Non linear management – fostering creativity / design driven development

Please read the first post on the subject of non linear management before continuing.

Level 2 of this journey starts with learning how to setup an environment that would catalyze creativity. In other words, we’re going to talk about design driven development and most importantly, how to actually implement it in a corporate environment.

There has been a lot of hype these past days about the launch of iPad and Apple’s decisions on this product. Whether or not this will be a successful device, it remains to be seen. However, the whole process of getting it to the market is really appealing. They are and have always been trend setters, and that is the basic, most important feature of design driven development. The idea behind it is very simple. Don’t use the old way, of market driven development, in which each new product or feature is a direct response of market needs. Instead, get a team of experts, create a community of requirements gathering – whether a closed or open one, whether a linear of hierarchical one, and use that to TELL your future customers what they want, give them what YOU think they need. It’s like going to a hotel and finding a free bottle of water on the table each day. You would never think to ask for/wish something like this, but if it’s there, your reaction towards that hotel is definitely more positive. Thus, you are in the avant-garde of creation, of satisfying your customers, and last but not least, of CREATING NEW NEEDS.

Onto the management side now. How do you foster creativity? There are a few steps to get there, the first one being a constant asker. You ask and encourage people to ask. Second, you must create an environment for idea sharing. Starbucks (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/) has a really appealing web application for doing just that. Now, it depends on the profile of your company if you adopt an open system like Starbucks did, or just use it internally, in the company and trusted partners sphere. What should be noted about such apps is that they provide an autonomous system for automatically selecting the best ideas (people vote on other people’s ideas), it encourages the employees to thinks (because you offer some sort of motivational bonuses for good ideas, not in money, but in any other benefit package – be creative) and you get an in-depth view on how your users/employees are feeling about the product/company. But what Starbucks lacks and you should implement, is also a system in which it’s not enough to come up with a good idea, but you also need to find a way to implement it – all in an open-collaborative manner. So X can come up with the idea, Y can modify it and X and Z find a way to implement it.

Doing the above mentioned is of extreme importance, because you posses the ability to harness the knowledge of the product your employees have, combined to their own views, as outsiders, as users of your product, or other competitor products. They are also aware of what their families, their friends think. Why spent a huge amount of money researching market needs, when you can have the best of both worlds at your fingertips, for free.

In your process of becoming a better manager, you must also learn about how your employee schema is structured. There are many classification criteria, but I’m going to stop on the level of imagination. Thus, there are 2 types of employees: workers and dreamers. A worker is the person who does its job without thinking of improving anything. He’s just there to do a job, collect a pay check, etc. There are a lot of people in this category, the hard working ones, the lazy ones, etc., what’s important is that they never think of anything related to improving the company. You must listen to them first and you must ALWAYS take their point into consideration. The reason for doing this is that they don’t provide feedback unless they have a real problem that prevents them from fulfilling their duties. So you need to act and act fast.
The dreamers on the other hand should be treated the other way around. Whenever a new idea pops up and starts to be promoted through the system mentioned above, leave it for some time to mature. The persons who came up with it will feel a bit frustrated, thus they’ll think it over and most probably improve it or realize it was a stupid idea in the first place. In each case, you’ll end up with only the brightest, practical ideas possible.

Last, but not least, in order for the system to work, you must always share your objectives to everybody, and also share each person’s work with all the other employees in the company. It’s like when you’re painting - your feet don’t need to know anything about what your hands are doing. But if you’re climbing a tree, the whole system has to be self aware.. this is the proper, holistic view in management.

In the end, the bad manager example: the company had 2 products, one focused on old users and the other, a newer one, focused on fresh users. It was decided to add a really innovative feature to one of the products, and the first one was chosen, because it generated the most revenue. There were a lot of people in the company that had something else to say, but they couldn’t, as that was not encouraged and neither did they have the means to do it. The result was a massive failure, not because the new feature was bad, but because it disrupted the old users, that are usually reluctant to change. Should the managers have listened, they would’ve learned that a feature like that would only appeal to active people, that actively selected a product (like it was the case for the second one) or the other, not the conservative ones, which stick to what they already have and know.

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