[music] Okay. The fourth of the group constraints I want to talk about is Process constraints.

And this is what I think is the kicker. This is the most important one of all of them. If you don't pay attention to any of them, pay attention to this. And process is really just about how do we direct members' behaviors. So, people are going to be doing things and so how do we direct that, what they're doing, in a certain direction and how do we, you know, get them to do the things that we know are going to lead to a good outcome? All right, so what is the steps that we do in a row? So again, how do I get a meaningful sequence of tasks, what are the things that they do and in what order, how do I make sure the groups shares the same goal? That when they do these things, they're trying to do them in the same direction. So, that way when the instruction don't work or aren't completely accurate or aren't perfect, the're still are moving in the right direction. How we keep the group focus on the task? And for some task, the hard task, group will tend to wonder away, and so, we really need to keep them focus on the task. And then, also, I mean, in the end, how do we keep them work in ways that we know are effective ways to work? And that's the problem process. That's the problem that we want to talk about for our teams. We think that innovation as a process, you know, it could be pretty straightforward. We do this thing called idea generation. We have lots of ideas and look for all different kinds of possibilities, you know, duct tape and antimatter and all these things. We then we have to assess because we can't do all the different things, we have to do a smaller amount of them. So, we may, we do this thing called assessment. That's where we bring that down. We then do concept selection, choose one, choose the best one of those ideas. We have to refine it. You know, it never work the first time, and so, you always have to refine it. And then, you go to these things call concept implementation.

Where you put your head down and you just get that thing down. And so, it seems pretty straight forward, this is general ideas, assess ideas, do concept selection, and then, do refinement, and then, do concept implementation. What's hard about that? It shouldn't be anything hard. Well, there are a couple of hard things actually. One thing is understanding, you know, which phase are you in? So, there's always different phases, there's different things you could be doing. Which phase are you in? Do you have the skills for that phase? You know, so where are we? Are we in phase zero or are we in phase one? Do we have different names for the phases or do we just, or are we brainstorming and which part of brainstorming are we in? And sometimes people don't understand that. Also, the skills that you might have. Do you have the right skills that you need for that particular stage of the process? And so, if it's the stage of, of deep analysis do you have the analytic tools? If it's the stage of deep idea generation, do you have the idea generation skills and tools? And then, also, once you're doing one phase, how do you know to move forward? Like what do you do to, to say, okay now it's time, we're done with that phase, now we move forward. It's not just quite as easy as it looks. So you still have to think about, you know, what are the goals for a phase or what are we trying to do now, in this part? And when we're done, what have we gotten done? And also, what behaviors are required? And so, if I have to do something now, what are the behaviors required for this phase and how do I understand what those are? You know, do I, do I, do I have informations of my organization that tells me or do I have to guess or do I get to talk to people about it? Like, how is it that I know what needs to be done? So, this innovation thing is actually as much a social process, I believe, as it is over this technical information process.

So, we do this thing called Idea Generation, which is in fact a divergent activity. If you say up, I say down because we are trying to explore space and we want as many different kinds of ideas as possible. And so, the social process of you say up, I say down, you say left, I say right, like we're trying to explore this space. And then, at some point, we have to say we've done enough exploration, it's time to convert. And we call this assessment. And so, convergence is when we star agreeing with each other. So remember, a moment ago we were diverging. We were thinking differently from each other. Now, we have to think similar to each other. We then have to set direction. We have to commit. We have to say, this is what we're going to do together. That's hard, right? To get people to commit. Then, we have to say diverge because oh, it never works the first time and you have to do some refinement on it and do some iteration. And so, that may be hard for some people because they thought they had a great idea or you didn't do their idea in the very early session. And so, they're thinking, like, wow. If we had just done my idea, we would be able to work now. We do another convergence, another alignment layer. And then, we have to do the thing I call sushi and Red Bull. And that's where you lock people in a room, and you say, work, work. You're not coming out till it's done. You sort of force people in there and there's just implementation. No vacation. You can't do anything. They have to stay in there until the project's done. And so, through all these different phases, through all these different behaviors, how do people know what to do? We often don't tell them. So, the problem is, you know, people in groups, groups are hard. Groups are difficult. Groups don't use a process. If they use a process, they don't trust

it. They say, oh, this is the HR people keep dreaming this one up. Like, what a dumb process this is. They rely on norms and assumptions. Oh, everyone knows what a brainstorm is, let's just go brainstorm. They miss learning curves. Maybe there is some time of which we can actually speed the group up by spending a lot of time together early on. But if we meet once intensely, and then we don't meet for 3 months, and then we meet again, we lose the learning curve. Also, groups may choose the wrong people to, to be a part of a project and that could be a big problem as well. More process issues. Groups try to jump ahead in the process. They say, well, I know we're brainstorming, exploring, diverging, but let's just get it done, let's implement, right? So, they just want to skip all the stuff in between. Groups don't know, have we done enough exploration? Have we done enough assessment? How do we know? Groups don't know how to switch modes. How do I bring a group from this diversion activity to this conversion activity with everyone happy about making the change? You know, there's different goals at different times. What are the goals? How do I communicate the goals? And different behaviors at different times. How do I communicate to people, that behavior was good yesterday, but it's not good today? Right, coz yesterday we were assessing ideas and today we are trying to generate more new ideas and that behavior didn't work. And so, how do we do those things? And that's going to be the difficult part about having groups and making groups work. And then, what about the members, remember when I said something about who are the people, how we compose teams. What we tend to do is to say okay we're going to solve this problem, let's get someone from marketing and someone from sales and someone from manufacturing and someone here and someone from there and put them together in a team and make it work.

Well, it sort of makes sense, but if you think about it this way, actually, think about the knowledge domains that have to be there, do you, do you see any knowledge domains in this, in this behavior that people have to do, you need to converge diverge any generate ideas, there's nothing there about sales or being marketing or being those things. And so, some of this behavior, we're going to choose people to be on a team without really paying attention to what is it that they're going to be doing together. And so, maybe we want to select on the behaviors more than on the actual, on the knowledge that they have. Let me show you a little innovation style survey here. This was done by Kirton in 1994. Kirton suggested there are R Innovators and A Innovators. And they had these properties R is were less disciplined, A is where, you know, tended to prefer precision. We had whether they manipulate or resolve the problem. We had things about short, you know, short burst or working steadily on a project. We have things of taking control versus being authority and wanting to do one or the other in groups. Challenging rules or working within the rules or seeking radical change or seeking implementation. So, if you look at these two columns and said, okay, which one of these describes me a little bit better? And so, think about one that describes you, are you type R or you're a little bit more of a type A? And so, just, just hang onto that, that idea of which one you are and we'll go get back to it in a second. So, some people in groups tend to focus, and you may have been in a group where people just all they do is like, talk about anti-matter and they're just like radical ideas and that's all they are. They're just spewing ideas all the time. They just can't stop themselves. So, maybe you know some people like that. Maybe you are one of those people. Taking innovation class, you may well be. There are other people in groups who tend to focus on implementation. That's like, okay, let's just do this and let's make it smaller, so let's get this done and then we can, you know, and, and that's a very different kind of person. And we probably know people like that.

Maybe you're a person like that as well, focus on implementation. And then, there's some people who just focus on process. Oh, my god, we're going to end, we're doomed and everything is going to because they really don't all they care about is the process and getting stuff done and really not sure of thinking beyond that. I'm sure you're not that way, but you know, sometimes the, the fact that we need to get stuff done can make us nervous, can make us focus on the process. So, if we think about these process constraints, lack of process, right, so these, I should've showed you some things like these things here. Where we get over folks in implementation, we get these people in a room and they just can't communicate because they are being radical. And someone's saying, hey, we need antimatter, we're going to do it this way. And another person's saying, no, no, no, let's use duct tape. And another person is saying no, no, no, let's hurry up, let's hurry up, let's hurry up. That's a problem. All those behaviors are useful in a group, but not at the same time. Certainly, not in the same room at the same phase. So, the things we're talking about, we talked about lack of process about having one. We talked about poor phase transitions, moving, not moving, not understanding why to move. And then, also, people just generally not trusting a process. That is not understanding why they're doing it and believing in that it's a good thing to be doing what they're being asked to do. So, how do we overcome these process constraints? It would be an important thing, ideally we'd be able to overcome these process constraints. Well, let's talk about a few things. So, one thing to think about is to develop master and use a process. That have a process that's simple, good but enforces users, make sure that you use the process. Because if you use the process and use it once and you have a good outcome, then, you can do the same process again. And if you don't like the outcome, then

you can say, maybe change this part of it. If everything is random every time, you know, just like some people cook that way. It's one day it's great and one day it's not great and you just can't make it happen again and again and again. And what we're after her is routine innovation. We want to be able to innovate on a routine basis and lock in the things that we know work. So, simple is good. From my book, in the, in chapter 3, for those of you who have the book you can see in this diagram here it sort of talks about these seven process steps and there's different ways that you can step through the steps. I have some good information, some really detailed information about how it is, whether there's specific things you can do to keep people on there. And so, in the very early phase of getting everyone on the same page, phase zero, through our framing the problem. Very, very important because if people don't start form the same place, they weren't and certainly not going to end up in the same place. And on as we go through. What are the things that we could do to help that process go through? So, defining the problem generating ideas. How would people do that? We talked about several steps so far of how to help people generate ideas. Assessing constraints. That's what we're doing in the class. And so, each week I'm asking you to do simple constraints assessment. And sort of understand, if I do it this way what's going to be the constraint, if I do it that way, what's going to be the constraint? If I do it this way, it's going to cost money. If I do it this way, it's going to cost time. If I do it this way, it's going to cost people. And so, I want to be thinking through those constraints. I need to set the direction and get the group to agree that in fact this is how we are going to do it together. Do my design, do my refinement and do my implementation. And in this simple language, at least, if I say, hey, we're in phase one or phase two or phase three, we should know what we

are. We're in phase zero or in phase one. And so, that's how we could actually make that work. So, to overcome process constraints, there's one thing that happens that I think it's very interesting where we don't manage the early stage of the process and I'm going to call this a latte phase. Let me just give you a little example and show you what I mean here. So, if you think about this in this way, that over the life of a project, you start out spending very little money, and then, you end up at a place where you spend a lot money, right. So, in the research phase you're just thinking things through, maybe you have a few meetings, you're just doing there's just a small number of people. You haven't made any big decisions. You haven't purchased any inventory or anything. But by the end of the project, you have. You've purchased inventory, you've trained people, maybe you've bought raw materials, supplies, and all those things. And so, early in the project, you haven't spend any money, late in the project you spend a great deal of money. Right? That, that should be pretty straight forward. Now, if we look at another curve and this curve is how committed are we to the decisions that we make, that is how commit, how much of the life cycle cause are we locking in at that stage in the process. So, early in the process, we make some decisions that say, okay, if I'm making this, you know, this rigid, if I make it out of three pieces of plastic, or make it out of five pieces of plastic, that's really different because, you know, a piece of plastic costs 15 cents. If I have ten of them in here or I have three of them in here, the price difference is really different, it's really big. Or, if I decide to do it with a product or with a service or if I decide to own my own service or not my own service, so you get the idea. You're going to lock in decisions and you have to do it early because later decisions require you to have locked in earlier decisions. So, it looks something like this. Right.

So, we start down and we very quickly lock in. Okay. And this precedes our expenditures. So, we make the decisions before we actually spend the money to do the thing. Now, if we look at the ability that we have to change, the ability that we have to improve performance or make it faster, make it better, make it cheaper, any of those things, it has this other property where at the very early, we can make really big decisions, really big interesting changes to a project, because we haven't bought a lot of stuff, we haven't trained a lot of people, we haven't printed all the brochures. And late in the project, wow, its really hard to do anything and the changes are really difficult and are very, very expensive. And so, for example I was working in a project once for a big computer company. They say, hey, we'd like you to get some cost out of this product, we have this laptop and it cost too much, can you get some $10 of cost out of the product? And I'm thinking okay and I look inside and say, well, if I paint this instead of putting a sticker, I could save an 8th of a cent. You know, $5, even $10 at a eighth of a cent at a time is a really hard place to get to. Okay, so late in the project is really difficult and early in a project is really easy. I said, if you had brought me this laptop, you know, before you started the project, we could have taken $100 of cost out, not even worry about the $10 cost. So again, here you have the actual expenditures, you see the commitment to life cycle cost, and then, you see our ability to change. So, looking at this thing, you ask the question like this, if you went around in the organization and looked at groups' behaviors, when are people in the latte phase? The latte phase is when people are, oh, I want a fine latte. We're going to have a meeting, let's meet over at Starbucks. You know, well, Joe can't make it. Oh, that's okay, we can meet in two weeks. And people are just really taking it easy. That's generally at the beginning of a project, right? And at the end of the project is what I

call the hair on fire stage. Oh, my god, my hair's on fire. We're going to die, and everyone's running around and, and people are worried about the, you know, they're going to get fired and this thing has to ship and they're not going home and they're just like working like dogs. Okay. That's at the end of projects, right? In this later stage of the project. So, why would it be that we work like crazy, like dogs at the end, when we spent the money, where we're committed, where we have very little power to change. And at the beginning of the project I want a fine latte, is that. Oh, Joe can't make it. We're wasting time, we're not doing the stuff that needs to get done that has the power. We haven't spent the money, we have a huge amount of power to change and we haven't committed to a way. Why do we do that? Why do groups do that? Well, there's a lot of reasons, one reason might be that your, your latte phase of one project actually coincides with the hair on fire phase of the previous project. And so, you're so busy with the previous project, you don't have the time to put into the new project. So, you're basically, you're robbing time from this project to pay, the other project. That could be really problematic. The other thing I think that happens is, so I'll overlay my idea of process. On top of this thing is we don't know what to do in that early stage. So, in this early stage in the process, without really having a good sense of, of what the behaviors are required when, we just sort of sit around and, and we don't act, we're not sure what to do. We don't know what behaviors would help us move down this curve, would help us move along here. And so, this is where I overlay this process and say, okay you' really need to be working hard on this. And in fact, what you could do is, is, we know at the end of projects, people fear for their lives. They fear for getting fired if they don't get the project done. But they don't feel that same feeling up front.

Maybe up front, you could say, look, you need to have 100 ideas, and if you don't have a hundred ideas by tomorrow you're fired. And that would allow people to get the kind of urgency early in the project that you need to be able to take advantage of the great amount of cost savings, the great amount of, of change that you could make, the performance improvement, and the life cycle cost reduction that happens in that early stage. So, these process constraints that was about managing the early stages. And now, let's talk for a moment about choosing participants carefully. And so, a moment ago, I showed you these types of innovators, the radical innovators, the Type R, and the adaptive innovators, the Type A. And so, they have these properties. And, and think about which one you are for a moment. So, when you think about this and say, okay, when would I use, which type of innovator? When would I want them to participate where in this process? Right, coz R's have a certain strength that they do. They're, and A's have a certain strength that they do. They have these other properties. Like, when would you use that? Well, we never normally don't think this way. We normally think, okay, I need someone from sales and someone from marketing and someone from engineering, don't do it that way. The better way to do it is to say, I need some Rs and some As. These are some super-radical project that I need some super-radical people here. Or, maybe it's not a radical project and, you know, Mr. Anti-gravity, I don't need you right now. And so, why don't you go do something else while we have this project going. Then, once I have them in the project team, I got to think about where I want them. Maybe I want a lot of R action here, because Rs are radical. They're going to think lots of different ways. They're divergent. But then, I need to bring it back together, and use my As there or put an a in charge there.

I have my R's and I have my A's. And then, I have places of transition where I may need people to use some R energy and, and, and bring them, the A over, right? Those that the radicals are going out and I need to bring it down to A. And again and again and again. So, we think about radical behavior, adaptive behavior or seeking radical change or seeking adaptive change and not just we do it consciously and not just a tendency, not because we don't any other way to behave, but we do it because this is the right way to do it. I think it's a super powerful way to look at what happens in your group and moving the groups forward. So again, get your Rs and, and stock your Rs and if you're an R, you know how to do A, and if you're an A, you also know how to do R. And so, just remind people right now, we're divergent. We're doing the divergent behavior. Next, we're going to do the adaptive behavior, the convergent behavior, but not now. That's going to be tomorrow, be a different time. And so, when we choose participants carefully we can actually help them behave properly because we're going to put them in a process, we can say this is the time to do and this is the thing to do now. And if people are, are willing to behave appropriately, the R's are wanting to do behavior R behaviors when R is required, then you should have them into the team. And if they're not then don't, invite them. You know, have the needing when they are not there. Well, at least talk to them about this is the way the process works. This time we're generating ideas, here we're selecting ideas, here we're doing this, here we're doing that. And the behavior you're exhibiting is way out here, but that's not where we are. We're at this stage of the process, so please help, behave appropriately.