Challenging Convention

Gary Hamel is one of the world's leading experts on strategy and innovation. He has penned countless articles and several tomes on these topics, including his latest, The Future of Management.

At The Masters Forum one year, Hamel talked of how convention stifles innovation. To illustrate, he focused on banks and asked - rhetorically - what might change in terms of day-to-day operations and/or strategic planning if two banks were to swap top management teams. His answer: nothing. Why? Because the banking industry has conventions - principles, practices, and protocols - which are followed by 99.99% of all banks and bankers. These conventions have been passed from one generation of bankers to the next, and their very deep roots virtually insure that any major innovations in banking will come from outside the industry.

Conversation:

For banks or bankers who want to challenge the conventions of the industry, Hamel suggested holding a conversation centered around these questions.

• What are 10 things you would never hear a customer say about a bank or bankers?
  
• What conventions do these statements represent?
• If we overturn these conventions, what new opportunities or new ways doing business emerge?

This is a very useful framework. You can use it in the same way to challenge the conventions of your industry, and you can use it in a variety of other ways. For example, you can ask what 10 things you would never hear a visitor say about your website, and go on from there.

Afterwords:

"To know what everyone knows is to know nothing." - Remy de Gourmont

"Engineers brought up and living in affluent Japan have no chance of understanding the needs of the next billion." - Fumio Ohtsubo, Panasonic president, as quoted by Financial Times

"Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness." - Ellen J. Langer

"The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of “ideas,” of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions." - Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso

"Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest." - Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

The Doctor Is In

When the name W. Edwards Deming comes up today, most people think immediately of the system of measurement - statistical process control - that he learned from Walter Shewhart of Bell Labs, and began teaching to Japanese business leaders in 1950. Some also remember that there is an award given in his name every year - The Deming Prize - to a company that has successfully advanced the quality of its products. Still others associate his name with a checklist - The 14 Points for Management. And, while these are the leaves - and maybe the tree - of Deming's work, they are certainly not the roots. In Deming's own words:

"The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. My aim is to provide an outside view—a lens—that I call a System of Profound Knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in. The 14 Points for Management follow naturally as application of this outside knowledge."

There are four parts to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge:

• Appreciation of a system: how disparate parts work together to produce a result
• Knowledge of variation: the ranges and causes of variation in quality
• Theory of knowledge: concepts explaining knowledge; the limits of what can be known
• Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature

Systems thinking? Variety? Epistemology? Id, ego, super ego? Yes! All that ... and more. Deming was first, and foremost, a management philosopher.

Deming's notions have been applied almost exclusively within large, for-profit businesses; most often in manufacturing operations. But if you really stop to think about it, you can begin to imagine ways you might apply them in much smaller, non-business groups such as:

• Your family
• A youth sports team you are coaching
• A class you are teaching
• A civic or church group to which you belong
  

Conversation:

Here are a few of Deming's 14 Points. For each point listed, have a discussion centered around how to apply it to better a family, a team, etc. And, remember to think metaphorically - not literally.

• Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs
• Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company
• Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
• Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
  

Afterwords:

"Without theory, there are no questions." - W. Edwards Deming

"Making mental connections is our most critical learning tool, the essence of human intelligence: to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationship, context." - Marilyn Ferguson

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." - Pablo Picasso

"The most important lesson I’ve ever learned is to understand and to trust abstractions. If you can learn both to see and to believe in life’s underlying patterns, you can make highly informed decisions every day. For example, everyone in high tech is familiar with Moore’s Law, which states that computer-processing power will double every 18 months. Now, Moore’s Law isn’t a law in any physical sense, but it has driven and will continue to drive our industry’s development. Yet very few people and very few companies really take this law to heart because really embracing it leads to seemingly nonsensical projections. Five years ago, when I told people that we’d have the processing power that we have today, lots of them even those who said they believed in Moore’s Law thought I was being ridiculous." - Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer Microsoft