E34: From Boxes to Lines

What if jazz is the key to better innovation? 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. Today marks a special occasion for me. Twenty years ago, I had my book launch party for my first book, 24. 7 Innovation. At the time, I was working for Accenture, living in London, and we decided to throw this big shindig at this really ritzy place and it was just a spectacular evening. We had a swing band, I was playing my saxophone, doing a little bit of jazz music, which is a little bit of foreshadowing of what we're going to talk about today. And also in addition to it being a book launch party, it was a leaving Accenture party because this was my last week with the company. I decided when the book came out that I would use it as an opportunity to launch my own speaking business. And that's what I did 20 years ago. So for me, this is a special podcast because it marks a special period of time. And in order to fully celebrate, what I'd like to do is actually read you the prologue from my book 247 Innovation, which was published 20 years ago. So with that, let's go to the prologue of 24. 7 innovation, which was called From Boxes to Lines. And the chapter started with a quote from Albert Einstein with his three rules of work. Number one, out of clutter, find simplicity. Number two, from discord, find harmony. Number three, in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. In writing this book, I felt a historical perspective on business would provide an interesting and useful context for my arguments, especially for readers who are a bit vague on the past contributions of people like Frederick Taylor Swift, W. Edwards Deming, and Dr. Michael Hammer. But as a colleague of mine once said to me, he said, I've read so much about Taylor that he feels that he can claim him as a dependent on my taxes. So it is with a bit of trepidation that I go ahead with this prologue. Because yes, most of it is historical, but it also provides the essential context for what comes next in business. An era of innovation such as we've never seen in the past. Although businesses over the years have used innovative approaches for improving their productivity, this has often been done at the expense of individual innovation. Innovation has been driven from the top rather than being pervasive throughout the organization. The goal has been to create a well oiled machine that turns employees into robots and removes all variability. To help illustrate what I mean, I find it useful to think of a business as being quite simply a pattern of boxes and and lines. The boxes can be tasks, people, departments, computers, units within a business, and the lines are the interrelationships and dependencies that connect these boxes together. It seems to me that too often businesses have focused on the boxes rather than the lines. Do you remember all the walls of post notes during the peak of RE engineering? Remember the huge investment in computers that never paid off? Decades of new ideas for improvements have left many businesses tied up in knots. The reason for this fragmentation of components is in part that organization theory has often mirrored the science or technology of the day. The shift from the agrarian technology to industrial technology had us focusing on machinery, tasks and movement within an entity. These are the things that make up a machine. One result is a very boxy way of looking at things. The focus has been on what happened inside the box. It's not surprising that Frederick Taylor concentrated on improving human performance by dividing work into small, discrete sets of activities around the machines they were performed on. And only managers, the people with intelligence, designed these work activities. And it was assumed that the workers had neither the intelligence nor the time, so they were told to get on doing what they were told to do. This was quite appropriate at the time when the workforce was largely uneducated. But the workplace has long changed. Then came the shift to the information age in the 1960s and the 1970s and computers focused on applications that processed information. But unfortunately compared to computers, certainly at that time couldn't think and therefore prescriptive solutions were required so that the computers could process the information within clear boundaries. But this forced out innovation and again got us focused on automating tasks. The organization of businesses naturally began to reflect this approach leading into the 1990s era of re engineering. A very industrial nuts and bolts term in itself, business process. RE engineering, although focused on connections across functions, still maintained a box focus. In this case, the box was the process. And although processes are an important part of a business, they are only one dimension. The current shift in technology is the most exciting yet. The convergence of the Internet, the World Wide Web, email, telecommunications and computer networks. As a result, our business models are again following in lockstep and beginning to focus on the lines, that is the interdependencies. This leads us into an era of collaboration, integration and innovation that I will be exploring and advocating in this book. The key is to avoid using technology in isolation. Use it as a tool to connect the dots. The past 100 years of business management and technology have, for the most part, focused on automation, mechanization and routinization of work at the expense of innovation. There has been too much focus on improving the boxes, the processes, departments, individuals, computers, databases. Fortunately, we are seeing a change now. As I said in the introduction, I am a jazz saxophonist, or some people might call it a saxophonist. And the concept of the lines versus boxes is exactly what jazz is about. The key in jazz is to let each player, a box, express his or her own individuality through improvisation, which is a form of innovation. In the context of a simple chart comprised of chord structures and rhythms, and these are the lines, there is very little limit to what the musician can do with their solo. The only control is the framework. Jazz is very much about the musician. Give the musician the freedom to express their own individuality. This is the human factor. And in the business world, we are now seeing the reintroduction of the human factor. This is a development that has evolved out of necessity. For this is a world of uncertainty, unpredictability and change. Indeed, change, as is often said, is the only constant today. And machines, computers and prescriptive compositions do not afford companies the flexibility they need to survive and thrive. They may be on top today with their best practices, great ideas and innovative thinking, but their competitors are nipping at their heels and often leapfrogging over them. Companies have begun to realize that they need innovative business models that that leverage technology so that their people can make the best use of their innate creativity. And this means focusing on the lines of the business, the flows, coordination and dependencies in doing so. This allows for innovation and adaptability to emerge from within and across the boxes. This is the challenging proposition for most companies. This requires no less than having good jazz music, which are the operating models and processes played by good jazz musicians. Your employees playing high quality instruments, the technology in the right way, so that the audience, the customer, enjoys the performance. And central to all of this is improvisation or innovation. Musicians read a score, but when they come to play that score, they improvise their solo parts, partly because they feel it improves the music, partly because they are responding to the improvisation of someone else in the group, and partly because they are responding to the audience's reaction. Once this procedure has begun, it can take the music far away from the original score and send it on a journey that was never dreamed by the composer. This is a form of perpetual innovation that companies need in order to evolve continuously to meet customer and market needs. In this age of change, My suggestion and the theme of this book is that companies must find a way to achieve 24. 7 innovation all day, every day, in order to survive in an increasingly daunting competitive environment. Tomorrow's companies will need pervasive innovation. Creative thinking everywhere, by everyone. We are witnessing the start of the next evolution phase of business innovation. And that is the end of the prologue. And although I wrote this passage over 20 years ago, I do believe that it still holds true. These interconnections are more important than ever. Technology has made innovation available to everybody in the organization. So we've had the emergence of idea management technologies where frontline workers can provide their ideas and solutions to problems posed by others in the organization. We've democratized contributions. Technology has also enabled external crowdsourcing platforms that allow us to connect problems with solvers. I have an issue in one industry, but maybe somebody in a completely different industry has solved this problem. Wow. This allows us to get those connections that previously were invisible. And we are seeing the disaggregation of businesses where suppliers can play a much more strategic role in the growth of their clients. We're not looking at organizations as four walls that protect everything that goes on inside, but rather we are seeing them as networks and nodes and connections to new technologies that a company might license to a partner that helps provide a capability that they could never develop on their own. And this ability to make all these connections, this ecosystem, is helping companies evolve faster and faster and faster. And at the end of the day, this is really the key to innovation. And I said this in the past is to me, innovation is not about creativity, ideas, suggestions, novelty, or being different. All of these might be input to innovation, they might be a part of innovation, but they are not innovation. The reason why we have innovation is to remain relevant. And in order to remain relevant, we need to create an organization that is adaptable, that is flexible, that is able to change quickly to meet the changes of the market. This is the key to success in the future. This is why I believe the concept of 24. 7 innovation is so important. And it's also why I believe that jazz music gives us at least an insight into how to create that real time improvisation that meets the needs of the audience. So thank you for being with me here today with this retrospective on my business and my book. 20 years ago, 24. 7 Innovation was published. And that's when I left Accenture to create my own business. And for the past 20 years, I've been helping companies drive innovation, create an innovation culture, and most important, remain relevant. So with that, we are at the end of this week's episode to submit problems you want solved on the podcast. When we are doing our problem solving format, please go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com and remember to download the lenses. Go to getthelenses.com with that. I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving.