Who doesn’t? But how?

For over a decade, I have used many management methodologies for business improvement, e.g. Lean, Six Sigma, Enterprise Process Management, Change Management, etc. One of the biggest lessons I learned is that no matter what methodologies we use, ultimately, sustainable improvement is built on one foundation: understand, develop, and enable people.

Anytime when the people component is lacking in a change initiative or operating model, it will inevitably fail.

It is not a new concept, and no one seems to disagree with the premise. Yet few put enough emphasis on people in everyday practice. The people and culture piece often gets the least amount of attention on a Balanced Scorecard — if it is used at all. Businesses need to achieve financial goals, satisfy customers, and improve capabilities. No doubt. Guess who make these happen: it’s their people.

Many organizations start to pay attention to people only after they begin a change initiative or when there is an attrition problem. Even then the task is often delegated to Human Resources or other specialists, and the resources disappear as soon as the initiative officially ends or when the symptom is gone.

But change is constant. The need to develop and enable people never ends, and it is the professional responsibility of the managers.

Nowadays, every organization tries to be agile and embrace change, including digital transformation. But are their people willing, prepared, and ready? The outcome is predictable: those who succeed have nurtured the right culture and people from the start.

People familiar with the Lean concepts know the seven types of waste and the benefits of relentless elimination of such waste. Lean practitioners are trained to see them in everyday activities and act on them. There is the eighth type – unused human potential, which is the biggest but least visible or recognized waste. Reducing or eliminating this type of waste is not the responsibility of a process improvement or HR specialist but management. Unfortunately, many managers (if not the majority of) do not proactively develop and enable their people. They are only trained or expected to handle performance issues when things go wrong.

Not realizing people’s creative and productive potential is a huge missed opportunity for both the organization and employees. But it doesn’t have to be.

I encourage every manager to ask one question:
What have I done today to develop my people or improve the environment to enable them to accomplish more? How about in the last week, in the last month?

I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instruments of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates resources. There is no such thing as a “resource” until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

Typically, OpEx professionals stress how process design, management, and continuous improvement help reduce variation and waste and increase quality and productivity. Scientists often see the drawbacks — processes being rigid, overly prescriptive, and unnecessarily complex, creating bureaucracy and limiting people’s creativity.

Understanding Innovation Work

As W Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” A poorly designed or implemented process certainly can stifle innovation. A better question is “How can we design and implement processes that enable creativity and innovation?” The emphasis here is “enable” not “control.” It is not an easy task, and I have been involved in making a few bad processes in my career.

From my experience, the first step to answering this “how” question is to understand deeply, first-hand, how the creative and innovative work is done. This cannot be accomplished by studying tasks and making flowcharts as we have done in manual work analysis for a century. Creative work does not follow a linear sequence of steps, visible and repeated as in a value stream. There is no value object that we can follow as it is being created. Instead, we have to get to know the people involved and learn how they work, individually and collectively, to generate results. Go Gemba, as we say in Lean. Only then can we start designing processes that enable them to innovate.

A Perspective from Apple

It is instructive to quote a few statements from Tim Cook in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek 16 months after becoming CEO of Apple. When asked about the enormous pressure to continue to create breakthroughs, Cook responded:

“Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those.”

Maybe Apple’s secret of innovation includes its understanding of where processes are needed and where they are not.

The following also resonates strongly with me.

“Creativity is not a process, right? It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. It’s providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows.”

How well do you understand what drives creativity and innovation in your organization?