
Steve Spear
Senior Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Achieving Our Innate Purpose: Creating the structure and dynamics to turbo charge our problem solving capabilities
Sometimes it just doesn’t seem fair. We show up at work to solve hard problems that no one could resolve individually, and we bust it to develop design and deliver great products and services. But that outfit “across the street” keeps beating us, arriving earlier and faster with solutions to their customers problems that fit better and which they generated with seemingly less effort. How’d they pull that off when we’ve got access to the same science and technology, the same talent pool, and more or less the same market information?
The answer is that they, like you, they devote creative energy on the “objects” in front of them—the code, molecule, part, weld line, patient experience through which value is expressed, and they also invest energy in the instrumentation through which creativity is expressed, yours and theirs. In addition, they’re constantly managing the organization’s own structure and dynamics to reduce confusion and otherwise increase the efficacy and efficiency by which individual efforts harmonize into collaborative problem solving, whereas you’re often stuck so confused or distracted by not knowing how your fit into the larger whole.
They literate creativity for being clever and creating value by clarifying and simplifying (linearizing) flows of work and otherwise stabilize them so local issues aren’t too disturbing locally or systemically. This right away changes conversations. Group priorities better help set local priorities, an immediate contribute to completion speed, as we can all be pulling together. Also,
What we’ll realize, when we look at organizing as something we do to optimize our ability to collaboratively solve problems, and see the disparate fields in which these relatively few tactics are used with great results, is that many of these particular items about which we’ve heard—lean, agile, TQM, psychological safety, some aspects of feedback and 2nd order learning, even disruptive innovation, are all part of the same cloth.