Error recovery not failure avoidance (the core skill of innovators)
I saw the following speech by Pixar’s Randy Nelson on the qualities they look for in people they hire. Many of the areas he covers not only apply to his industry, but as he points out we can all apply them no matter what we do. One example Randy uses is how NASA selected austronauts for the mission to the moon. He said they looked for people who were good at error recovery not failure avoidance. I guess he would agree with this post. Enjoy.
Take away:
- Collaboration, accept every offer and make your partner look good by amplifying
- Depth, resilience and adaptability to master some area
- Breadth of experiences and interest in things
- Communication, translation for the listener
Rank Projects, don't try to do it all
Today I read a blog post on CrunchGear about how Apple’s success is at least partly due to their streamlined product line. On a post at MacRumors, they discussed Tim Cook’s view of the Apple Philosophy. This quote stood out to me:
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.
For years I have been touting this is an Apple strength, but this philosophy does not just have to apply to product development. It can be engrained into an organization in other ways.
I have seen organization try to tackle many initiatives simultaneously and they have either failed at most of them or they have done a poor job during implementation.
No matter what an organization is trying to do, it has to realize that resources are finite and that most people will not be able to adequately address multiple initiatives simultaneously.
Given those constraints, what can be done? Well, borrowing from Agile development and the Toyota Production System, the organization should list all the projects it wants to undertake and develop a set of objective criteria to rank these projects (Time / Resources Needed, Ease of Implementation, Cost, etc.). Once the projects are ranked, the top projects are selected,”pulled,” and the lower ranked projects are put on the back burner.
Not only does ranking help identify the truly important projects, but it helps people stay focused. Another advantage is that no one works on projects which are low priority and may get displaced by a hot new initiative. By continuously reviewing, adding, and modifying your project backlog, your organization will do a better job at implementation and the benefits will be realized sooner.
Bottom up solutions miss the mark
If you were trying to get to the Statue of Liberty and didn’t know where it was located, would you just head out and hope you would find it? If you don’t know where you are and where you need to go, will you ever get there?
Although many people can agree that in order to solve a problem well, one must take a top down approach to problem solving, it is my experience that people take the path of least resistance and solve problems bottom up. For some reason most of the time I come across people who want to just dive in and “solve a problem.” Some of these people see the situations in front of them as black and white.
Like many in the business world, I too just want to get down and dirty. I want to implement solutions and move on to the next challenge. The problem with this approach is that unless you step back and take a birds eye view of the situation prior to getting down in the weeds, not only will you manage to create a locally optimized solution, but you will likely find it more difficult to achieve your goals.
Most people can step back and get a broader view, but they rarely go beyond the areas outside their immediate control. Whereas the people who jump into a solution know the situation as the black and white squares above, the ones who take a broader view know there is more to the problem.
These people realize they are in a maze, but their Achilles heel is that they stop widening their view here because they see multiple paths to take. Any one path may be the optimal path and so they do some analysis around the 3 possible solutions. They show their analysis to management, select the path, and go on to implement the solution.
In rare situations, you will have management who will help you see the entire maze. These are the great managers who realize that locally optimizing a system may adversely affect someone else. These managers realize that for the company to succeed, it need solutions that go beyond their immediate area of responsibility and which are aligned with the corporate goals.
If you don’t know where to start or what your goal is, any path will do. So start at the top, understand where you’ve been and where you want to go, then find the solution to today’s challenge which will optimize the entire system.
Is whining sabotaging your progress?
My first job out of college as a newly minted Industrial Engineer led me to a company with lots of “opportunities.” On an almost daily basis I recognized processes that didn’t work well and things that could be improved. I made it a habit of pointing these out. Since these areas were outside my immediate area of responsibility, I felt that pointing these out was as far as I needed to go.
One day my manager gave me some advice that I have lived by ever since; ”instead of whining, suggest solutions.” He made me realize that as a small company with limited resources and a staff which could not see past the processes they had lived with for years, ideas and execution were what was going to move the organization forward.
The other day I read an article in the New York Times, Some Protect the Ego by Working on Their Excuses Early, and it reminded me of this story. Not because I was trying to protect my ego, but because whining and making excuses will not help your organization move forward.
It is easy to fall into the trap of finding faults with the things around you, but the next sentence after, “Filling out this form serves no purpose.” should be “I will take ownership and find out why the form was implemented and I will see if there is a way to get rid of it”
Too many times a culture of complaining will develop within an organization and all progress will come to a halt. Production will blame Planning, Planning will blame Purchasing, Purchasing will blame Suppliers, and so it goes. The sooner you realize that these are just excuses and that the whining always comes from the same direction, the sooner you can be empowered to make the necessary changes to move forward.
Change can be a long hard road when everyone is committed to it, but if you are having to deal with whining in the face of change, change will be nearly impossible.
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