[MUSIC]. Another problem we have in organization is we have these great project managers. And so a good project manager actually will not let a project be canceled because that's what they do, right, it's in their title. I'm a project manager and so if I have a project, it's going to go. Well, sometimes, projects may not be in the best interests of the organization. And at some point we actually have to say it's hard, it's distasteful, it's something we don't want to do. But we may have to intervene and say, nope, sorry, we have to stop that project. And so, I call this Don't Fear the Reaper. There are projects that are at a point that they may actually just have to stop. And it's hard to do, but we actually may have to intervene and stop the project. There's not a very much of a of a appetite for this in many organizations because you have these project managers. You have these people who see themselves as project managers, who have built a career doing project management. And they're very, very good at explaining to you why the projects behind. Why it's actually not working and, and so on. So, we actually need to be able to come in and say, sorry, we need to stop this project and re-, reallocate these resources somewhere else. When you think about it, projects burn precious resources. The most important resource is the people that you have, I think. In most, in most organizations, that's actually the case. they have products with a very small possibility for success, why not reallocate those onto projects that actually have the possibly for success? And where you can actually drive up the possibility of success by putting more people on and getting more people invested in this projects. Also, one thing we might think about is the language that we use inside. And so I've been in a couple of organizations I found that kind of interesting actually, that if something was a project. It was going to get done, no matter what. Where on the other hand, if it's a concept test, then it's something that actually can get stopped. You know, we tried and tested that concept and it didn't work and so let's try a different concept. And even in there was just about the language. They can be exactly the same thing, same number of people, same resource level, same, you know, everything the same. But if you call it a project, somehow it has to get done, where if you call it a concept test it doesn't have to get done. So our language with these early stage things that we're playing with, maybe the language of concept testing, is much better. So maybe we should stop this idea of, of calling everything a project. Because projects are, is kind of a reserved word, makes people want to actually do something very specific, namely get it done. when the case, when in fact it may not be worthy of getting done. That may not be a pro, project or not be in a concept that's going to take us to the place we're trying together, may not solve the problem. Our structure we want to make sure that our structure for innovation makes it easy to see people, to see resource, to see things. I mentioned earlier about how it is we mean to put these things in, and move information around and build our structure away. It may be that we have to change some aspects or innovation structure. And this is a hard thing to do, to say. Hey, we really need to change the structure, we need to get some space for these people, we need to put these people in their own space. We need to give them autonomy, we need to protect them from outside. This may actually have to happen and to the extent that you're going to make an innovative organization. You're going to drive innovation in the organization, you may need this kind of structure. If you have innovation in your title, the idea may be to support your innovators. That your job is not to innovate, to do the thing called innovation, but realy to support the people call innovation. It's not about outsourcing innovation or saying, okay that's not my job that's R&D's job. You know, those people over there, they're the one's who're supposed to innovate. You know, I have no responsibility. But, as a person in an organization who has innovation my title who's trying to build an innovative organization, I need to support the innovators. An maybe it's about finding resources for them. Maybe it's about giving them a process. Maybe it's about serving as a process facilitator. Maybe it's about bringing them new information. But giving them all the things they need, in order to push this thing called innovation along. An to the extent that they develop a process. You're able to help them do that, then youre doing your job which is to get more people to innovate. So that it's not just one person's job and not just R&D's job to this thing called making the world a better place inside the organization. In so far as supporting the innovators, basically as, as I just said, removing constraints, providing motivation, encouragement proving that the organization is actually serious about innovation. And, and pushing it forward in that way. We want to also provide advocates to help people find out where they should pitch their ideas. So if I have a great idea, where do I go in the organization? Maybe the innovation people, the people who are managing innovation function can be the place that is the wave finder. That say okay if you have an idea about this. This is where you should go. If you have an idea about that. That's where you should go. We will help you. We'll run interference for you. We'll help you cause get, get those people to really listen to you. And really understand what your ideas area and the potential value of those ideas for us. Now this other idea I think is really interesting is my, one of my favorite people in the world, Bob Sutton. Robert Sutton said, has this idea that you reward failure and success equally, but what you want to punish is inaction. And that people will make it, they won't see it as their obligation to innovate. And that's because if i innovate and it fails, if i try to innavate and it fails then i get punished. But if I don't do anything, I'm fine, right? And the longer I stay in this organization, the more seniority I get, the more pay I get, I get a cost of living allowance. Why should i go out o the way to risk innovation when in fact I'm going to get punished for it? There's a high likelihood if the things fails I will get punished. So his idea is that if we say people who are not doing anything, they're the ones you need to punish, they're are the ones you need to push forward. If people are making intelligent guesses or if people are doing intelligent learning, even if they don't succeed the way that you want them to, certainly we need this, to reward that. And we need to celebrate that In fact. And so making sure we leave people clear instructions about how it is that they you know, what is a meaningful failure? That's the failure that we learn from, is from an important part of this. But if we can do that then we can actually get people moving forward and take on the obligation of innovating for the organization. One thing, also, is to let creative people do creative work. In many organizations, we ask people to something creative or innovative and then we bombard them with forms in triplicate and that's going over your budget. And why do you have to show up to this meaningless meeting that you show up to every week? And we don't protect people from the rest of the organization. So recall the story of A12 when Locke was building this, this aircraft they had as skunk works. It was this place off by itself and it was really protected from the traditional things of the organization. And so the innovation leader, as a person bringing innovation into the organization, it may be your job, it is your job, to actually buffer the creative people from this. Because creative people you want them to do their creative work. Its not that there's a certain type of creative people but the people that you've asked to do this thing called innovation. They really need to be protected from this the organizational antibodies that I would call it. It's part the organization let's say that send something foreign is going on and come in and try to kill that thing. Your innovation resources, also, you have people and understanding how to divide up the people. We talked about just touched on this briefly in the technological constraints area, talking about sequencing and coordination. But really sort of figuring out how do I divide up projects, how do I take pieces projects apart and have people do meaningful parts, meaningful task. You don't want it so broken up that they pieces that people work on are meaningless. But you do want them sufficiently broken up, that they can actually make progress on em, and come back together, and make progress and go apart. You have resources, the resources are money, time, and people. So be sure to just think about, how can I put these things in relationship to each other. And how can I desegregate the task in a way that allows me to move it forward much more quickly than might otherwise be done? Rather than having all three people sit in a room trying to move something forward. Maybe if I sometimes I can separate them out and actually get to a further place, to, to a better place by having them work independently. Then coming back together, than to just have them sitting in a room alone. And so again this requires where in the process am I. Am I in the divergent stage, a convergent stage? Am I trying to reach commitment? Am I trying to iterate? Am I trying to implement? If I know those things, I can decide how it is i want to best use my innovation resources. We may also have this problem where we have errant groups. This is quickly say that sometimes groups will be going off in the weeds or you'll have a person who's just not making the group work and you may just need to intervene. And it's a hard thing to do, but if the group is going badly, someone has to stop them or else it's just going to be more and more and more waste. And so we have these errant groups, we can intervene. One thing I like to do before groups go errant, before they go off the weeds, is to use this idea of a team contract. The idea of a team contract is, at the beginning of a project, people will sit down and sort of write out. What it is they're going to do, and how it is they're going to do it together. Do we show up on time, how do we do discussions? If we have a disagreement, how was that we going to decide that? Are we going to vote, are we going to reach consensus? And on and on. And then, we're usually have them do it big on one of those big, giant sticky post-its and stick it on the wall and everyone has to come up and sign it. And when I asked my MBA students to do this, you know, the first couple of times, they say, oh my God, this is so infantile. I can't believe you're making us do this, like we're not children, we're adults, and we know how to act like adults, and so let us do this. And what I would find is, when I, the years that I don't make people do the contract, I end up with a big line outside of my office. Oh, Joe won't show up, or Joe won't do his part of the work, and Sue, she's just try and take the project in a different direction. And there's when I do the team contracts, the team is able to resolve that themselves. Because when they're having a meeting and there's some kind of problem inside. They just point back at the team contract, and say hey look, it says right here, we're going to show up on time. And you didn't show up on time, and so either we're going to change the contract. Or we need you to actually to, to read, to continue to do what it is you have agreed to do. And, so this is a way to stop these errant teams from going off in the weeds. That we then have to intervene in later at the cost of you know, energy, and emotion, and credibility and all those things as well. So this is about building innovative organizations and some of the things you can do. And, at the risk of having it sounding a little bit like a laundry list, my idea here was that to say we have been through different kinds of constraints. And so I wanted to put a little bit of pointers to each one and how it is that we might use those things. How it is we might use our new found insights in order to build innovation inside of our organization. So next up, we're going to talk about why its important to know your constraints. Your constraints.
