FROG BLOG

If you haven’t been part of a major failure in your career then you’re not trying hard enough.

As a Scoutmaster I’ve seen adults and children learn faster and more efficiently from their mistakes than from their successes. “Well I won’t do it that way again,” holds a lot more weight than “Aren’t I clever.”

Leading a risky, innovative project automatically ensures that things will go wrong. So the relevant question is how to lead through difficulties to ensure innovation continues.

Whining does not work — “We didn’t have enough resources. It was out of my control….”

Pointing does not work — “The division didn’t step up. The research was wrong….”

Excuses don’t work. If the point of failure comes as a complete surprise to your management then you have already missed a key element of leading a risky project — Managing Expectations.

As chief cheerleader your focus has to be on convincing an organization that the goal is achievable. At the same time you must identify and highlight the areas where organizationally a lot of learning must go on and flag elements that are so critical they could sink the program. This also allows you to break success up into more manageable chunks.

“We learned how to do this.”

“We’ve passed that hurdle”

“We’ve found a solution”

Every success builds momentum to help you get past the next hurdle. A list of meaningful successes creates capital you can tap.

Every innovative project provides learning and output that is useful even if the ultimate goal of the project is not achieved. By identifying those elements you help create a platform for innovation and highlight your value to the organization.

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I’m guilty of preaching the “Don’t fire your innovators who fail” sermon to upper management.
I’ve done it many times.

Sometimes I’ve seen my advice followed, sometimes not.

The idea behind the sermon isn’t wrong. But when I look at the reasons why innovators who fail get pushed aside I find that the reasons lie less with management and more with the innovators themselves.

So assuming a company at least gives lip service to the idea that improvement and innovation is worth the pain of learning through failure, what differentiates the innovator-who-thrives versus the innovator-who-is-sent-packing when things get difficult?

Turns out the push aside vs treat as a learning experience decision depends more on how the innovator communicates and sets expectations than in how the project itself turns out. In a well run organization managers will make their decision based on your perceived future value - not on the cost of your most recent escapade. This allows managers to maintain a significant cost of failure while minimizing its impact on the future of the organization.

Over the next few weeks I’ll look at how Personality, Perseverance and Politicking can determine if you as an innovator will survive the failure (and believe it or not - the success) of your innovative project. Also we’ll look at why it’s useful for managers to maintain that fear of failure while promoting innovation.

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Template thinking leads to under-prioritized laundry lists of to-do’s.

If you’ve been in the business world for more than a few months then you have probably experienced the damage such thinking causes. Lots of work being done, nothing truly important to the organization being accomplished.

Sound familiar? My favorite solution to this problem occurred in a senior management retreat for a major company. The Corporate President asked his team to put together a list of priorities for the coming fiscal year. The list that came back was a staggering 20 points long.

He sent it back. “Shorten it.”

It came back 18 points long. Every point strongly defended.

Bob said, “Fine, we’ll go with this.”

The list was carefully typed up. The first page included our mission and the first three priorities. The second page the other 15 priorities. His team approved the two pages.

Bob then proceeded to forget to copy, distribute or refer to the second page.

Objectives were built off the first page.

Programs were budgeted according to the first page.

People were hired according to the first page.

No organization can have 18 life or death priorities. That’s like being at sea with a compass that stops at North every now and then. Forcing a short list helps everyone fit their personal, team and product concerns within the key priorities of the organization.

What happened to the other 15 priorities? Many of them were accomplished because they were important to a division or a product line. Some of them were key to accomplishing the first three priorities. Some of them disappeared because they sounded more important than they were. They were sorted according to the top three priorities.

To break down template thinking you have to force difficult decisions that prioritize what is truly important for your organization.

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I’m not easily impressed - especially when I feel as if everything is going wrong. But in the end I have to grudgingly tip my hat to ComEd’s Customer Service Group even though I’m sitting here with only half power 6 days after the storm.

Did ComEd’s electronic response system make mistakes? Looks like it.

Did individual ComEd reps make mistakes? Looks like it.

Did the customer (me) make mistakes? Probably.

First, about my problem - Why am I still at half power? Turns out an electrical spike fried my breaker box. Unfortunately, ComEd kept saying the power disruption was their issue until about 5 pm yesterday so I delayed calling an electrician.

I’m writing this from a computer that is running off a series of extension cords strung from from a kitchen outlet that is also running my fridge and stove. I had never heard of half power before, but for us it means that a seemingly random assortment of lights and outlets are working in the house. When we have a power need we re-weave our extension cords to take care of it.

So, I’m a customer who’s problem was not solved or identified until well after it should have been. Why am I not peeved?

Credit goes to well trained and very sympathetic customer service reps that seemed to care no matter how upset I got.

When their electronic response system seemed to reset my request every time I called, the rep was as frustrated as I was. When I was apparently the last house in town that no one had stopped by, I could tell the rep felt my pain. When the notes from the field didn’t explain why I was still sitting in the dark and no excuse seemed reasonable - I could almost hear the conversation between managers that got a truck to my home in 15 minutes. When it turned out to be something in my house the lineman apologized that communication hadn’t been better. Everyone seemed to care and everyone seemed willing to go off script to try and help.

The empathy was what seemed so unusual and disarming. I don’t know if it was from training, from great hiring practices or both. Maybe the situation of having over half a million customers without power just broke down the barriers to create a “We’re all in this together attitude” had something to do with it.

In the end, I was left with the strong impression that they actually cared - admitting their own mistakes and doing what they could to correct them. Now here’s the question that begs to be asked: With all the emphasis on customer service in our economy, why did this feel so unusual that I felt the need to write about it?

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In the name of efficiency we are slowly driving fuzzy time out of our day. Fuzzy time is difficult to value because it is hard to attach creative end-product to such ‘unproductive’ time. As corporate managers have become better at measuring the time it takes to do a job, the more fuzzy time gets diverted to the employee’s supposedly personal time.

So you want to kill creativity? Maximize measured productivity.

How can we protect fuzzy time? How can we make sure it doesn’t get swallowed up by other chores pulling at employees?

Through a combination of rewarding creativity and allowing more individualized control over scheduling you can actually empower an employee to lighten up and think more about what they are doing.

Of course, CFE #6 automatically puts you on the teeter totter with CFE #7, Waisting Time. (Ahh… encouraging creativity. It’s not easy, but at least it’s fun!)

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Similar to CFE #4 in that it pushes decision making responsibility away from an individual and towards a group is the wonderfully inclusionairy Universal Buy-In.

And your manager says, “Go Ye Into The Corporation And Implementeth Thy Idea With The Voluntary Help From All Such Departments That Are Touchethed By Thy Idea Or Hear Of Your Idea Or Simply Who Speaketh Loudly and Catcheth My Ear And Wanteth To Add Imputheth Into Ye Idea That I Liketh So Much.”

If you hold a powerful creative spark this may be all the go ahead you need to drive a great idea through the organization. Most of the time, it is simply a great way to freeze things the way they are.

Driving change with the voluntary help of various support groups means that if any group decides not to participate for any reason your project is dead. Driving change requires enough management support to help individuals get over their minor objections and on with change. Bureaucratic momentum is usually against change and for frozen processes.

Support your firestarters. Allow disagreement and conflict, but push participants to find solutions before attempting to kill the idea - Let them know you want the creative fire to melt through the ice.

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In every organization there is an individual who is supposed to have final say about interesting tidbits like ideas that will determine the future of your company, the universe and everything (My apologies to Mr. Adams.) Often this process is broken in several ways.

• The leader keeps a bucket of sand in his office for emergency head dunking. (Although Ostriches don’t survive this way, it is popular with management.)
• The leader has an idea list that will be gotten to when the day-to-day stuff is running perfectly. (This is a unique way of never saying never while always meaning never.)
• The leader is a group of people who listen to presentations and don’t really say yes or no, stop or go. (Often this is tied to meting out budget dollars in such a way that all comers can keep moving forward ever so slowly until a project derails of it’s own weight.)

The last is my favorite. The group leader can feel good about itself because so many new ideas are percolating and failure can always be attributed to circumstances. The problem here is that great ideas are starved for resources by less great ideas. If nobody prioritizes then the organization can not reach it’s potential.

Building a creative organization and encouraging creative fires does not mean that along the way you don’t put out one or two here, add fuel to one over there and wait and see on some others. In truth the more you encourage creative fires, the more fires you will have to put out. The art is in putting out fires that don’t meet your strategic goals in a way that encourages the fires that do.

In an organization where creative fires are allowed to run amok there is never enough fuel for the truly break out great idea.

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Customers tend to come up with - and understand - incremental improvements. Important, but potentially a trail straight towards a cliff. Radical new concepts tend to fly under the radar, accepted by a few early adopters or as a solution to a niche problem until suddenly it makes sense in a wider context.

So what happens when you let customers control your product development? They get what they want from you until the radical new solution is matured by somebody else. THEN THEY LEAVE, WONDERING WHY YOU WEREN’T MORE INNOVATIVE.

So Creative Fire Extinguisher #3 is expecting your customers to be the visionaries. If you allow innovation to be driven from outside your organization, then at some point you will find your self so far behind the curve that your future is at stake.

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A blast from a fire hose will put out almost any creative fire. In some organizations it becomes second nature, “New Idea! Find The Flaws!”

The water hose is turned on full bore, showering the fire starter with problems and opening up flaws. The fire starter ends up defending their small spark of a fire, rather than gathering fuel and building it.

Give an idea time to gel before pouring water on it.

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Creative fire is a funny thing. It is the natural human condition to look for creative solutions and innovations. However, the natural tendency of existing organizations is to avoid creative fire because it shakes things up, rattles the bones.

So, rather than espouse on all the ways you can encourage fire starting in your organization, I think it will be more useful to discuss all the ways an organization smothers creative fire. Stop throwing water buckets and the natural tendency will be for creativity to flourish.

Creative Fire Extinguisher 1: “Did something like that 12 years ago and it didn’t work.”

I just heard this one a day or two ago. I’m not sure anyone would say this is a good way to kill an idea, and yet, we all do it. We’re creatures of our own history and not repeating mistakes is a crucial element to survival. In the business world this poses a problem. First - 12 years is an eternity. 6 months can be an eternity. Many ideas fail for no reason other than they were ahead of their time. Second - ’something like that’ is a red flag. Maybe the elements that are different were all that kept you from succeeding the last time. Third - ‘it didn’t work’ is not an adequate description of what happened. Did nobody buy it? Did it blow up? Did the VP of sales hate it?
Ideas that come up over and over again often indicate there is a need to be satisfied somewhere. The concept put forward for satisfying that need may be completely wrong, but that does not mean the core opportunity does not exist. Ask yourself, why are we seeing this idea again? What other ways can we satisfy the need? What is the underlying opportunity?

What creative fire extinguishers have you run into?

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