Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Seeing Things As They Are’ Category

When the work is new, it all comes down to learning.  And with learning it all comes down to three questions:

• What do you want to learn?
• What actions will take to learn what you want to learn?
• How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn?

There are many definitions of learning.  To me, when your beliefs change, that’s learning.  If your hunch moves to a validated idea, that’s learning.  If your understanding of a system moves from “I don’t know” to “I know a little bit.”, that’s learning.  If you believed your customers buy your product for Feature A and now you know they really buy it because of Feature B, that’s learning.

What do you want to learn? The best place to start is to clearly define what you want to learn.  Sounds easy, but it’s not. Some of the leading thinking recommends you define a formal hypothesis.  I don’t like that word.  It’s scary, intimidating and distracting.  It’s just not helpful.  Instead, I suggest you define a Learning Objective.  To do that, complete this sentence:

I want to learn if the customer ____________________.

It may take several iterations/meetings to agree on a Learning Objective, but that’s time well spent.  It’s faster to take the time to define what you want to learn than to quickly learn something that doesn’t matter.  And define the Learning Objective as narrowly as possible.  The tighter the Learning Objective, the faster you can learn it.

What actions will you take to learn what you want to learn? In other words, for every Learning Objective create a Learning Plan.  Use the Who, What, When format.  Define Who will do What and When they’ll be done.  To increase the learning rate, define the minimum work to fulfill the narrowly-defined Learning Objective.  Just as you defined the Learning Objective narrowly, define the Learning Plan narrowly.  And to further speed the learning, set constraints like – no one can travel to see customers; no more than five customers can be contacted; and the Learning Plan must be completed in two days.  You’re not looking for large sample sizes and statistical significance; you’re looking to use your best judgement supported by the minimum learning to create reasonable certainty.

How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn? Learning requires decisions, decisions require judgement and judgement requires supporting information.  As part of the Learning Plan, define the Learning Information you’ll collect/capture/record to support your decisions.  Audio recordings are good and video is better.  For fast learning, you can record a phone call with a customer or ask them to share their webcam (and record the feed) as you talk with them.  Or you can ask them to shoot some video with their smart phone to provide the information needed to achieve you Learning Objective.

To analyze the data, it’s best to review the audio/video as a group and talk about what you see.  You should watch for body language as well as listen to the words.  Don’t expect complete agreement among your team and expect to create follow-on Learning Objectives and Learning Plans to answer the open questions.  Repeat the process until there’s enough agreement to move forward, but don’t wait for 100% consensus.

When you present your learning to company leadership, show the raw video data that supports your learning.  Practically, you’ll connect company leaders to customers and let the customers dispel long-held biases and challenge old thinking.

There’s nothing more powerful than a customer telling your company leaders how things really are.

Image credit – Thomas Hawk

With creativity, the leading thinking says the most important thing is to create many of ideas.  When asked to generate many of ideas, the thinking goes, the team lets go of their inhibitions and good ideas slip through their mental filters.  I’ve found that thinking misleading.  I’ve found that creating many ideas results in many ideas, but that’s it. Before the session to create new ideas, you already had a pile of ideas you weren’t working on, and after the session is bigger, but not better.

What’s needed is several outlandish ideas that make your hair stand on end. The ideas should be so different that they cause you to chuckle to mask your discomfort.  These ideas should be borderline unbelievable and just south of impossible. The ideas should have the possibility to change the game and tip your industry on its head.

The “many ideas” thinking has the right intent – to loosen the team’s thinking so they generate good ideas, but the approach is insufficient.   To force the team to generated outlandish ideas they must be turned inside-out and put on the rack.  Heretical ideas don’t come easily and drastic measures are needed.  The team must be systematically stripped of the emotional constraints of their success using the Innovation Burst Event (IBE) method.

To prepare for the IBE, a reward-looking analysis is done to identify traditional lines of customer goodness (for example, miles per gallon for automobiles) and define how that goodness has changed over time (position it on the S-curve.)  If the improvement has been flat, it’s time for a new line of customer goodness, and if the goodness is still steadily increasing, it’s time to create a new technology that will provide the next level of improvement.  With this analysis the disposition of the system is defined and potentially fertile design space is identified.  And within this design space, design challenges are created that force the team to exercise the highly fertile design space during the IBE.

Everything about the IBE is designed to strip the team of its old thinking.  The IBE is held at an offsite location to change the scenery and eliminate reminders of traditional thinking and good food is served to help the team feel the day is special.  But the big medicine is the design challenges.  They are crafted to outlaw traditional thinking and push the team toward new thinking.  The context is personal (not corporate) and the scale of the challenge is purposefully small to help the team let go of adjacent concerns.  And, lastly, the team is given an unreasonably short time (five to ten minutes) to solve the problem and build a thinking prototype (a prototype that stands for an idea, not at functional prototype.)

Everything about the IBE helps the team let go of their emotional constraints and emit eye-watering solutions.  The design challenges force them to solve problems in a new design space in a way and does not give them a chance to limit their thinking in any way.  The unrealistic time limit is all-powerful.

Four design challenges is about all team can handle in the one-day IBE.  With the IBE they come up with magical ideas clustered around four new areas, new areas that have the potential to flip your industry on its head.  In one day, a team can define market-changing ideas that obsolete your best products and even your business model.  Not bad for one day.

It may be popular wisdom that it’s best to create many new ideas, but it’s not the best way.  And it contradicts popular belief that a team can create three or four game-changing ideas in a single day.  But the IBEs work as advertised.

Don’t waste time creating a pile of ideas.  Spend the time to identify fertile design space and hold a one-day IBE to come up with ideas that will create your future.

Image credit – moonjazz

Today’s work is complicated with electronic and mechanical subsystems wrapped in cocoons of software; coordination of matrixed teams; shared resources serving multiple projects; providing world class services in seventeen languages on four continents. And the complexity isn’t limited to high level elements.  There is a living layer of complexity growing on all branches of the organization right down to the leaf level.

Complexity is real, and it complicates things.  To run projects and survive in the jungle of complexity it’s important to know how to put the right pieces together and provide the right answers.  But as a leader it’s more important to slash through the complexity and see things as they are.  And for that, it’s more important to know how ask diabolically simple questions (DSQ).

Project timelines are tight and project teams like to start as soon as they can.  Too often teams start without clarity on what they’re trying to achieve.  At these early stages the teams make record progress in the wrong direction.  The leader’s job is to point them in the right direction, and here’s the DSQ to set them on their way: What are you trying to achieve?

There will likely be some consternation, arm waiving and hand wringing.  After the dust settles, help the team further tighten down the project with this follow-on DSQ:  How will you know you achieved it?

For previous two questions there are variants that works equally well for work that closer to the fuzzy front end: What are you trying to learn? and How will you know you learned it?

There is no such thing as a clean-sheet project and even the most revolutionary work builds on the existing system.  Though the existing business model, service or product has been around for a long time, the project team doesn’t really know how it works.  They know they should know but they’re afraid to admit it. Let them off the hook with this beauty: How does it work today?

After the existing system is defined with a simple block diagram (which could take a couple weeks) it’s time to help the project team focus their work.  The best DSQ for the job: How is it different from the existing system?  If the list is too long there’s too much newness and if it’s too short there’s not enough novelty.  If they don’t know what’s different, ask them to come back when they know.

After the “what’s different” line of questioning, the team must be able to dive deeper.  For that it’s time one of the most powerful DSQs in the known universe: What problem are you trying to solve? Expect frustration and complicated answers.  Ask them to take some time and for each problem describe it on a single page using less than ten words.  Suggest a block diagram format and ask them to define where and when the problem occurs.  (Hint: a problem is always between two components/elements of the system.)  And the tricky follow-on DSQ: How will you know you solved it? No need to describe the reaction to that one.

Though not an exhaustive list, here are some of my other favorite DSQs:

Who will buy it, how much will they pay, and how do you know?

Have we done this before?

Have you shown it to a real customer?

How much will it cost and how do you know?

Whose help do we need?

If the prototype works, will we actually do anything with it?

Diabolically simple questions have the power to heal the project teams and get them back on track.  And over time, DSQs help the project teams adopt a healthy lifestyle.  In that way, DSQs are like medicine – they taste bad but soon enough you feel better.

Image credit – Daniela Hartmann

How a company allocates its resources defines its strategy.  But it’s tricky business to allocate resources in a way that makes the most of the existing products, services and business models yet accomplishes what’s needed to create the future.

To strike the right balance, and before any decisions on specific projects, allocate the desired spending into three buckets – short, medium and long.  Or, if you prefer, Horizon 1, 2 and 3.  Use the business objectives to set the weighting. Then, sit next to the CFO for a couple days and allocate last year’s actual spending to the three buckets and compare the actuals with how resources will be allocated going forward.  Define the number of people who will work on short, medium and long and how many will move from one bucket to another.

To get the balance right, short term projects are judged relative to short term projects, medium term projects are judged relative to medium term projects and the long term ones are judged against their long term peers.  Long term projects cannot be staffed at the expense of short term projects and medium term projects cannot take resources from long term projects.  To get the balance right, those are the rules.

To choose the best projects within each bucket, clarity and constraints are more important than ROI.   Here are some questions to improve clarity and define the constraints.

How will the customer benefit? It’s best to show the customer using the product or service or experiencing the new business model.  Use a hand sketch and few, if any, words.  Use one page.

How is it different?  In the hand sketch above, draw the novel (different) elements in red.

Who is the new customer? Define where they live, the language they speak and how they get the job done today.

Are there regional constraints?  Infrastructure gaps, such as electricity, water, transportation are deal breakers.  Language gaps can be big problems, so can regulatory, legal and cultural constraints. If a regional constraint cannot be overcome, do something else.

How will your company make money?  Use this formula: (price – cost) x volume.  But, be clear about the size of the market today and the size it could be in five years.

How will you make, sell and service it?  Include in the cost of the project the cost to overcome organizational capacity/capability constraints.  If cost (or time) to close the gaps is prohibitive, do something else.

How will the business model change?  If it won’t, strongly consider a different project.

If the investigations show the project is worthwhile, how would you staff the project and when?  This is an important one.  If the project would be a winner, but there is no one to work on it, do something else.  Or, consider stopping a bad project to start the good one.

There’s usually a general tendency to move medium term resources to short term projects and skimp on long term projects.  Be respectful of the newly-minted resource balance defined at the start and don’t choose a project from one bucket over a project from another.  And don’t get carried away with ROI measured to three significant figures, rather, hold onto the fact that an insurmountable constraint reduces ROI to zero.

And staff projects fully.  Partially-staffed projects set expectations that good things are happening, but they never come to be.

Image credit – john curley

When it’s time for new work, the best and smartest get in a small room to figure out what to do.  The process is pretty simple: define a new destination, and, to know when they journey is over, define what it looks like to live there.  Define the idealized future state and define the work to get there.  Turn on the GPS, enter the destination and follow the instructions of the computerized voice.

But with new work, the GPS analogy is less than helpful.  Because the work is new, there’s no telling exactly where the destination is, or whether it exists at all.  No one has sold a product like the one described in the idealized future state.  At this stage, the product definition is wrong.  So, set your course heading for South America though the destination may turn out to be Europe.  No matter, it’s time to make progress, so get in the car and stomp the accelerator.

But with new work there is no map.  It’s never been done before.  Though unskillful, the first approach is to use the old map for the new territory.  That’s like using map data from 1928 in your GPS.  The computer voice will tell you to take a right, but that cart path no longer exists.  The GPS calls out instructions that don’t match the street signs and highway numbers you see through the windshield.  When the GPS disagrees with what you see with your eyeballs, the map is wrong.  It’s time to toss the GPS and believe the territory.

With new work, it’s not the destination that’s important, the current location is most important.  The old sea captains knew this.  Site the stars, mark the time, and set a course heading.  Sail for all your worth until the starts return and as soon as possible re-locate the ship, set a new heading and repeat.  The course heading depends more on location than destination.  If the ship is east of the West Indies, it’s best to sail west, and if the ship is to the north, it’s best to sail south.  Same destination, different course heading.

When the work is new, through away the old maps and the GPS and channel your inner sea caption. Position yourself with the stars, site the landmarks with your telescope, feel the wind in your face and use your best judgement to set the course heading.  And as soon as you can, repeat.

Image credit – Timo Gufler.

I don’t believe the role of Chief Innovation Officer has a place in today’s organizations.  Today, it should be about doing the right new work to create value.  That work, I believe, should be done within the organization as a whole or within dedicated teams within the organization. That work, I believe, cannot be done by the Chief Innovation Officer because the organizational capability and capacity under their direct control is hollow.

Chief Innovation Officers don’t have the resources under their control to do innovation work.  That’s the fundamental problem.  Without the resources to invent, validate and commercialize, the Chief Innovation Officer is really the Chief Innovation Mascot- an advocate for the cause who wears the costume but doesn’t have direct control over the work.

Companies need to stop talking about innovation as a word and start doing the work that creates new products and services for new customers in markets.  It all starts with the company’s business objectives (profitability goals) and an evaluation of existing projects to see if they’ll meet those objectives.  If they will, then it’s about executing those projects. (The Chief Innovation Officer can’t help here because that requires operational resources.)  If they won’t, it’s about defining and executing new projects that deliver new value to new customers. (Again, this is work for deep subject matter experts across multiple organizations, none of which work for the Chief Innovation Officer.)

To create a non-biased view of the projects,  identify lines of customer goodness, measure the rate of change of that goodness, assess the underpinning technologies (momentum, trajectory, maturity and completeness) and define the trajectory of the commercial space. This requires significant resource commitments from marketing, engineering and sales, resource commitments The Chief Innovation Officer can’t commit.  Cajole and prod for resources, yes.  Allocate them, no.

With a clear-eyed view of their projects and the new-found realization that their projects won’t cut it, companies can strengthen their resolve to do new work in new ways.  The realization of an immanent shortfall in profits is the only think powerful enough to cause the company to change course.  The company then spends the time to create new projects and (here’s the kicker) moves resources to the new projects.  The most articulate and persuasive Chief Innovation Officer can’t change an organization’s direction like that, nor can they move the resources.

To me it’s not about the Chief Innovation Officer.  To me it’s about creating the causes and conditions for novel work; creating organizational capability and capacity to do the novel work; and applying resources to the novel work so it’s done effectively.  And, yes, there are tools and methods to do that work well, but all that is secondary to allocating organizational capacity to do new work in new ways.

When Chief Innovation Officer are held accountable for “innovation objectives,” they fail because they’re beholden to the leaders who control the resources. (That’s why their tenures are short.)  And even if they did meet the innovation objectives, the company would not increase it’s profits because innovation objectives don’t pay the bills.    The leaders that control the resources must be held accountable for profitability objectives and they must be supported along the way by people that know how to do new work in new ways.

Let’s stop talking about innovation and the officers that are supposed to do it, and let’s start talking about new products and new services that deliver new value to new customers in new markets.

Image credit – Neon Tommy

In strategic planning there’s a strong forcing function that causes the organization to converge on a singular, company-wide approach.  While this convergence can be helpful, when it’s force is absolute it stifles new ideas.  The result is an operating plan that incrementally improves on last year’s work at the expense of work that creates new businesses, sells to new customers and guards against the dark forces of disruptive competition.  In times of change convergence must be tempered to yield a bit of diversity in the approach.  But for diversity to make it into the strategic plan, dissent must be an integral (and accepted) part of the planning process.  And to inject meaningful diversity the dissenting voice must be as load as the voice of convergence.

It’s relatively easy for an organization to come to consensus on an idea that has little uncertainty and marginal upside.  But there can be no consensus, but on an idea with a high degree of uncertainty even if the upside is monumental.  If there’s a choice between minimizing uncertainty and creating something altogether new, the strategic process is fundamentally flawed because the planning group will always minimize uncertainty.  Organizationally we are set up to deliver certainty, to make our metrics and meet our timelines.  We have an organizational aversion to uncertainty, and, therefore, our organizational genetics demand we say no to ideas that create new business models, new markets and new customers.  What’s missing is the organizational forcing function to counterbalance our aversion to uncertainty with a healthy grasping of it.  If the company is to survive over the next 20 years, uncertainty must be injected into our organizational DNA. Organizationally, companies must be restructured to eliminate the choice between work that improves existing products/services and work that creates altogether new markets, customers, products and services.

When Congress or the President wants to push their agenda in a way that is not in the best long term interest of the country, no one within the party wants to be the dissenting voice. Even if the dissenting voice is right and Congress and the President are wrong, the political (career) implications of dissent within the party are too severe.  And, organizationally, that’s why there’s a third branch of government that’s separate from the other two.  More specifically, that’s why Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life.  With lifetime appointments their dissenting voice can stand toe-to-toe with the voice of presidential and congressional convergence.  Somehow, for long-term survival, companies must find a way to emulate that separation of power and protect the work with high uncertainty just as the Justices protect the law.

The best way I know to protect work with high uncertainty is to create separate organizations with separate strategic plans, operating plans and budgets.  In that way, it’s never a decision between incremental improvement and discontinuous improvement.  The decision becomes two separate decisions for two separate teams: Of the candidate projects for incremental improvement, which will be part of team A’s plan? And, of the candidate projects for discontinuous improvement, which will become part of team B’s plan?

But this doesn’t solve the whole challenge because at the highest organizational level, the level that sits above Team A and B, the organizational mechanism for dissent is missing. At this highest level there must be healthy dissent by the board of directors.  Meaningful dissent requires deep understanding of the company’s market position, competitive landscape, organizational capability and capacity, the leading technology within the industry (the level, completeness and maturity), the leading technologies in adjacent industries and technologies that transcend industries (i.e., digital).  But the trouble is board members cannot spend the time needed to create deep understanding required to formulate meaningful dissent.  Yes, organizationally the board of directors can dissent without reprisal, but they don’t know the business well enough to dissent in the most meaningful way.

In medieval times the jester was an important player in the organization.  He entertained the court but he also played the role of the dissenter.  Organizationally, because the king and queen expected the jester to demonstrate his sharp wit, he could poke fun at them when their ideas didn’t hang together.  He could facilitate dissent with a humorous play on a deadly serious topic.  It was delicate work, as one step too far and the jester was no more.  To strike the right balance the jester developed deep knowledge of the king, queen and major players in the court.  And he had to know how to recognize when it was time to dissent and when it was time to keep his mouth shut.  The jester had the confidence of the court, knew the history and could see invisible political forces at play.  The jester had the organizational responsibility to dissent and the deep knowledge to do it in a meaningful way.

Companies don’t need a jester, but they do need a T-shaped person with broad experience, deep knowledge and the organizational status to dissent without reprisal.  Maybe this is a full time board member or a hired gun that works for the board (or CEO?), but either way they are incentivized to dissent in a meaningful way.

I don’t know what to call this new role, but I do know it’s an important one.

Image credit – Will Montague

Successful commercialization of products and services is fueled by one fundamental – making the new one better than the old one.  If the new one is better the customer experience is better, the marketing is better, the sales are better and the profits are better.

It’s not enough to know in your heart that the new one is better, there’s got to be objective evidence that demonstrates the improvement.  The only way to do that is with testing.  There are a number of types testing mechanisms, but whether it’s surveys, interviews or in-the-lab experiments, test results must be quantifiable and repeatable.

The best way I know to determine if the new one is better than the old one is to test both populations with the same test protocol done on the same test setup and measure the results (in a quantified way) using the same measurement system.  Sounds easy, but it’s not.  The biggest mistake is the confusion between the “same” test conditions and “almost the same” test conditions.  If the test protocol is slightly different there’s no way to tell if the difference between new and old is due to goodness of the new design or the badness of the test setup.  This type of uncertainty won’t cut it.

You can never be 100% sure that new one is better than the old one, but that’s were statistics come in handy.  Without getting deep into the statistics, here’s how it goes.  For both population’s test results the mean and standard deviation (spread) are calculated, and taking into consideration the sample size of the test results, the statistical test will tell you if they’re different and confidence of it’s discernment.

The statistical calculations (Student’s t-test) aren’t all that important, what’s important is to understand the implications of the calculations.  When there’s a small difference between new and old, the sample size must be large for the statistics to recognize a difference.  When the difference between populations is huge, a sample size of one will do nicely.  When the spread of the data within a population is large, the statistics need a large sample size or it can’t tell new from old. But when the data is tight, they can see more clearly and need fewer samples to see a difference.

If marketing claims are based on large sample sizes, the difference between new and old is small.  (No one uses large sample sizes unless they have to because they’re expensive.) But if in a design review for the new product the sample size is three and the statistical confidence is 95%, new is far better than old.  If the average of new is much larger than the average of old and the sample size is large yet the confidence is low, the statistics know the there’s a lot of variability within the populations. (A visual check should show the distributions to more wide than tall.)

The measurement systems used in the experiments can give a good indication of the difference between new and old.  If the measurement system is expensive and complicated, likely the difference between new and old is small.  Like with large sample sizes, the only time to use an expensive measurement system is when it is needed.  And when the difference between new and old is small, the expensive measurement system’s ability accurately and repeatably measure small differences (micrometers vs. meters).

If you need large sample sizes, expensive measurement systems and complicated statistical analyses, the new one isn’t all that different from the old one.  And when that’s the case, your new profits will be much like your old ones.  But if your naked eye can see the difference with a back-to-back comparison using a sample size of one, you’re on to something.

Image credit – amanda tipton

There are countless books and articles on innovation.  You can read how others have done it, what worked and what didn’t, how best to organize the company and how to define it.  But I have not read much about how it feels to do innovation.

Before anything meaningful can happen, there must be discontent or anger.  And for that there needs to be a realization that doing things like last time is a bad idea.   This realization is the natural outcome of looking deeply at how things really are and testing the assumptions of the status quo.  And the best way to set all this in motion is to do things that generate immense boredom.

Boredom can be created in two ways.  1. Doing the same boring work in the same boring way.  2. Stopping all activity for 30 minutes a day and swimming in the sea of your boring thoughts.  Both work well, but the second one works faster.

Next, with your discontent in hand, it’s time birth the right question.  Some think this the time for answers, but with innovation the real work is to figure out the question.  The discomfort of trying to discover the right question is seven times more uncomfortable the discomfort of figuring out the right answer.  And once you have the right question, the organization rejects you as a heretic. If the organization doesn’t dismiss you in a visceral way, you know you don’t have the right question.  You will feel afraid, but repeat the cycle until your question threatens the very thing that has made the company successful.   When people treat you like you threaten them, you know you’re on to something.

To answer your question, you need help from the organization, but the organization withholds them from you.  If you are ignored, blocked or discredited, you’re on the right path.  Break the rules, disregard best practices, and partner with an old friend who trusts you.  Together, rally against the organization and do the work to answer your question.  If you feel isolated, keep going.  You will feel afraid and you will second guess yourself.  Proceed to the next step.

Make a prototype that shows the organization that your question has an answer.  Don’t ask, just build.  Show the prototype to three people and prepare for rejection.  You and your prototype will be misunderstood and devalued.  Not to worry, as this is a good sign.  Revise the prototype and repeat.

Do anything you can to show the prototype to a customer.  Video the customer as they interact with the prototype.  You will feel afraid because you are breaking the rules.  This is how you should feel.  Keep going.

Set up a meeting with a leader who can allocate resources.  If you have to, set up the meeting under false pretenses (the organization is still in rejection mode) and show the video.  Because of the uncertainty of their response, you will feel afraid.  Show the video anyway.

The organization is comfortable working in the domains of certainty and control, but innovation is done in the domain of uncertainty.  By definition, the organization will reject your novel work.  If you are rejected, keep going.  Revise your heretical question, build a prototype to answer it, show a customer, show someone who can allocate resources, and be afraid all along the way.  And repeat, as needed.

With innovation, mostly you feel afraid.

Image credit – Tybo

Do good work and people will notice.  Do work to get noticed and people will notice that too.

Try to do good work and you’ll get ahead. Try to get ahead and you won’t.

If the work feels good while you’re doing it, it’s good work.  If it doesn’t, it’s not.

If you watch the clock while you work, that says nothing about the clock.

When you surf the web at work, you’re not working.  When you learn from blog posts, podcasts and TED talks, you are.

Using social media at work is good for business, except when it isn’t.

When you feel you don’t have the authority, you don’t.  If you think you need authority, you shouldn’t.

When people seek your guidance you have something far more powerful than authority, you have trust.

Don’t pine for authority, earn the right to influence.

Influence is to authority as trust is to control.

Personal relationships are more powerful than org charts.  Work the relationships, not the org chart.

There’s no reason to change right up until there’s a good reason.  It may be too late, but at least you’ll have a reason.

Holding on to what you have comes at the expense of creating the future.

As a leader don’t take credit, take responsibility.

And when in doubt, try something.

Image credit — Peter Clark

The organizational capability of a company defines its ability to get things done.  If you can’t pull it off, you have an organizational capability problem, or so the traditional thinking goes.

If you don’t have enough people to do the work, and the work is not new, that’s not a capability gap, that’s an organizational capacity gap. Capacity gaps are filled in straightforward ways. 1.) You can hire more people like the ones who do the work today and train them with the people you already have. Or for machines – buy more of the old machines you know and love.  2.) Map the work processes and design out the waste.  Find the piles of paper or long queues and the bottleneck will be right in front.  Figure out how to get more work through bottleneck.  Professional tip – ignore everything but the bottleneck because fixing a non-bottleneck will only make you tired and sweaty and won’t increase throughput.  3.) Move people and machines from the work to create a larger shortfall.  If no one complains, it wasn’t a problem and don’t fix it.  If the complaints skyrocket, use the noise to justify the first or second option.  And don’t let your ego get in the way – bigger teams aren’t better, they’re just bigger.

If your company systematically piles too work on everyone’s plate, you don’t have an organizational capability problem, you have a leadership problem.

If you’re asked to put together a future state organization and define its new capabilities, you don’t have an organizational capability gap.  A capability gap exists only when there’s a business objective that must be satisfied, and a paper exercise to create a future state organization is not a business objective.  Before starting the work, ask for the company’s growth objectives and an explanation of the new work your team will have to do to achieve those objectives.  And ask how much money has been budgeted (and approved) for the future state organization and when you can make the first hire.  This will reduce the urgency of the exercise, and may stop it altogether. And everyone will know there’s no  “organizational capability gap.”

If you’re asked to put together a project plan (with timeline and budget) to create a new technology and present the plan to the CEO next week, you have an organizational capability gap.  If there’s a shortfall in the company’s growth numbers and the VP of business development calls you at home and tells you to put together a plan to create a new market in a new country and present it to her tomorrow, you have an organizational capability gap.  If the VP of sales takes you to a fancy restaurant and asks you to make a napkin sketch of your plan to sell the new product through a new channel, you have an organizational capability gap.

Real organizational capability gaps are rare.  Unless there’s a change, there can be no organizational capability gap.  There can be no gap without a new business deliverable, new technology, new partnership, new product, new market, or new channel.  And without a timeline and an approved budget, I don’t know what you have, but you don’t have organizational capability gap.

Image credit – Jehane