Not a Brain Cell to Waste

I've been fortunate since I started my consulting practice. I've met some amazing people. I've had a lot of fun in places as diverse as Quebec, Minneapolis, Penang, Amsterdam, Orlando, San Diego and Providence, RI to name just a few. I've done well financially and I have enough people coming to me that I don't need to "sell" so much as just ask good questions of the people who come my way.

But that's not what gets me into every morning. If it were just about the fun or about the money, I wouldn't do it - there are easier ways to do both. No, the thing that gets me up every morning is my commitment to the engine of innovation, and its ability to solve problems that make peoples' lives better.

In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote an article Georgia on My Mind (registration required) where he questioned the two political candidates' commitment to driving the engines of innovation. He took an American perspective on this - claiming that the United States must continue to invest in new technology development to thrive.

I take a more global perspective. I believe that we need innovation to solve many problems that don't begin or end at the borders of any particular nation: eliminating the possibility of terrorism as a tactic while addressing the root causes that foster it, finding alternative clean energy sources, solving public health issues, providing food and clean water to six billion people, bringing developing nations into the global economy, etc, etc. We are here because the engine of innovation opened up lines of communication and possibilities that we could not even imagine at the beginning of the 20th century. We have so many challenges left to solve in the 21st century.

The principles and practices of lean product development help ensure that we use the best of our knowledge to make decisions and eliminate wasted effort, reinvention, unnecessary activities, etc. so that we can solve these problems at the pace we need to solve them.

Whatever product your company makes, your shareholders, executives and customers need you to do it as well and as fast as possible. However your products contribute to the greater good (and we all do, somehow, or our products would not deliver enough value to sell), we also need your best work.

For all of us to live in peace and prosperity, we truly don't have a brain cell to waste.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 3: Space is Always Open

In the afternoon, the conference had an Open Space session where the attendees "design their own conference." Diana Larsen of Futureworks Consulting got us going with a description of the process and the ground rules, while we sat in one giant circle.

People nominated themselves to be session hosts, simply by writing a topic on a piece of paper, choosing one of two times and a location then posting it on the "Marketplace" bulletin board. Then we chose the topics we most wanted to discuss. "Butterflies" chose to work by themselves rather than join groups, but Diana claimed that butterflies would tend to cluster and I did see that happen. "Bumblebees" buzzed from session to session, pollinating one session with ideas from another.

For the first time, I participated in a lively discussion on "Cultural Change for Collaboration" where we talked about the importance of getting senior leaders to behave collaboratively themselves to foster collaboration in the rest of the organization. To do that, we need to make sure that people understand the relationships between collaboration and decision-making, which can take many forms.

I was a bit of a bumblebee in the second session, drifting between topics like Cultural Issues in Global Collaboration, How to Get Anti-social Engineers to Collaborate, and Collaborating with the "Man on the Mountain." This final topic was an interesting lesson in collaboration, because the people drawn to it talked for at least twenty minutes before I observed that we all had a different picture of the "Man on the Mountain" - who he was and why he was up there.

I"ve organized conferences and I'm a bit of a control freak so I wasn't sure how Open Space would work. But the topics were interesting, the session hosts and participants brought their passion into the room and the discussions were interesting and fruitful - much more so than an endless series of passive slideshows.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 2: You Think You Have Customers?

In the morning, I attended a break-out session on Collaboration in Innovation by Bryan Jobes of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes Division. He was a senior manager for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Here's the thing that struck me: commercial aircraft designers have to balance trade-offs for a range of customers and end users from passengers, pilots, flight attendants, ground crew, airport infrastructure managers, passenger experience managers (or whatever they call those people who decide that those in Coach don't need much legroom), capacity managers, bean counters, etc. plus a worldwide network of regulatory agencies. That they can do this and deliver an innovative aircraft in a reasonable (for the industry) timeframe seems like quite an accomplishment.

Collaboration is a given in this environment, and he provided a nice example of how Marketing, Product and Technology roadmaps work together to provide direction for a team making literally thousands of trade-off decisions.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 1: Best Slideshow Ever

I'm at the Oregon Product Development Management Association and Program Management Forum joint conference today.

The keynote speaker was Sam Lawrence of Jive Software, speaking on Collaboration 2.0. He had a great but not very deep message about how today, it's all about Web 2.0 - it's all about collaboration, people, openness, participation. As a keynote presentation, it was perfect - broad in scope and entertaining in tone. While he didn't offer any new insights, he did set up the deep dives in the break-out sessions very well.

I was most impressed with his use of presentation software (PowerPoint® is the most popular but I'm not certain that was the one he used). Most people use these things to present bullet list after bullet list, perhaps punctuated with a complex diagram. He used it completely differently. Most of his slides consisted of one word or phrase with an accompanying image, delivered alongside a rapidfire monologue. The slides provided a bit of an ironic twist to his words sometimes - think Steven Colbert's The Word. Most often, they punctuated his main points like exclamation marks.

I still have the usual problem with slidesets - I cannot remember much of their content. But with this presentation style and the purpose of his talk, that did not matter quite so much.