Observation and imagination

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... in a nutshell, [this] was Lenonardo's signature talent: the ability to convey, by marrying observation with imagination, "not only the works of nature but also infinite things nature never created"

Walter Isaacson in his history "Lenonardo da Vinci"

And, how many of us have Lenonardo's instincts of observation -- on the one hand -- which are then drivers for something unimagined?

• How would you handle a Lenonardo on your team? (Did I mention his total disregard for schedule; his somewhat arrogant approach to customers; and the fact he finished modestly few projects)
• How does your stuffy project office handle the imagination thing, one might ask? (I'm sure observations are just fine in the PMO)

In an earlier posting on Leonardo, I quoted another historian:

Alas! This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning. ... In his imagination, he frequently formed enterprises so difficult and so subtle that they could not be realized and worthily executed by human hands. His conceptions were varied to infinity

On the other hand, speaking of ".... conceptions varied to infinity". Is that all bad?

• Who knew we needed a smart phone before someone imagined it? 
• And, thousands of other examples over history, probably going back to the bow and arrow -- and before (See: imagining ancient pyramids, and yes, some of them were used for grain storage to buffer bad harvests)

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The originals --- creative thinkers

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Not necessarily first we learn, but certainly be the best and be different

In a TED talk, Adam Grant opines on what qualities or habits there are to look for in "the originals" -- as he calls them -- that lead to creatively different successes

Grant finds three habits:

1. Modest procrastination: not pre-crastinators for sure -- those working far ahead of schedule -- but not so late as to be out of it either.
2. Fearful of not trying; doubtful of the default
3. Prolific with ideas, even as most of them will be bad

Grant concludes that such habits won't necessarily get you there first. So, if you are the project manager, don't be too obsessed with getting to market first. Just be different, and the best, when you do get there. Remember My Space was well into the market when Facebook came along, etc 

 

And, the worst thing is to not try; the next worst thing is to accept the default or status quo.

 

Be prolific! Lots and lots of ideas -- all but one won't make it. So what? You only need one!

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Risk management: we don't make policy

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From General Mike Hayden's memoir (paraphrasing from pg 428)

Imagine two doors to the same room: One labeled risk manager; the other labeled visionary.
Though the risk manager's door, entry is for the inductive thinker:

• I've got the facts; now I need to connect the dots to reveal a generality or integrating narrative

Through the visionary's door, entry is for the deductive thinker:

• I've got the vision; I'm confident the facts and dots needed for implementation will emerge

And, consider this:

• Pessimists with facts enter through the risk manager's door
• Optimists with business-as-we-want-it enter through the visionary's door

Then what happens?
Each needs to find the other. In the best of situations, they meet in the middle of the room where there is buffer space and flexibility.

Risk management does not establish the vision, set any policy, or necessarily decide anything; it only sets the left and right hand boundaries which arise from the generalities devined from the observable facts. The space in between the boundaries is where the visionary gets to do their envisioning, and decision maker's get to do the deciding.

Sound familiar? I hope so. You'll find a similar explanation known as the "project balance sheet" in my book in Chapter 6 of "Maximizing Project Value: A project manager's guide". In that metaphor, the right side is for the fact-based inductive manager; the left side is for the deductive visionary. And, since those two never agree fully, there is a gap between the inductive and deductive.

And the gap is where the risk is. And who is the risk manager? The PM and the project team -- not the visionary (after all, they have no facts; facts are behind the other door!)

And, that's why we pay the PMO the big bucks: to manage the risk!

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Innovation or efficiency

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For F.W. Taylor, the scientific management guy, success was to be found in efficiency. He was the guy with the process stop watch and the job descriptions. But recently, efficiency has given way to innovation, even in PM. Traditional methods, honed and efficient, have been displaced by agile and empirical methods, not particularly efficient they are, but resilient with failure, to be sure.

WW II  and innovation
Now, it may seem that a war that ended some 60 years ago this summer is a bit distant to connect to contemporary dots. But no! WW II ushered profound changes into the culture and society of the United States that is fuel for the innovation fire.

• WW II empowered 50% of our workforce for the first time. Women entered the workforce in large numbers doing jobs never open to them before. They have never looked back
  
  WW II beget the 'GI Bill' that sent millions to college and all but invented the modern middle class from which yet more innovation, inventiveness, and entrepreneurship has arisen.
  

The scope of WW II projects was unprecedented, leading to the military-industrial complex that defined and codified program management, system engineering, risk management, analog simulation, and a host of other project practices heretofore unknown or undefined.

• WW II unleashed innovation as no other world event. The modern research university was empowered. During the war, the laboratories at MIT and CalTech and Stanford were at the forefront of new ideas, inventions, and applications. Since then, a multitude of research universities have been drivers of the innovation explosion in the United States.
• Although the war drove atomic science, atomic science drove quantum mechanics, an understanding of the sub-atomic structure. From this we have all manner of semiconductors that have in turn been the underpinning of the information age.

Throughput won the war
The enormous industrialization of WW II all but put defined process control on the map. Repeatable process and process control gave us unprecedented throughput. Who knew you could build 55K ships and 600K aircraft in four years?

And now, we have "throughput accounting" which many say is the only way to value projects: the value is in the "add", ignoring the infrastructure and permanent staff sustaining cost that gets allocated into the project overhead.

The "good" war?
It sounds like "...there's nothing like a good war".  But that's not the case.  The emergency of warfare has always raised the bar.

Before the U.S. civil war in the mid 19th century, railroads as a means for tactical support for forces was unheard of; so also electronic messaging ... the telegraph in those days ... changed not only the timeliness of reporting, it changed forever the influence of "high command" on the tactics of the moment.

What we can say:
Innovation, as a consequence of great national emergency, is the sidebar that always gets a boost.

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Choose your box

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Do you buy this idea from Mark Chussil?

A box is a frame, a paradigm, a habit, a perspective, a silo, a self-imposed set of limits; a box is context and interpretation.

We cannot think outside boxes. We can, though, choose our boxes.
We can even switch from one box to another to another.

Boxes get dangerous when they get obvious, like oft-told stories that harden into cultural truth. Letting a box rust shut is a blunder not of intention but of inattention.

Boxes are invisible until we look for them.

In other words: driving yourself to think "outside the box" is a box onto itself. The "outside box" is a box --- gasp!

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Mathematicians hard at work

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I love this image -- But, it comes with some baggage which you can read about here.

I've not yet got an application for it in the program management domain, so perhaps it's just art for the blogger to gaze at.
 

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Robotic PMP?

We learned recently (on a 60 Minutes broadcast) that robotic assembly of cars in the United States happens at an equivalent labor rate of about $4/hr, and the quality is all but flawless.

In other industries, like warehouse management and distribution, the results are almost as startling. At that rate, no wonder manufacturing is returning from overseas... but without the jobs attached -- they go to robots.

Really, anything that is structured and can be described with procedural instructions and criteria is amenable to robots; but we saw in IBM's WATSON project that 'big data' analysis is also amenable to machine processing.

Project robotics
So, what about projects, and more to the point, project jobs? There is already a track record:

• Automated testing robots have been around for decades; they are better now, and methods like Agile depend upon them
• Likewise, there have been code writing robotic programs for a long time
• Spreadsheet macros have been doing work for 30 years
• Assembly robots of various types are used to construct hardware prototypes and pre-production project models and proof of concept models

On the other hand, the true thinking jobs are not in danger... yet! But what about CAD programs? How 'auto' is AutoCad? With libraries of modular stuff, CAD programs can/will be able to come up with some unique stuff, though I'm not sure today's Steve Jobs is endangered. The creative stuff still needs creators. But then the robotic possibilities take over.

Certainly a lot of project administration can be robotically handled... it's very procedural and repetitive. And, some structured analysis is similarly a candidate.

Cost-quality-productivity
The fact is that our industry, like all others, will be constantly pushed for productivity, quality, and lower cost, all in the same package. Presumably that's what agile is about; that's what all manner of streamlining is about in DoD (several years ago almost all the MIL specifications were dropped in favor of ANSI and other industry standards); and that's what other process control paradigms are about as they are applied further up the intellectual food chain.

Robotics will push the bar on acceptable quality, even in one-offs. The ISO requirements will tighten, even as applied to projects... and, customers will not want to pay a differential price for this. In this regard, Moore's Law is at work -- half the price for twice as much

Maybe we should all be re-reading Clayton Christensen!

In part, the defensive strategy is offensive in nature: constantly engage in personal improvement; in effect, never stop learning, inquiring, expanding your repertoire.

++++++++++

And, Georgia Tech strikes back at 60 Minutes! In a rebuttal, researcher Henrik I. Christensen, the Kuka Chair of Robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing, asserts that in the balance, in the longer term, robotics brings more jobs than not.

Indeed, the United States remains the largest manufacturing nation by dollar value of goods. We read that "....two chief executives of small American manufacturers described how they had been able to both increase employment and compete against foreign companies by relying heavily on automation and robots". And, this is at the heart of the on-shoring return of manufacturing to the U.S. from low cost labor centers abroad.

A similar theme was struck a few days later by a three part series in the Washington Post.

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Storyboards

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A great technique for writing proposals, papers, or books -- as I do a lot -- is to storyboard the ideas.

My favorite expression: "If you can't draw it, you can't write it!"

Here's Einstein on the same idea:

I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes and I may try to express it in words afterwards

If you're not a storyboard person, check out this website for insight...

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Brainstorming--who knew?

Boy, did I miss the memo on this one! Who knew?

There's just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn't work

Jonah Lehrer: "Imagine"

According to researcher Keith Sawyer of Washington University:

.... brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and then pool their ideas

Now, what's going on here? Since the 1940's, brainstorming--an invention more or less of Alex Osborn--has been touted as the way to get new ideas surfaced. The Osborn formula is famous for being non-confrontational:

• The first rule is "no criticism"; and
• The second rule is "everyone contributes"

But others, famously at Microsoft and Pixar, have gone the other way: everyone contributes but everyone is subject to critique and challenge. Lehrer says: "the acceptance of error reduces its cost", meaning that when you know the group will correct your errors you are less prone to avoidance.

In other words, criticism and debate is the stimulate of new ideas according to work done at UC-Berkeley by researcher Charlan Nemeth. In effect, critical inspection by others drives engagement, improvement, and innovation.

Perhaps as important is informal follow-up, is the communication by osmosis that Alistair Cockburn talks about. And, this in turn is stimulated by more open spaces and areas for informal collaboration.

In any event, to return to the top, it's not that brainstorming doesn't work, it's that the Osborne formulation of "lets all be friends" doesn't get the stuff out.

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Another post on Kano Method

I gave a recent presentation on the Kano Model as applied to the business case for new product development.  I put the charts on slideshare.net.  You can also find my Kano presentation for agile practitioners there also.

If you are interested in more detail, here is a good presentation by a different author of the model with a lot of narrative on definitions.

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Defining creativity

Every project manager is challenged with finding 'creative solutions' to project requirements.  Certainly over the last generation, practitioners have been admonished to 'think outside the box'; manager's have been warned to value the new and unique.

[The 'establishment' always resists a challenge to conventional orthodoxy.  See Einstein, A. for the year 1905]

In a recent article in a national publication, and on a follow-up panel show on PBS, creativity was defined [again, since there are many definitions].

Creativity is production of something original and useful, ..... To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

As discussed by the panelists, creativity arises from synthesis of known facts or ideas in ways heretofore not known. As such, creative people must be aware of, or have knowledge of,  facts and ideas in order to create a new synthesis. Obviously, project managers can have a big affect here: assembling facts, or providing access to ideas, to drive creativity within the project scope [and budget, etc] is something we managers can do, even if we ourselves are challenged for right-brain function.

As project managers, we face these questions:
1. Can creative people be reliably identified?
2. Can creativity be taught, and therefore, learned as a means to develop project resources?
3. Is there a project protocol to evaluate a new and unique narrative to connect a known set of dots?
4. How do you fit innovation, the practical implementation of creativity, into budget estimates?

The general conclusion from the cited references is yes to 1 and 2: there are nationally recognized and accepted tests for creativity aptitude, and there are ways to influence and stimulate creative solutions.  [Step 1: move away from rote recitation of 'how we did it before']

Beware the timeline, however. Some research shows that constant immersion in creative activity actually changes brain physiology. So that would suggest that consistently creative people started young, but that also means that physiology once developed may be a life-long capability [there's a place for senior citizens over 40!]. It also suggests [at least to me] that many creative people have there best years when they are young and the brain is most pliable. [See Gates, W. III for 1980's]

As for 3 and 4, protocols that anticipate innovative solutions from creative ideas that are practical and proven by experience are more problematic.

• Spiral methods provide allowance for creativity. 
• Deming's PDCA cycle anticipates an opportunity to think creatively--that is, to synthesize a new narrative from the facts--as part of  'Check-Act'.  
• To provide innovation is one of the motivations for agile methods.  

But regardless of methodology, projects of necessity have limited windows for creativity when the scope-resource-quality-time dependencies are open for debate and for shaping.  Of course, agile methods protocols to stretch the window openings, but in the end "someone has to pay for this stuff", so even agilists must limit creativity.

Photo credit: Newsweek on-line, July 10, 2010

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