Lewis Carroll, in his book, straight through the looking Glass, has Humpty Dumpty smugly intone, 'Whenever I use a word it means exactly what I select it to mean, nothing more and nothing less.' Such seems to be the case whenever the topics of improvement and innovation are discussed.
Improvement means whatever the one who wants it to happen wants it to mean. It could mean doing what's being done now to a greater degree of efficiency or speed or detail. In other words, 'do what you're doing now 'only better.' It could also mean that something else altogether needs to be done instead of or in increasing to what's being done now. In any case, improvement is intimately connected with measurable outcomes that can be compared with former outcomes to determine degrees of organizational and/or personal amelioration or deterioration.
Innovation
The means of accomplishing any outcome is called process. It is generally thought that organizational outcomes are inextricably interwoven with the processes that produce them. Poor processes cause poor outcomes, mighty processes cause mighty outcomes, and so on. As the process goes, so goes the outcome. With this reasoning, all one would have to do to heighten the outcome is to heighten the process in some way. Although this approach can work, it often takes a long time and gives up as much as it gains in process efficiencies, workplace morale and laborer commitment to fully implementing process changes.
This mechanistic view of improvement has been a long time in development. Culturally acceptable notions about human nature and behavior have contributed strongly to the idea that improvement in life's outcomes is causally effected by process ' more particularly, the right process. If an outcome is not what is wanted or expected it means that the right process has yet to be discovered. straight through persistent and diligent effort, at last the definite process will be found and the result outcomes achieved.
Many readers will be aware of the 'hierarchy of needs' (figure 1) industrialized by the psychologist, Abraham Maslow. In it, Maslow identified what he saw as the incremental needs-based structure of human existence and fulfillment. It began at the lowest with primal needs such as water, air and other survival requirements and moved up to the top which he called, 'synergy,' or the need to have things working well in all areas of life. Maslow's model did not allow for skipping a step in the quest for experiencing deeper levels of humanness. For example, one couldn't go to the third level without having the first two fulfilled and predictably secured, and so on up the ladder. For Maslow, there was a definite process straight through which an individual had to go in order to grow and caress greater dimensions of human fulfillment.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs
The upper needs (Esteem, Self-Actualization and Synergy) are more complex, less immediate and therefore 'weaker' in their demands on psychic and emotional energy.
The lower needs (Belongingness/Love, protection and Survival) are less complex, more immediate and therefore 'stronger' in their demands on psychic and emotional energy.
Synergy: the need to have things working well in all areas of life
Self-Actualization: the need to found one's unique capacities
Esteem: the need to be very regarded by self and others
Belongingness/Love: the need to be accepted, liked and loved
Safety: the need to be derive and protected
Survival: the need for air, food and water
Just as accomplishing desired organizational outcomes is seen as a matter of going straight through the definite process so, too, personal fulfillment is seen as a matter of following the right process. Personal and organizational improvement becomes connected with planning, strategizing and manipulating the process.
This is a linear view of cause and result and doesn't actively take into catalogue the fact that processes don't happen all by themselves. citizen perform processes. citizen possess power beyond any process that animates behavior toward creative and surprising outcomes. citizen are the wind, the spirit (in Greek, the same word, pneuma, is used for both wind and spirit) that blows invisibly within and among human organizations and cannot be predicted, channeled or contained.
People can bring the inanimate structures of process to life by breathing into them the spirit of their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Process is merely a skeleton that holds an club together structurally; it is citizen who select either to put flesh on the skeleton and imbue it with vitality, meaning and significance or to allow it to remain a lifeless, empty shell.
If citizen select to permeate the club with life, then poor processes would not necessarily be a hindrance to achieving improved outcomes. While it is true that an able and willing someone who is trapped working in poor processes will find it difficult to heighten her performance, and therefore organizational outcomes, it is not impossible to do so. Willing and able persons will not allow poor processes to come to be an excuse for not doing any best on the job. They will actively and creatively seek out ways to heighten their performance and outcomes by changing, even if only slightly, the way they think about and do their work. In doing so, they move beyond the processes themselves enriching them with innovative ('outside the process box') approaches and applications.
We are now beginning to found an insight of innovation. If a turn in the process is the only way citizen are allowed to turn their job activities, the wind of the creative spirit will blow to result changes beyond the process. While improvement has to do with measurable outcomes of a process, innovation has to do with freedom from the implicit and explicit constraints of a process. Process mental tends to channel thoughts and operation along predetermined psychic and behavioral pathways. Innovation occurs when connections are made between self-evident thoughts, ideas or entities and those that are not part of the mental scenery created by the existing process.
By way of example, Forbes magazine is mailing the September 2000 edition to its more than 800,000 subscribers with bar codes on every page where an advertiser's web site appears. With the magazine they will be sending, free of charge, a scanning pen and computer software that will enable readers to passage the specific web page identified by the bar code by sliding the electronic pen over it. This gives the advertiser the opening to furnish detailed facts about their products and services in a way that they could not in the magazine. This is an innovative way of manufacture a association between two distinct forms of media (physical and virtual) and merging them technologically into a complimentary theory of facts delivery. Up to this point, the two forms of media were thought to be in direct competition, mutually excluding each other from their respective goal of developing shop share and buyer loyalty.
Innovation occurs most unquestionably whenever citizen are engaged unselfconsciously in an caress that consumes their attentiveness by engaging their skills, knowledge, attitude, beliefs, values and/or self-image. Such an caress is enjoyable and fulfilling unquestionably because it places unusual demands on the faculties and skills of the individual. while such times, one is unaware of personal needs and either or not they have been or are being met. There is no distraction; no diversion is potential ' the only thing that matters is the caress itself. Afterward, the individual becomes more fulfilled and faultless with a sense of well being and wholeness. A tasteless term for this optimal caress of life is flow.
In a New York Times Book retell of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's The psychology of Optimal Experience, (March, 1990), the unnamed author states:
'As a theory of optimal experience, flow is a big improvement over Abraham Maslow's thought of self-actualization. Maslow regarded optimal experiences as frosting on the cake of life, potential only after one had met material needs for protection and security. Maslow's beloved idea that basic needs must be met before citizen can pursue 'higher order' needs for self-fulfillment has never been validated by research. On the contrary, many citizen who experience poverty, tragedy, and abuse nonetheless conduct to find contentment and fulfillment.'
Flow experiences result in innovation because they serve to reframe the 'world as it is' and recast the meaning and significance of the 'way things are.' Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation was correct: 'Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea it can never conveniently return to its customary shape.' Flow extends the range of what one sees as potential ' and cheap ' to accomplish. It expands the percipient connections between prevailing reality and those things that at first appear to threaten that reality.
During and after a flow experience, a someone will begin to see interrelationships between opposites. As an example, a painful memory that has all the time produced the emotion of hate can now also be seen as having provided an anchor caress for learning how love can overcome hate. Flow allows a perspective removed from the confines of the caress itself and helps the individual to both see and feel a bigger reality ' one in which all things have relationships not ordinarily perceived.
Flow can be experienced by whatever at any time under any circumstances. All that is required is a engaging situation for the individual and a willingness to meet the challenge. Such are the only conditions for fostering an environment in which citizen can effortlessly caress flow in their lives and thereby most unquestionably be visited by innovative thoughts and ideas. The task is to nurture an environment that provides challenges to individuals at their respective levels of skill and competence without splendid or frightening them into inaction.
My cousin welds together the iron and steel skeletons of skyscrapers in Chicago. His work is hazardous, to say the least, as it takes him many hundreds of feet above the ground treading on windswept girders no wider than a sidewalk. Whenever I'm in a high-rise building, such as the Sears Tower observation deck, looking down on the ant-like world below, I get a tickling sensation all straight through my body even though I know I'm safe behind reinforced walls and windows. Just mental about being that high without such protection surrounding me fills me with fear and trembling.
I asked him one day how he could do such work without fear of falling. He nonchalantly replied, 'When you walk on a sidewalk you don't think about falling off, do you' When I'm high in the air walking on a girder, in my mind I'm walking on a sidewalk on level ground. It never even occurs to me that I might fall off.' I had never thought about his work in such terms. It caused me to think still further about how any of us conduct to do difficult things: we do difficult things by not dwelling on the difficulties we associate with unquestionably doing them!
Challenges in the workplace can be exhilarating or they can be terrifying. What my cousin had done to meet the challenges of his job was to mentally 'recontextualize' the process of his job. The general context of his job was high off the ground walking along slender beams of iron and steel. When he was in the process of doing his job, however, he chose to do it within a distinct mental context ' one that allowed him best operate over his job tasks by eliminating his fear of failing (falling) on the job. This enabled him to caress a high degree of freedom from the potential constraints of the processes of his job. In fact, he was able to devise a welding technique that reduced the amount of time it took to safely derive the steel joints of skyscrapers. Innovative consequences result when, in a engaging situation, there are no distractions and no fear of failing. And this can be achieved by mentally re-framing the context of a work process.
Coincidentally, a friend of mine also worked as an ironmonger in an additional one large city. He told me that he and his friends would 'dance on the I-beams' while they were on the ground. Puzzled, I asked why they would do such a thing. He said that if they could dance on the I-beams on the ground without falling off, they would have trust that they could unquestionably walk on them without falling off when they were forty stories in the air.
This is an additional one essential element in fostering an environment of innovative mental and acting. It encourages and enables process institution and performance visualization. It empowers citizen to determine how they will act in distinct situations before they unquestionably occur.
The things you do that you don't have to do will all the time determine who you are and what you'll be able to do when it's too late to do whatever about it. My friend and his co-workers didn't have to dance on the I-beams; they didn't have to spend time making ready to do their jobs safely. But they did and the results were that there were no injuries and projects were completed on time and within funds for as long as he worked in that job.
Summary
An club can nurture an environment of continuous improvement by focusing on outcomes and the process changes that can best perform them. But this approach can only go so far in accomplishing improvement in the organization's potential to riposte to the rapid changes in the marketplace and in customer requirements.
To nurture quicker and longer continuing improvement straight through innovation an club needs to focus on permanently creating individualized challenges for its citizen and then providing the resources essential to meet those challenges. By doing this, it encourages an environment in which flow can be more unquestionably experienced, distractions and diversions reduced and fear of failure mitigated. These are the ingredients that make it conducive for citizen to originate mental landscapes that overflow the bounds of existing processes thereby allowing them to creatively riposte to 'the way things are' with 'the way things could be.'
This situation can occur best after the process article is fully understood and deployed. Encourage citizen to institution the article of the process: when you know you know how to do something, your mind and body are freed to devise ways to do it best and/or differently. Encourage citizen to reframe the context of the process: when you know that what you know is applicable to other areas of life, you can make connections that others haven't and pursue new approaches to work and life with prospect of flowing into personal and pro fulfillment.
Fostering improvement through Innovation
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