eXampleCG Enabling Excellence Forum

Product, Process and System auditing has been used extensively in organizations for many years to track extent of implementation to established standards. It is also utilized to verify whether standards established are in line with global standard frameworks for eg., ISO, CMM etc.,.

In specific, compliance audits are often perceived by the workforce to be "policing" activity and most organization members find it a "plague to avoid" as much as possible. There are many reasons for this such as:

The way audit is positioned in the organization by top/senior management and the auditing functions (say Process/Quality/Operational excellence (or) Accounts (in case of financial audits)
The repetitive experience of employees over series of audits which primarily focus on finding "deviations and non-conformances" vs. established standards and makes employees feel like culprits.
Often "dictatorial" way in which audits are conducted. Hey, I am here for an audit, you should leave all your job and listen to me (or) Send an audit schedule weeks ahead of time and land on the D-Day to make the doers life miserable
Often in audit, the focus is on finding "objective evidence" of non-conformance to established standards or requirements. While this in itself is the intended purpose of any audit, the attributing causes / reasons for such non-conformance is generally left to the persons / team which operates the process to investigate and fix via a corrective action report or plan.

Quite often I notice auditors are inadequately trained (if someone has extra time, make him an auditor), unclear themselves on the width and depth of processes to be audited, become "one size fits all" auditors (if I get trained/certified once as an auditor I am now capable of auditing anything and everything in the organization) besides many other shortcomings.

While auditor training is extremely important and ongoing competency upgradation is a must (given that periodic changes in technology, tools and ways of doing business (for eg., outsourcing work to partners etc brings about major changes in the way organizations run businesses), I have frequently noticed the audit can much more effective if one takes into consideration the following elements.

I believe the audit process besides checking for compliance should seriously consider and help address:

How adequately is the standard defined and documented?

(If you look at most standards definitions and documents in the company (whether product/process/service/inspection/testing etc.,), they read like the "Constitution of India" - Boring/uninspiring and unappetizing to even pick up and read (Employees keep talking that "if you want to go to sleep, read our company's Quality / process manual). Making the organization standards and documentation easy and presentable to read can never be under-emphasized. Use of as many pictures, visuals, samples/illustrations, diagrams, photographs etc will induce better interest for employees to read through the standards and also quickly refer to it in times of need and this automatically improves the situation. Besides, doing a "failure mode" assessment of standards when they get defined to identify gaps in standard definitions and in its potential deployment will really help)

How well is the standard communicated?

In implementing standards, usually a few training sessions are held where batch of employees of the company are herded into conference room and are "downloaded" with "knowledge" about the standards. After that they are expected to "strictly" implement and comply with it. In this age and time when public memory is so short and there are hundred of priorities for employees to take care, it is unrealistic to expect employees to well remember the standards and follow it to the "t". The team which is responsible for such communications (for eg. CMM/SEPG/ISO team etc.) should make a detailed communication plan that well and truly ensures knowledge about the standards reach the employees not just in the beginning but everytime when there are changes, or new employees join or people get transferred across teams/groups/locations (or) join back after long leave/sabbatical etc., One should consider organization "standards" like a product being sold to prospects and plan to "market" it well within the company so that customers (employees in this case) will have high "standard (brand) recall". Communication strategies could include use of posters, technology tools (intranet alerts, standard of the day campaigns, e-mail/newsletter campaigns of changes to standards on periodic basis, quiz/contests etc.). Think like a marketing person and get innovative in communicating standards and I am sure compliance levels will be much better.

How well is the standard understood?

This is a very important step in order to achieve high level of standards compliance. Often employees are communicated but do not fully understand the purpose and import of the relevant standards. Activities such as "short and quick refreshers" (instead of long boring full day sessions), group studies (joint study and interpretation of standards - like we used to do in school/college of group studies!!), "Standards hour" where team members spend time addressing gaps in understanding of standards and identifying exceptions which requiring modification of standards, illustrative examples of "what is correct undertanding" and list of what is wrong understanding (based on past audit outcomes / instances and failure mode assessment data), multi-lingual training (if employees / lower level staff are not comfortable understanding things in English, nice quick e-learning capsules, quiz/test/contests, conducting events and entertaining workshops (where standards are demystified and making it easy for people to understand) are initiatives that can go a long way to help employees well understand and comply.

Remember it is essential that time and resources be budgeted along with a well developed strategy to make such things happen. Creating excitement in employees that standards are primarily help them to do a better and productive job (so that they can go home at 5.00 pm and enjoy both professional and personal life!!) is vital to get buy-in and high level of voluntary involvement in implementing standards.

How well is it complied?

This is the last but not the least element of good standard implementation. If the above explained aspects are well undertaken (I call them the "process" of deploying standards in the company), the result i.e, extent of compliance (or) #of non-conformances per standard audited will be much better. Such a transformation will take some months to achieve and will really start improving in the medium to long term for the betterment of the organization.

I am sure a structured approach to developing and deploying standards in the organization will largely take away the fear and anxiety that most employees have on the "AuD-Day" or the running around that companies do 2-3 days before an external audit as well as bring a sense of calmness and confidence to boldly get subjected to audits whether planned or surprise ones, whether internal or external and come out with flying colors.

These are based on my personal experiences both as an Auditor and Auditee to many organizations as internal / external consultant resource and I hope it is beneficial in a small way to our forum members.

I invite members of our forum to add your comments gained from experience as an auditee or auditor as it can further value add to this post and help our forum members greatly.

How leaders kill meaning at work
Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,1 found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward-small wins-boost what we call "inner work life": the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person's reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line.2 People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it's not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.

In our book and a recent Harvard Business Review article,3 we argue that managers at all levels routinely-and unwittingly-undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates' work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.

But what about a company's most senior leaders? What is their role in making-or killing-meaning at work? To be sure, as a high-level leader, you have fewer opportunities to directly affect the inner work lives of employees than do frontline supervisors. Yet your smallest actions pack a wallop because what you say and do is intensely observed by people down the line.4 A sense of purpose in the work, and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.

Four traps

To better understand the role of upper-level managers, we recently dug back into our data: nearly 12,000 daily electronic diaries from dozens of professionals working on important innovation projects at seven North American companies. We selected those entries in which diarists mentioned upper- or top-level managers-868 narratives in all.

Qualitative analysis of the narratives highlighted four traps that lie in wait for senior executives. Most of these pitfalls showed up in several companies. Six of the seven suffered from one or more of the traps, and in only a single company did leaders avoid them. The existence of this outlier suggests that it is possible for senior executives to sustain meaning consistently, but that's difficult and requires vigilance.

This article should help you determine whether you risk falling into some of these traps yourself-and unknowingly dragging your organization into the abyss with you. We also offer a few thoughts on avoiding the problems, advice inspired by the actions and words of a senior leader at the one company that did so.

We don't claim to have all the answers. But we are convinced that executives who sidestep these traps reduce their risk of inadvertently draining meaning from the work of the people in their organizations. Those leaders also will boost the odds of tapping into the motivational power of progress-something surprisingly few do.

We surveyed 669 managers at all levels of management, from dozens of companies and various industries around the world. We asked them to rank the importance of five employee motivators: incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and progress in the work. Only 8 percent of senior executives ranked progress as the most important motivator. Had they chosen randomly, 20 percent would have done so. In short, our survey showed that most executives don't understand the power of progress in meaningful work.5 And the traps revealed by the diaries suggest that most executives don't act as though progress matters. You can do better.

Trap 1: Mediocrity signals

Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?

We saw this dynamic repeatedly at a well-known consumer products company we'll call Karpenter Corporation, which was experiencing a rapid deterioration in the inner work lives of its employees as a result of the actions of a new top-management team. Within three years of our studying Karpenter, it had become unprofitable and was acquired by a smaller rival.

Karpenter's top-management team espoused a vision of entrepreneurial cross-functional business teams. In theory, each team would operate autonomously, managing its share of the company's resources to back its own new-product innovations. During the year we collected data from Karpenter teams, the annual report was full of references to the company's innovation focus; in the first five sentences, "innovation" appeared three times.

In practice, however, those top managers were so focused on cost savings that they repeatedly negated the teams' autonomy, dictated cost reduction goals that had to be met before any other priorities were, and-as a result-drove new-product innovation into the ground. This unintended, de facto hypocrisy took its toll, as a diary excerpt from a longtime Karpenter product engineer emphasizes:

Today I found out that our team will be concentrating on [cost savings] for the next several months instead of any new products. . . . It is getting very difficult to concentrate on removing pennies from the standard cost of an item. That is the only place that we have control over. Most of the time, quality suffers. It seems that our competition is putting out new products at a faster rate. . . . We are no longer the leader in innovation. We are the followers.

This employee's work had begun to lose its meaning, and he wasn't alone. Many of the other 65 Karpenter professionals in our study felt that they were doing mediocre work for a mediocre company-one for which they had previously felt fierce pride. By the end of our time collecting data at Karpenter, many of these employees were completely disengaged. Some of the very best had left.

The mediocrity trap was not unique to Karpenter. We saw it revealed in different guises in several of the companies we studied. At a chemicals firm, it stemmed from the top managers' risk aversion. Consider these words from one researcher there:

A proposal for liquid/medical filtration using our new technology was tabled for the second time by the Gate 1 committee (five directors that screen new ideas). Although we had plenty of info for this stage of the game, the committee is uncomfortable with the risk and liability. The team, and myself, are frustrated about hurdles that we don't know how to answer.

This company's leaders also inadvertently signaled that, despite their rhetoric about being innovative and cutting edge, they were really more comfortable being ordinary.

Trap 2: Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder'

As an experienced leader, you probably scan your company's external environment constantly for guidance in making your next strategic moves. What are competitors planning? Where are new ones popping up? What's happening in the global economy, and what might the implications be for financing or future market priorities? You are probably brimming with ideas on where you'd like to take the company next. All of that is good, in theory.

In practice, we see too many top managers start and abandon initiatives so frequently that they appear to display a kind of attention deficit disorder (ADD) when it comes to strategy and tactics. They don't allow sufficient time to discover whether initiatives are working, and they communicate insufficient rationales to their employees when they make strategic shifts.

Karpenter's strategic ADD seemed to stem from its leaders' short attention span, perhaps fueled by the CEO's desire to embrace the latest management trends. The problem was evident in decisions at the level of product lines and extended all the way up to corporate strategy. If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift. In one employee's words:

A quarterly product review was held with members of the [top team] and the general manager and president. Primary outcome from the meeting was a change in direction away from spray jet mops to revitalization of existing window squeegees. Four priorities were defined for product development, none of which were identified as priorities at our last quarterly update. The needle still points north, but we've turned the compass again.

At another company we studied, strategic ADD appeared to stem from a top team warring with itself. Corporate executives spent many months trying to nail down a new market strategy. Meanwhile, different vice presidents were pushing in different directions, rendering each of the leaders incapable of giving consistent direction to their people. This wreaked havoc in the trenches. One diarist, a project manager, felt that rather than committing herself to doing something great for particular customers, she needed to hedge her bets:

The VP gave us his opinion of which target candidates [for new products] may fit with overall company strategy-but, in reality, neither he nor anyone in our management structure knows what the strategy is. It makes this project a real balancing act-we need to go forward, but need to weigh commitments very carefully.

If high-level leaders don't appear to have their act together on exactly where the organization should be heading, it's awfully difficult for the troops to maintain a strong sense of purpose.

Trap 3: Corporate Keystone Kops

In the early decades of cinema, a popular series of silent-film comedies featured the Keystone Kops-fictional policemen so incompetent that they ran around in circles, mistakenly bashed each other on the head, and fumbled one case after another. The title of that series became synonymous with miscoordination. Our research found that many executives who think everything is going smoothly in the everyday workings of their organizations are blithely unaware that they preside over their own corporate version of the Keystone Kops. Some contribute to the farce through their actions, others by failing to act. At Karpenter, for example, top managers set up overly complex matrix reporting structures, repeatedly failed to hold support functions (such as purchasing and sales) accountable for coordinated action, and displayed a chronic indecisiveness that bred rushed analyses. In the words of one diarist:

Last-minute changes continue on [an important customer's] assortments. Rather than think through the whole process and logically decide which assortments we want to show [the customer], we are instead using a shotgun approach of trying multiple assortments until we find one that works. In the meantime, we are expending a lot of time and effort on potential assortments only to find out later that an assortment has been dropped.

Although Karpenter's example was egregious, the company was far from alone in creating chaotic situations for its workers. In one high-tech company we studied, for example, Keystone Kop-like scenarios played out around the actions of a rogue marketing function. As described in one engineer's diary, the attempts of many teams to move forward with their projects were continually thwarted by signals from marketing that conflicted with those coming from R&D and other key functions. Marketers even failed to show up for many key meetings:

At a meeting with Pierce, Clay, and Joseph, I was told that someone from marketing would be attending our team meetings (finally). The meeting also gave me a chance to demonstrate to Joseph that we were getting mixed signals from marketing.

When coordination and support are absent within an organization, people stop believing that they can produce something of high quality. This makes it extremely difficult to maintain a sense of purpose.

Trap 4: Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals'

Management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras encourage organizations to develop a "big, hairy, audacious goal" (BHAG, pronounced bee-hag)-a bold strategic vision statement that has powerful emotional appeal.6 BHAGs help infuse work with meaning by articulating the goals of the organization in a way that connects emotionally with peoples' values. (Think of Google's stated mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.")

At some companies, however, such statements are grandiose, containing little relevance or meaning for people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets. Although we saw this trap clearly in only one of the seven companies we studied, we think it is sufficiently seductive and dangerous to warrant consideration.

That company, a chemicals firm, set a BHAG that all projects had to be innovative blockbusters that would yield a minimum of $100 million in revenue annually, within five years of a project's initiation. This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activities of people in the organization. It did not articulate milestones toward the goal; it did not provide for a range of experiments and outcomes to meet it; worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organization, not to the customer. Far from what Collins and Porras intended, this misbegotten BHAG was helping to destroy the employees' sense of purpose.
Avoiding the traps

Spotting the traps from the executive suite is difficult enough; sidestepping them is harder still-and wasn't the focus of our research. Nonetheless, it's instructive to look at the one company in our study that avoided the traps, a creator of coated fabrics for weatherproof clothing and other applications. We recently interviewed its head, whom we'll call Mark Hamilton. That conversation generated a few ideas that we hope will spark a lively discussion in your own C-suite. For example:

When you communicate with employees, do you provide strategic clarity that's consistent with your organization's capabilities and an understanding of where it can add the most value? Hamilton and his top team believed that innovating in processes, rather than products, was the key to creating the right combination of quality and value for customers. So he talked about process innovation at every all-company meeting, and he steadfastly supported it throughout the organization. This consistency helped everyone understand the strategy and even become jazzed about it.

Can you keep sight of the individual employee's perspective? The best executives we studied internalize their early experiences and use them as reference points for gauging the signals that their own behavior will send to the troops. "Try hard to remember when you were working in the trenches," Hamilton says. "If somebody asked you to do a bunch of work on something they hadn't thought through, how meaningful could it be for you? How committed could you be?"

Do you have any early-warning systems that indicate when your view from the top doesn't match the reality on the ground? Regular audits to gauge the effectiveness of coordination and support processes in areas such as marketing, sales, and purchasing can highlight pain points that demand senior management's attention because they are starting to sap meaning from your people's work. In Hamilton's view, senior executives bear the responsibility for identifying and clearing away systemic impediments that prevent quality work from getting done.

Hamilton's company was doing very well. But we believe that senior executives can provide a sense of purpose and progress even in bad economic times. Consider the situation that then-newly appointed Xerox head Anne Mulcahy faced in 2000, when the company verged on bankruptcy. Mulcahy refused her advisers' recommendation to file for bankruptcy (unless all other options were exhausted) because of the demoralizing signal it would send to frontline employees. "What we have going for us," she said, "is that our people believe we are in a war that we can win."7 She was right, and her conviction helped carry Xerox through four years of arduous struggle to later success.

As an executive, you are in a better position than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organization. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward greatness. Along the way, you may find greater meaning in your own work as a leader.

About the Authors

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher and writer.
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Notes

1 Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, August 2011.

2 See Sangeeta Agrawal, James W. Asplund, James K. Harter, Emily A. Killham, and Frank L. Schmidt, "Causal impact of employee work perceptions on the bottom line of organizations," Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 2010, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 378-89.

3 See Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, "The power of small wins," Harvard Business Review, May 2011, Volume 89, Number 5, pp. 70-80.

4 See Robert Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best . . . and Learn from the Worst, New York: Business Plus, 2010; and Sutton's related article, "Why good bosses tune in to their people," mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2010.

5 Lower-level managers were even less likely to recognize the power of progress: only 5 percent of all survey respondents ranked it first among the five factors we asked about.

6 See James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, "Building your company's vision," Harvard Business Review, September/October 1996, Volume 74, Number 5, pp. 65-77.

7 William W. George and Andrew N. McLean, "Anne Mulcahy: Leading Xerox through the perfect storm (A)," Harvard Business School Case 9-405-050, January 2005.

© Copyright 1992-2012 McKinsey & Company

Most attempts at brainstorming are doomed. To generate better ideas-and boost the odds that your organization will act on them-start by asking better questions.

Companies run on good ideas. From R&D groups seeking pipelines of innovative new products to ops teams probing for time-saving process improvements to CEOs searching for that next growth opportunity-all senior managers want to generate better and more creative ideas consistently in the teams they form, participate in, and manage.

Yet all senior managers, at some point, experience the pain of pursuing new ideas by way of traditional brainstorming sessions-still the most common method of using groups to generate ideas at companies around the world. The scene is familiar: a group of people, often chosen largely for political reasons, begins by listening passively as a moderator (often an outsider who knows little about your business) urges you to "Get creative!" and "Think outside the box!" and cheerfully reminds you that "There are no bad ideas!"

The result? Some attendees remain stone-faced throughout the day, others contribute sporadically, and a few loudly dominate the session with their pet ideas. Ideas pop up randomly-some intriguing, many preposterous-but because the session has no structure, little momentum builds around any of them. At session's end, the group trundles off with a hazy idea of what, if anything, will happen next. "Now we can get back to real work," some whisper.

It doesn't have to be like this. We've led or observed 200 projects over the past decade at more than 150 companies in industries ranging from retailing and education to banking and communications. That experience has helped us develop a practical approach that captures the energy typically wasted in a traditional brainstorming session and steers it in a more productive direction. The trick is to leverage the way people actually think and work in creative problem-solving situations.

We call our approach "brainsteering," and while it requires more preparation than traditional brainstorming, the results are worthwhile: better ideas in business situations as diverse as inventing new products and services, attracting new customers, designing more efficient business processes, or reducing costs, among others. The next time you assign one of your people to lead an idea generation effort-or decide to lead one yourself-you can significantly improve the odds of success by following the seven steps below.

Know your organization's decision-making criteria
One reason good ideas hatched in corporate brainstorming sessions often go nowhere is that they are beyond the scope of what the organization would ever be willing to consider. "Think outside the box!" is an unhelpful exhortation if external circumstances or company policies create boxes that the organization truly must live within.

Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas. Are there any absolute restrictions or limitations, for example? A bank we know wasted a full day's worth of brainstorming because the session's best ideas all required changing IT systems. Yet senior management-unbeknownst to the workshop planners-had recently "locked down" the IT agenda for the next 18 months.

Likewise, what constitutes an acceptable idea? At a different, smarter bank, workshop planners collaborated with senior managers on a highly specific (and therefore highly valuable) definition tailored to meet immediate needs. Good ideas would require no more than $5,000 per branch in investment and would generate incremental profits quickly. Further, while three categories of ideas-new products, new sales approaches, and pricing changes-were welcome, senior management would balk at ideas that required new regulatory approvals. The result was a far more productive session delivering exactly what the company wanted: a fistful of ideas, in all three target categories, that were practical, affordable, and profitable within one fiscal year.

Ask the right questions
Decades of academic research shows that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques ("Go for quantity-the greater the number of ideas, the greater the likelihood of winners!") are inferior to approaches that provide more structure.1 The best way we've found to provide it is to use questions as the platform for idea generation.

In practice, this means building your workshop around a series of "right questions" that your team will explore in small groups during a series of idea generation sessions (more about these later). The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective. Why? Because whenever you look for new ways to attack an old problem-whether it's lowering your company's operating costs or buying your spouse a birthday gift-you naturally gravitate toward thinking patterns and ideas that worked in the past. Research shows that, over time, you'll come up with fewer good ideas, despite increased effort. Changing your participants' perspective will shake up their thinking. (For more on how to do this, see "Sparking creativity in teams: An executive's guide.") The second characteristic of a right question is that it limits the conceptual space your team will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes.

It's easier to show such questions in practice than to describe them in theory. A consumer electronics company looking to develop new products might start with questions such as "What's the biggest avoidable hassle our customers endure?" and "Who uses our product in ways we never expected?" By contrast, a health insurance provider looking to cut costs might ask, "What complexity do we plan for daily that, if eliminated, would change the way we operate?" and "In which areas is the efficiency of a given department ‘trapped' by outdated restrictions placed on it by company policies?"2

In our experience, it's best to come up with 15 to 20 such questions for a typical workshop attended by about 20 people. Choose the questions carefully, as they will form the heart of your workshop-your participants will be discussing them intensively in small subgroups during a series of sessions.

Choose the right people
The rule here is simple: pick people who can answer the questions you're asking. As obvious as this sounds, it's not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart.

Instead, choose participants with firsthand, "in the trenches" knowledge, as a catalog retailer client of ours did for a brainsteering workshop on improving bad-debt collections. (The company had extended credit directly to some customers). During the workshop, when participants were discussing the question "What's changed in our operating environment since we last redesigned our processes?" a frontline collections manager remarked, "Well, death has become the new bankruptcy."

A few people laughed knowingly, but the senior managers in the room were perplexed. On further discussion, the story became clear. In years past, some customers who fell behind on their payments would falsely claim bankruptcy when speaking with a collections rep, figuring that the company wouldn't pursue the matter because of the legal headaches involved. More recently, a better gambit had emerged: unscrupulous borrowers instructed household members to tell the agent they had died-a tactic that halted collections efforts quickly, since reps were uncomfortable pressing the issue.

While this certainly wasn't the largest problem the collectors faced, the line manager's presence in the workshop had uncovered an opportunity. A different line manager in the workshop proposed what became the solution: instructing the reps to sensitively, but firmly, question the recipient of the call for more specific information if the rep suspected a ruse. Dishonest borrowers would invariably hang up if asked to identify themselves or to provide other basic information, and the collections efforts could continue.

Divide and conquer
To ensure fruitful discussions like the one the catalog retailer generated, don't have your participants hold one continuous, rambling discussion among the entire group for several hours. Instead, have them conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of three to five people-no fewer, no more. Each subgroup should focus on a single question for a full 30 minutes. Why three to five people? The social norm in groups of this size is to speak up, whereas the norm in a larger group is to stay quiet.

When you assign people to subgroups, it's important to isolate "idea crushers" in their own subgroup. These people are otherwise suitable for the workshop but, intentionally or not, prevent others from suggesting good ideas. They come in three varieties: bosses, "big mouths," and subject matter experts.

The boss's presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. ("Speak up in front of my boss's boss? No, thanks!") Big mouths take up air time, intimidate the less confident, and give everyone else an excuse to be lazy. Subject matter experts can squelch new ideas because everyone defers to their presumed superior wisdom, even if they are biased or have incomplete knowledge of the issue at hand.

By quarantining the idea crushers-and violating the old brainstorming adage that a melting pot of personalities is ideal-you'll free the other subgroups to think more creatively. Your idea crushers will still be productive; after all, they won't stop each other from speaking up.

Finally, take the 15 to 20 questions you prepared earlier and divide them among the subgroups-about 5 questions each, since it's unproductive and too time consuming to have all subgroups answer every question. Whenever possible, assign a specific question to the subgroup you consider best equipped to handle it.

On your mark, get set, go!
After your participants arrive, but before the division into subgroups, orient them so that your expectations about what they will-and won't-accomplish are clear. Remember, your team is accustomed to traditional brainstorming, where the flow of ideas is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow.

Today, however, each subgroup will thoughtfully consider and discuss a single question for a half hour. No other idea from any source-no matter how good-should be mentioned during a subgroup's individual session. Tell participants that if anyone thinks of a "silver bullet" solution that's outside the scope of discussion, they should write it down and share it later.

Prepare your participants for the likelihood that when a subgroup attacks a question, it might generate only two or three worthy ideas. Knowing that probability in advance will prevent participants from becoming discouraged as they build up the creative muscles necessary to think in this new way. The going can feel slow at first, so reassure participants that by the end of the day, after all the subgroups have met several times, there will be no shortage of good ideas.

Also, whenever possible, share "signpost examples" before the start of each session-real questions previous groups used, along with success stories, to motivate participants and show them how a question-based approach can help.

One last warning: no matter how clever your participants, no matter how insightful your questions, the first five minutes of any subgroup's brainsteering session may feel like typical brainstorming as people test their pet ideas or rattle off superficial new ones. But participants should persevere. Better thinking soon emerges as the subgroups try to improve shallow ideas while sticking to the assigned questions.

Wrap it up
By day's end, a typical subgroup has produced perhaps 15 interesting ideas for further exploration. You've been running multiple subgroups simultaneously, so your 20-person team has collectively generated up to 60 ideas. What now?

One thing not to do is have the full group choose the best ideas from the pile, as is common in traditional brainstorming. In our experience, your attendees won't always have an executive-level understanding of the criteria and considerations that must go into prioritizing ideas for actual investment. The experience of picking winners can also be demotivating, particularly if the real decision makers overrule the group's favorite choices later.

Instead, have each subgroup privately narrow its own list of ideas to a top few and then share all the leading ideas with the full group to motivate and inspire participants. But the full group shouldn't pick a winner. Rather, close the workshop on a high note that participants won't expect if they're veterans of traditional brainstorming: describe to them exactly what steps will be taken to choose the winning ideas and how they will learn about the final decisions.

Follow up quickly
Decisions and other follow-up activities should be quick and thorough. Of course, we're not suggesting that uninformed or insufficiently researched conclusions should be reached about ideas dreamed up only hours earlier. But the odds that concrete action will result from an idea generation exercise tend to decline quickly as time passes and momentum fades.

The president, provost, and department heads of a US university, for example, announced before a brainsteering workshop that a full staff meeting would be held the morning after it to discuss the various cost-savings ideas it had generated. At the meeting, the senior leaders sorted ideas into four buckets: move immediately to implementation planning, decide today to implement at the closest appropriate time (say, the beginning of the next academic year), assign a group to research the idea further, or reject right away. This process went smoothly because the team that ran the idea generation workshop had done the work up front to understand the criteria senior leaders would use to judge its work. The university began moving ahead on more than a dozen ideas that would ultimately save millions of dollars.

To close the loop with participants, the university made sure to communicate the results of the decisions quickly to everyone involved, even when an idea was rejected. While it might seem demoralizing to share bad news with a team, we find that doing so actually has the opposite effect. Participants are often desperate for feedback and eager for indications that they have at least been heard. By respectfully explaining why certain ideas were rejected, you can help team members produce better ideas next time. In our experience, they will participate next time, often more eagerly than ever.

Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow. By scrapping these traditional techniques for a more focused, question-based approach, senior managers can consistently coax better ideas from their teams.
About the Authors

Kevin Coyne and Shawn Coyne, both alumni of McKinsey's Atlanta office, are cofounders and managing directors of the Coyne Partnership, a boutique strategy consulting firm. This article is adapted from their book, Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas (HarperCollins, March 2011).
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Notes

1 For two particularly useful academic studies on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional brainstorming, see Paul A. Mongeau, The Brainstorming Myth, Annual Meeting of the Western States Communication Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 15, 1993; and Frederic M. Jablin and David R. Seibold, "Implications for problem solving groups of empirical research on ‘brainstorming': A critical review of the literature," Southern Speech Communication Journal, 1978, Volume 43, Number 4, pp. 327-56.

2 For a full discussion about identifying and using a portfolio of such right questions in the generation of personal and institutional ideas, see Brainsteering, the book from which this article is adapted, as well as Patricia Gorman Clifford, Kevin P. Coyne, and Renée Dye, "Breakthrough thinking from inside the box," Harvard Business Review, December 2007, Volume 85, Number 12, pp. 70-78.

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Innovate or die

From Ford and General Motors 100 years ago to Google today, management models can provide great competitive advantage. In the past, companies found scientific and organisational models, which enabled them to mass-produce products faster and more cheaply or to organise global businesses more efficiently.

Today companies such as Google appear to have found new ways to mine the human potential of their staff in more effective ways than before. What is the essence of management innovation? How can companies capture it?

It is to answer questions such as these that Professor Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School joined forces with Professor Gary Hamel and others to form the Management Innovation Lab. In the next few years the Lab will be working with companies to encourage experiments in new management processes and methods. By working together Birkinshaw believes they will "co-create" management innovation that could encourage others to develop their own models suited to their needs. World Business talks to Professor Birkinshaw about the search for management innovation

What is the Management Innovation Lab for?

Our goal is to create a movement whereby our corporate and strategic partners all over the world do innovative work around the nature of management with a view that this will not only have a big impact for the companies involved but also that it will create some sort of collective groundswell of change.

What's the reaction so far?

Every company we talk to is tantalised. They say it is interesting. But many of them ask question such as, ‘Well I can see that management innovation has helped some companies at some points in time but how is it going to help me?' ‘What is the precise problem you are going to solve?' It's not easy to answer them because we are saying first of all that management innovation is not the solution. Management innovation is the set of tools and ideas that can be applied to any number of problems - not all problems, but a large number of problems. It can be around employee engagement. It can be around making yourself more innovative in the product sense. It can be about increasing your adaptability and resistance to problems. Once you have got over that problem with the companies, they will ask me, ‘Well, what will it look like?' And of course we can't tell them the solution because the whole point is we are using them to co-create something new. So all we can do is point to examples of either things we've been involved in or things that we've seen other companies do.

Don't companies die naturally when they have ceased to be competitive?

We know companies go through lifecycles; we know that many companies reach that stage in their life where they become big and slow-moving. And many of them survive for decades purely on the basis of inertia. GM is the classic example of this and yet that comes at enormous cost in terms of layoffs, bureaucracy and a lack of enthusiasm. The big question is, can we reignite the passion? And you and anyone else have a right to be sceptical as to whether this is possible. But I think it is a battle worth fighting for. The alternative of letting these companies just fade away is just too horrible to contemplate.

Can companies live forever then?

I'm a great believer in the laws of nature, the Darwinian view that a company should only exist when it is continuing to do a good job. As I look over industries I see new companies supplanting old companies and that's exactly as it should be. But if I'm advising one of the old companies, my tone shifts away from fatalism and moves towards the big question: What can you do to reinvent yourself? There are companies who have reinvented themselves. IBM is the classic example. It was close to oblivion 15 years ago and then it reinvented itself as this monstrous IT services company. We have to strip away the empirical reality of creative destruction and do what we can to help those dinosaurs invent anew.

How can companies release the full force of human imagination?

We know that when people work in small companies they have enormous passion. We know that when people work on projects of their own choosing they do it with enormous passion. And the flip side is that by and large when we are stuck in a factory working as one cog in the system we don't bring much passion to work. Of course there are certain jobs that will never be ones that develop passion. It's hard to imagine a self-organised call-centre, for instance. Because calls come in, they have to be distributed and someone has to answer them. We can make those factories less soul-destroying but ultimately there will always be factories.

What type of management model gets more out of people?

I think the idea that people create their own projects, and those projects are defined by who chooses to cluster around them rather than teams being allocated from above, is very alluring. Eden McCallum, a new management consultancy based in London is a beautiful example of this new model. It's a virtual organisation. They semi-employ a bunch of freelancers on one side and they have a bunch of client relationships on the other. Their job is essentially to help their clients create project teams out of their network of freelancers. So no longer are you a consultant being allocated to another job this week. Instead you are invited to put your name forward if you are interested in the project. Obviously once that project happens, you've essentially chosen your own job. I like to think of it in terms of flipping the responsibility around to that of the individual where they are making their own choices. Because when we make our own choices we are much more likely to pursue them with the passion.

What reward structures do you need for this?

I believe if you get the model right then the financial reward is almost irrelevant. You have to reach a level of financial reward where people feel they are getting a just return for their efforts - that they are being treated equitably. I used to do a lot of work in the area of corporate venturing. And they used to argue that you needed to reward people in corporate venturing departments in the way that private equity or venture capitalists are rewarded. Well this is nonsense because they made the decision to work for a company. They were not mortgaging their house for the risks being taken. All those people need would be to get a fair salary plus some bonus on the upside. And they're happy with that.

How do you train managers for 21st century management?

The first thing we need to do [to change an outdated mindset] is to start at home in the MBA world. I teach an elective course on management innovation, which the students sometimes find very frustrating. They have just taken 18 months of a standard MBA course. And then suddenly I say to them, actually all of those rules you were just taught are nothing more than traditions, hypotheses or ways of working that may or may not be right but certainly are not inviolable laws. And I say, everything's up for grabs. The way that we hire people, the way we allocate resources, all of these things can and should be challenged. They love the course. It is self-selecting of course. They wouldn't take the course if they weren't already mavericks by nature. My ambition is to say, let's bring some of this stuff right in at the beginning of the MBA. We need to teach them the way the world currently works so that they can live in that world, but we also need to teach them how to challenge the rules.

What kind of leader makes management innovation happen?

What I've discovered is that you tend to get a few enlightened senior people who say that in order to legitimate a new management technique we need to tie it to our key performance indicators (KPIs). I've seen companies do this. And at least one company has adopted it in its official metrics. The alternative is in a Google or a 3M where it has just become so basic to the culture that it is accepted. There are two very different ways of looking at management innovation. One is to say there are the Googles who grow up that way, it is in their DNA. And the other way is where you change the practices within existing companies. For instance, UBS did this and made dramatic strides in its wealth-management business. It basically eliminated the whole budgeting process in this business division because it was getting in the way of growth. And it switched to ‘I can invest what I like as long as I am held accountable for what I invest', instead of ‘I will negotiate the budget with my manager'.

What was the catalyst for the change at UBS?

It needed to find a new way of growing. And a very enlightened boss - Marcel Rohner who is now the chief executive of UBS Group - gathered the group together and said, ‘Let's look at what the biggest blockers are'. Budgeting emerged as the single biggest blocker to growth. So it took an incredibly creative approach. This is what it is all about. Rather than building practices that GE or Proctor & Gamble have employed, for example, you have to have the courage to develop your own model and stick with it.

Will Google become old management one day?

As new practices emerge they rarely completely supplant the old practices. The old layers are still there but on the surface there are new elements, which reflect more modern ways of thinking. As Google evolves it will pick up many of the traditional traits of many large companies. There are certain aspects of being big that cause you to create more rules and hierarchy. But my hope is that, first of all, it will retain a lot of the new DNA that has made it what it is and, secondly, of course some of those principles it has have pioneered will also be layered into traditional organisations.

Is there enough variety in management thinking?

The trouble with management is that if you look at the number of different management courses that are out there it's actually very difficult to find variety. You'd expect small Indian and Chinese companies coming onto the world stage for the first time to be managed differently. But when you scratch under the surface you find that Western consultants, lawyers and accountants have advised them. They're all picking up our bad practices. So actually it's quite hard to find companies with innovative management models such as Google or Semco (a Brazilian firm owned by Ricardo Semler), which are genuinely doing something that is different. So most of their wacky management models won't survive. But little bits of them will.

Is Apple a management innovator?

Obviously Apple is brilliant at a lot of things. Certainly I remember in the heyday of Apple in the 80s it was doing some very innovative things around management. The original Macintosh team was a classic example of a skunk works (teams working on new ideas). Is Apple's management model today innovative? I don't know that it is. It is not just Steve Jobs but a collection of incredibly clever and insightful people who are leading the charge.

Are companies like Apple over-dependent on charismatic leaders?

There is a very important point there. You can't rely forever on one or two charismatic people because sooner or later they run out of good ideas or they fall under a bus or whatever. So you need to find some way to institutionalise the Steve Jobs way, for instance. What you are trying to do is almost codify the essence of his maverick style and trying to create a company around that. And it's possible Apple does that. Certainly Google has got elements of that maverick quality that says ‘we will encourage people to bet big'.

What is the essence of management innovation?

We need to be much more open to ideas, try lots of new things and be prepared to fail quickly and often.

How do you encourage your people to be open-minded?

It's a massive issue. At the individual level we climb up a hierarchical system, reach some level of power and we know in our minds what we should be doing now is giving up an awful lot of that power. Because the "Wisdom of the Crowd" tells us that the people below us are far more likely to come to a good decision collectively than I am. So everything analytically is telling us we should be giving up power and everything our experience tells us makes us want to hang on to that power. Former UK prime minister Tony Blair did the right thing when he gave up interest-rate power to the Bank of England just after coming to office in 1997. This turned out to be one of Labour's most lasting policies on the British economy. Clearly it helped in Mr Blair's case that he had committed the government to giving up power before getting it. It is far harder to give it up after you get a taste of power.

Can you think of a company that has institutionalised a maverick model?

Larry Huston from Proctor & Gamble became quite famous for the company's ‘connect and develop' model [that builds R&D communication networks between insiders at P&G and thousands of scientists outside]. What it did was to institutionalise it. Rather than get into the mindset of one individual, P&G institutionalised it by building a set of systems that gave P&G access to an enormous number of people: scientists from around the world. It created structures inside the company that almost mandated the use of those systems. It allied this with the very visible goal set by P&G's chief executive AG Lafley - which was that 50% of its new ideas should come at least in part from outside. So in order to fight that natural predisposition to hoard power it created a whole infrastructure to mandate the use of external