As industry leaders, we need to incorporate more improvisation into our daily business.
Over the years I have noticed a tendency for companies to become too mechanical in our execution. Ironically, we need to make more FORMAL time for INFORMAL collaboration and creativity --- and problem-solving improvisation. Allow me to explain…
Now, more than ever, it’s important to operate all aspects of our business creatively. In the past, production issues may have been solved by throwing money at them with new machines or consultative new processes. In your supply chain, conflicts were often resolved by advancing orders, re-routing, and LTL shipments. Pretty expensive solutions, eh? And in the sales and marketing channel, how often have you “solved” a short-term volume issue by throwing money at it in the form of a deep promotion? Too often, I suspect.
With tight budgets and ever-increasing pressure to run our departments more productively, what are the catalysts for new ideas and creative solutions? How can you incubate new approaches? Are your teams getting together to brainstorm? Are you providing “formal” opportunities to spend time “away” from the business so that you can let your creative juices flow and address ongoing challenges from a different point of view (other than as a crisis)? At many companies, these opportunities are just no longer offered, and have slowly ceased to exist.
Furthermore, there is an alarming trend of late in fewer industry meetings, being attended by fewer industry managers involved in the day-to-day operation of the business, with less opportunity to truly interact with their peers to discuss the challenges of the industry. I am not talking about massive industry conferences with hours of PowerPoint decks and droning speakers at a podium, but smaller, more casual opportunities for collaboration with the intelligent and exciting members of your industry “tribe” who share your values, your mission, and your interest in becoming more productive. Not that long ago, organizations like IFMA and others would create and encourage this collaboration and interaction, but have since fallen into the “meetings as a profit center” mode and no longer offer truly interactive opportunities, committees, or breakouts.
In the past, many of us have perhaps assembled meetings with the sole purpose of getting various disciplines together to learn, interact, and collaborate on the important --- and sometimes less important --- strategic issues facing the enterprise. But now we have webinarized, video-conferenced, and IM’d ourselves into thinking that these forms of forced collaboration will accomplish the task…when they are in fact the antithesis of creative and collaborative problem solving. Will these encounters foster and embrace new ideas? Do they encourage casual and unstructured interaction between the parties? Typically not…they are narrowly cast and focused on a singular tactic designed to solve a specific issue.
And how often are you thrown together across disciplines so that you can absorb different perspectives and hear the issues facing their area? It’s too easy to become myopic about our own problems like facing deadlines and meeting quotas, that we tend to stick closely to those we who share our common perspective. And inbreeding rarely produces the best spawn. Meeting with colleagues in other disciplines to discuss YOUR ideas and issues --- while learning about theirs --- will often generate new solutions just outside your vision. Perhaps they won’t all be “genius” but a couple of them just might be. Isn’t that worth the risk?
So look into your organization and examine how you can change your group’s activities to better encourage the “cross-fertilization” of ideas, as well as create opportunities for your tribes to intermingle --- both inside the organization as well as outside it.
We’re all getting back to basics in these tough times, and nothing is more basic in organization and industry dynamics than this.
“Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it." --- Lisa Alther, American novelist