoid investing more time in thinking about a once-good idea is to just start working on a new and different one.
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