E13: Turn Your Worst Idea Into Your Best Idea

What if your worst ideas could lead to your best ideas? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Typically, when brainstorming, we're going to ask people for their best ideas. But what if sometimes the path to finding great ideas is intentionally starting with terrible ones? In Invisible Solutions, this would be lens number 20. Lens number 20 is the bad idea. Lens. So think about, for example, space travel. Space travel. As it turns out, flight to the moon was actually made possible through a bad idea. Probably the worst idea. And the worst idea might be, what if the rocket ship fell apart after takeoff? Now this of course sounds like a crazy idea, but if you think about it, this was a critical factor in the success of the Apollo missions because the rocket boosters containing the fuel fall off early during the trip to the moon. So it really is a very powerful way to rethink things. What if we did something that didn't make sense? And the cool thing is, bad ideas don't necessarily have to always relate to complex technical problems. For example, if you wanted to sell more raisins, you might focus on the health benefits, the sweet taste, or the various uses that you have, such as in cereals or desserts. In 1987, an advertising team working on this problem had exhausted all of the obvious options. When one of the writers said, we have tried everything but dancing raisins, singing I heard it through the grapevine. Okay, now this sounds like a pretty silly, crazy, stupid idea. But they ran with it. And to their surprise, the commercial became so wildly popular that it created other commercials in the future, two TV specials and a Saturday morning cartoon series. And sometimes bad ideas can yield life saving results. Considering a company whose manufacturing process is complex and quite dangerous, and their goal is to reduce accidents in the workplace, a good idea, of course, would be to add more safety inspectors. But what would be a terrible idea? Firing all of the safety inspectors. Okay, now this sounds a little crazy. And the company involved didn't go quite that far. But they took a radical approach because their philosophy was that employees have much more knowledge dispersed amongst them than any small group of corporate planners or safety inspectors could ever have. So rather than having a few safety engineers scour the company for unsafe conditions, they gave responsibility to all of their employees. And they gave rewards for uncovering safe conditions and for discovering new ways to conduct business more safely. As it turns out, by reducing the role of the safety inspector and increasing the role of the employee, they reduced the number of accidents 35 to 50% each year for several years across the entire company. And with one year, they moved from being middle of the pack to having one of the best safety records in the industry. So sometimes bad ideas can lead to great ideas. Counterintuitive solutions might actually lead to very valuable solutions. So the next time you have a problem you want solved, don't always ask for the best solution, a great solution, or a wonderful idea. Sometimes it can be useful to ask what would be the worst or silliest idea that you could possibly think of, and then find a way of making that work. So that is our tip of the week. Look for the worst idea. And again, that's lens number 20. Today's problem. That was actually submitted by somebody who was attending a workshop recently, works for a global organization, and they're in customer service and sales. And their challenge has been, how do we serve? How can we serve our customers around the globe without people burning out? Because what was happening, especially now with zoom, people are on Zoom calls 24 hours a day. If you're based in Europe and you have a call in Asia, well, now you're gonna have to wake up super early in the middle of the night, or maybe you have people in the United States who have calls overseas, and you have to wake up in the morning, whatever it might be. So the question was, how can we avoid the burnout that's associated with it? Because all of these virtual zoom calls were wreaking havoc on people's health and. And their motivation. We pulled out the lenses, and there were quite a few lenses that were applicable to this. But my goal in each episode is to limit the number of lenses to three. And I think there's three lenses that really stand out in my mind that would have a great amount of value. The resequenced lens, which is number 11. The reassigned lens, which is number 12, and the variations lens, which is number 24. So let's tackle each of these lenses. So the resequence lens is all around timing. Now, in some cases, it might be doing something earlier, doing something later, postponing or predicting. But in some cases, we can change the timing by moving away from synchronous work to asynchronous work. Anytime you have a phone call, anytime you have a zoom call, that means that you need to be there real time. So if someone is 12 time zones away and they want to meet at 12 noon their time. Well, you're going to be at midnight your time. Not very practical. But what if there was a way to provide 24 hour service to people without having to be available 24 hours a day? How would you do that? Well, one way might be to look for asynchronous modes of communication. I'm doing this a lot with my clients right now. I'm finding that in many cases people don't want to be real time. They don't want to sit in front of their computer and have real time conversations. But they want information, they want support, they need help, but maybe they don't need it that second. What I've been doing with my clients is we've moved to asynchronous forms of communication. So for example, many of my clients now, we've moved our conversations from real time zoom calls to asynchronous Yak calls. That's yac.com so Yak is like several other tools out there. There's Voxer, there's Marco Polo, which is a video version of it. And you can think of the text version of it as being slack. And in essence what it means is if somebody wants my help, instead of getting it that minute, they send me a voice message and I'm able to respond back at an appropriate time zone for me. So that means they can submit questions 24 hours a day. It means I can respond 24 hours a day, but. But they don't have to happen at the same time. So that resequence lens I think could be super valuable for something like this. The next lens would be the reassign lens. Again, this is number 12 and this is looking at the who. So if resequence is when, the reassigned lens is who, who's doing the work. So one possibility might be making sure that you have people providing service to people who are in their time zone. That may not always be practical, but if you could start looking at shifting the work, maybe you can find ways of creating people who are able to serve people locally. So if you shift the question to how can we get people serving their clients locally as opposed to globally, well then that might lead you down the path of what kind of training and capability do we need to do. There's a lot of different ways that you could focus on this, but by making that small shift, by changing the mindset of one person has to serve everybody around the world as opposed to maybe we have multiple people serving people locally. Well now that opens up a new set of opportunities and the last lens that we'll talk about today is number 24, which is the variations lens. This is one I use quite frequently because I think in some cases we make the mistake of assuming that we need a one size fits all solution to our problems. And the reality is we don't. I mean we can have multiple solutions. For example, maybe the tier one customers, your best customers, well, they're going to get the best support from the best people, 24 hours a day, whatever that takes. But that's not going to be 100% of your customers. That might be 20% of your customers. So now what you've done is you've taken 80% of the workload off of people and then your tier 2, maybe tier 2 are served by somebody locally, maybe it's somebody who's not as deeply expert in the topic, but if they need to, they can raise it up to somebody who has more knowledge later on in the day. So you do always have that local contact, but you have access to global resources when needed. And maybe the third tier customers, well, you don't even have that type of real in depth support. Maybe there is more investment in technology, whether it's chatbots or other types of tools that are used to provide self service. Instead of doing it for your customers, maybe you can find a way of them being able to do it for themselves. Or at least in 90% of the cases, even within that third tier, maybe you use the variations lens because you might say, well for third tier we have these types of problems. Some problems are self service, some go to a local representative and then some get raised up to the global experts. You can start seeing that by changing just a couple of different parameters, we open up a whole new range of opportunities. So we started off this podcast with lens number 20, which is the bad idea lens which is really about instead of always looking for the best idea, sometimes look for the worst idea and make it work. We then talked about how can we support customers on a global basis without having burnout. And we use the three lenses resequence, which is all about when reassigned, which is about who and the variations lens which says let's avoid a one size fits all strategy. And with that we are at the end of this week's episode. To submit a problem that you want solved in this podcast, go to www.invisiblesolutionspodcast.com and remember to download the lenses go to getthelenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem. Sol. D.