A Lean, Mean, Innovation Machine!

Want to increase innovation? Employee engagement? Lower turnover and create a workforce that is focused on solving problems. In his new book, The Bright Idea Box: A Proven System to Drive Employee Engagement, Jag Randhawa tells us how.

If you only have time to read one book and your business needs a booster shot for innovation and engagement, this is the book you need. 

This photo was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution License and has been taken from Tsahi Levent-Levi’s Flickr photo stream.

It’s a lean book that is easy to read. It has just enough information for anyone to understand why building a bottom-up innovation program is important, how to get buy-in, how to implement the program, and ensure its success! Better yet, it can be done with the smallest of budgets. 

I’ve read many books on innovation and employee engagement, but this is the first one that ties it all together and gives us the plan to make it happen in our businesses. 

This is a “how to” book with just enough theory to launch the innovation program. 

I work for an internet marketing startup, and after reading the first chapter, I was going to use the information in this book to inject innovation into our team’s DNA. I’m going to create innovation training in conjunction with our Bright Idea Box Program, based on this book and my other research, books like: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson, and The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. 

The book is written in 3 parts:

Part One - The Innovation

Part Two - The Program

Part Three - The Engagement

Jag breaks down business innovation into four categories: 

Revenue Generation 

Cost Reduction 

Business Process

Business Model.

“The results of innovation can emerge as a new or improved product, a new management strategy, lowered cost, added convenience for customers, or selling existing products in new ways or to new markets,” says Jag. When my team talks about innovation, it normally pertains to new products, niches, or marketing ideas. We overlook some places that have huge potential, like improving business processes. 

Things like business processes and adding value for customers often get overlooked because they’re not sexy. 

How much better would things work if everyone was thinking about improving the way we work instead of just the people whose job it is? Reframing innovation like this is hugely helpful. 

Taking advantage of research in neuroscience, Jag uses chunking to help us to remember the steps necessary to implement our innovation program using the acronym MASTER:

Mobilize- Get people involved

Amass- Collect Ideas

Support- Assuring commitment

Triage- Screen Ideas

Execute- Implement Ideas

Recognize- Recognize team members  

Jag says, “Innovation = Invention + Execution + Adoption” in other words, ideas without implementations are like seeds that get planted but never watered and tended to. It’s not enough to have good or even great ideas. They have to be captured, evaluated and, if they are worthy, implemented.

The author shows us how to get buy-in from executives, managers, and team members. He suggests we should hire partners, not employees. This is crucial for maximizing team engagement. 

Question: In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig?

Answer: The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed!

One of the best ways to engage team members is to raise their level of commitment. Be the pig! Be committed. When people are empowered and supported to make potentially staggering contributions to the company's success, they are much more likely to be committed.  

The author also gives us a great way to filter out ideas that don’t add value to the business. When an idea is submitted four questions must be answered: 

1. What is the name of the idea:

2. Description:

3. Benefits:

4. Cost-Benefit Rationale:

The first two are no-brainers, the third is necessary, and the last is gold! Requiring your team to answer these questions makes them think their idea through and sends half-baked ideas back for more development. Anyone who participates in the program will learn how to do a cost/benefit analysis. In other words, they will learn to think like business owners!

This is easily the best business book I’ve read in the last year. If your team lacks engagement, like 74% of employees in the United States, and innovation is something they hear mentioned in the news, you might want to give this book a read and put its ideas to good use. 

The Science Behind Scrum

Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross-functional and self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, four weeks or less. By the end of a sprint, the code must be functional, tested, and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. Defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact. 

Instead of planning out your software design months in advance and guessing at what will work, like traditional software development, scrum encourages experimentation via transparency, observation, and adaptation. The saying “fail early and often” comes to mind. With scrum, one is constantly learning and improving skills, efficiency, and quality. Scrum is conducive to creating flow states which leads to mastery. A scrum is a self-organizing team or rather a team without a manager, a team that picks what work it will do and how it will do the work. Whether its creators know it or not, scrum has a lot of self-determination theory.  Scrum is, in many ways, intrinsic motivation in sheep’s clothing.

I am floored that I just figured this out. I had heard of agile development and scrum but I had never read anything about it, nor have I come across it in any of my research. Scrum is rife with positive psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience.

None of this is mentioned in any of the literature I have read, and by this point, I’ve read quite a bit. What is the benefit of using scrums to develop software? Scrum teams develop software up to 15 times faster than traditional project management processes. Holy performance increase, batman! Granted, a minimal number of teams ever get to that level. Gains of 400% are achievable by any team willing to do the work. Not only is the work done quickly, but at the end of a development iteration or sprint, the code developed is ready to ship, and it generally has fewer bugs than traditional methods.

I watched a Google Tech Talk: Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team by one of scrum’s creators: Jeff Sutherland. He talked about how having people co-located creates a social bond. The idea is that if people work closely together, they will care about each other, be a better team, and do better work. This comes out of behavioral economics, which tells us that we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships, and transactional relationships. Social relationships build trust and result in win-win situations. Transactional relationships build rewards and result in win-lose situations.

Agile development teams do 30% of all development. Though my research for this post indicates that only 50% of teams that call themselves agile are fully agile, and only 10% of scrums are scrums. Most teams implement some kind of less successful variant. This kills me! Implementing agile or scrum means that management has to change too much or give up too much power to fully adopt these practices, that or teams are resistant to change. Speed and quality matter, not how compliant you are with a framework.

The sacred protector of the team and scrum theory is the scrum master. Part leader, part servant, his job is to ensure the team is fully enabled to succeed and remove any impediment to their success. She does this by being an expert on the framework, genuinely caring about the team, and focusing on doing whatever it takes to make the team successful and keep them focused. It certainly would not hurt if the scrum master understood SDT, positive psychology, and behavioral economics. Though I think all leaders should.

I’m ecstatic to find evidence-based practices worming their way into the workplace! As a side benefit, it gives me something new to research and writes about. Hug your local agile programmer; they is making the world better.

Do You Have Vendors or Partners?

How do you treat your vendors? Are they partners that are interested and engaged in your success or just a resource you use as needed? Many companies are too focused on having the upper hand and squeezing every last dollar out of vendor relationships. Both customers and vendors are guilty of this. When a relationship is focused on money and status, the rules change. If vendors gave their best price on the first quote and companies didn’t try to squeeze them, they could get money out of the way and focus on results. 

People, as well as companies, have relationships with two general focuses, social and financial. Social relationships display the social rules of the culture they are in. Transactional relationships exhibit a more self-centered, win-or-lose focus. We know from empirical research in Psychology and Behavioral Economics that the further a transactional transaction is from a social one, the more likely social rules will apply. 

Companies and vendors should have social relationships so that both parties are interested in and invested in each other’s success. Many companies don’t trust their vendors and vice versa. Why would anyone do business with a vendor or company they don’t trust? There are situations when a company or vendor is the only game in town, and if that’s the case and they’re not trustworthy, then you can put them in the financial relationship category. Other than that, it doesn’t make sense to do business with people you don’t trust. 

If companies and vendors form social relationships, it’s more likely that both companies will be more successful. Look at Zappos and Semco. They treat their vendors like partners, invite them to company meetings and outings, and are dedicated to mutual success. In times of economic downturn, Semco has helped employees that they needed to lay off to start their own businesses that supply Semco or any other company they want to do business with. Talk about building loyalty!

Engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction are not just good metrics for employees and customers. They are essential in all your company’s relationships. 

It's Just Our Culture

Does your company know why it does what it does? Is there a good reason for all of the policies you follow? In most organizations, the answer to both of these questions is no. Here’s a test. Open your HR manual and look at the section on sick days or paid time off. How many days do you get off for sickness? Can you use that time to care for a family member or a “mental health” day? Do you need a doctor’s approval to return to work?

I’ll bet you can’t figure out the why of your sick time policy and most other policies. Is it based on some scientific or historical data? Does the law mandate it? Or is it just an arbitrary number? A friend who currently works from home most of the time recently went on a job interview. When he asked about working from home, he was told, “we expect you to show up to work every day. It’s just our culture.” This is another way of saying it’s just the way it is, or it’s always been that way.

If every company encouraged its workers to question its policies and reduce or eliminate them whenever possible, we’d all be better off. As adults, we don’t need supervision. Hire good people and get out of the way. The more rules you have, the more they are in the way. It’s about the work, not the hours.