The impact on nonprofit organizations was confirmed by research by a team from Stanford University. They studied various innovation methods across a range of nonprofits. They found that most “innovation methods” don’t actually result in innovative solutions. Most simply result in “innovation as usual.” However, Innovation Engineering was found to be unique. The researchers concluded that it resulted in true breakout innovations. This validates that system-driven innovation is not just for commercial companies. Nonprofits that measure results based on delivery of their mission can also realize dramatic gains from it.
The Importance of Engaging Everyone in Innovation
When employees are enabled to innovate, they are more engaged. Gallup reported that only 31% of employees feel engaged; 69% feel nonengaged. This breaks down to 38% of management and 29% of Millennials. Both of these numbers are horribly low. Millennial disengagement is particularly concerning when you look at demographic trends.
Innovation Engineering provides a system that enables all employees (Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials) to think, create, AND take action on their ideas. When you enable employees to use their brains and imaginations, a cultural transformation occurs. In just six months, our tracking studies find measurable improvements on factors such as “the courage to take action,” “optimism,” “quality of work,” and the organization being “a great place to work.” Basically, work is fun again!
Note: Dashed lines represent projected years.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division.
How Innovation Engineering Engages Everyone
Virtually every existing innovation/creativity program preaches the importance of embracing a childlike, extroverted, creative spirit. This works for the 15% of the population who have a right-brain creative thinking style. However, it doesn’t work for the 85% of the work population with a logical left-brain thinking style.
Asking left-brain logical thinkers to let loose makes them uncomfortable. It often causes them to disengage or, even worse, become active resisters. And, without the 85% who are logical, there is virtually no chance that a Meaningfully Unique innovation will become reality. That’s because left-brainers are critical to accomplish the engineering, finance, production, and operational work that is required to make meaningful change happen.
Innovation Engineering methods and tools are designed to engage both left- and right-brain thinkers. Projects are focused with clear and motivating strategic missions that speak to both project vision and boundaries. Idea-sparking stimuli feature both right-brain trends/insights and left-brain technologies/patents. Decisions are grounded in data as opposed to corporate politics. Math and writing are both used to enable deeper thinking about ideas. Feasibility challenges are openly confronted not ignored. Key issues are tagged as “Death Threats” and resolved through disciplined and documented Fail FAST, Fail CHEAP cycles of learning.
The result is an unleashing of a culture of whole-brain thinking. The 15% who have a right-brain thinking style have new hope with Innovation Engineering, as there is a system for turning their ideas into reality. The 85% who are left brain are more engaged because for the first time, for many, they see an innovation system with structure, clarity, and discipline.
Quick Backstory on System Thinking
Innovation Engineering applies the system thinking of Dr. W. Edwards Deming to innovation, strategy, and the way we work together. For those who don’t know of Dr. Deming, here’s a quick overview.
After World War II, the Japanese economy and manufacturing base were in shambles. The country had a negative net worth. To rebuild it, American General Douglas MacArthur supported a program to educate business leaders in smarter ways of working. In 1950, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a statistician from Powell, Wyoming, conducted a series of seminars in Japan. His mission was to teach system thinking to Japanese business leaders. He showed them how to approach manufacturing as a system of interconnected parts—instead of as a series of silos—to increase quality while also reducing costs.
The leaders of Japanese companies embraced the message. Japanese industry was so thankful for Dr. Deming’s contribution to the rebirth of their economy that they named their national quality award the Deming Prize. The Japanese emperor awarded him the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure in recognition of his contributions to Japan. Shoichiro Toyoda, the first president of the Toyota Motor Corporation, described Dr. Deming’s impact on Toyota this way:
Every day I think of what he meant to us. Deming is the core of our management.
—Shoichiro Toyoda, first president,
Toyota Motor Corporation
I believe that the key to Dr. Deming’s success was that he blended logical, rational discipline with emotional, soul-inspiring hope. He used his statistical science to enable the human spirit. At many of his four-day seminars he would start by saying: “Why are we here? We are here to come alive, to have fun, to have joy in work.”
In the early 1980s, as Dr. Deming predicted would occur, the Western world faced the invasion of higher-quality products from Japanese manufacturers at better prices. It was called the Japanese miracle. In just 30 years they had risen from the ashes of war to challenge the world.
Dr. Deming’s role in the Japanese transformation was “discovered” in the USA with the airing of an NBC White Paper documentary by Clare Crawford-Mason titled “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”
The television special featured Dr. Deming and the story of Nashua Corporation, where the CEO, Bill Conway, had hired Dr. Deming to help him transform his company. The TV special discussed Nashua’s success with applying Dr. Deming’s mindset to the company’s carbonless paper division. It was a story I knew well, as my father, M. Bradford “Buzz” Hall, had helped lead that project as director of central engineering.
The TV special made Dr. Deming, at the age of 80, the management rock star of the 1980s. He led up to 40 (four-day) Deming Seminars a year, well into his nineties. His teaching of system thinking ignited the greatest change in how companies are managed in 100 years or more.
More on the history of Dr. Deming’s work can be found in the back of this book, along with an interview with Kevin Cahill, president and executive director of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and grandson of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Additional information, including a link to the original NBC documentary, can be found at the Deming Institute website: deming.org.
The Factory Represents Just 3% of the Opportunity
Derivatives of Dr. Deming’s teachings are classically packaged today under names such as Total Quality, 6 Sigma, Lean, and the Toyota Production System. Each has had, and continues to have, a transformational impact on factories.
However, the factory was and is but a small part of Dr. Deming’s vision. In his book The New Economics, Dr. Deming wrote that the factory represented just 3% of the opportunity for company improvement from applying system thinking: “The shop floor is only a small part of the total. Anyone could be 100% successful with the 3% and find himself out of business.” He felt that 97% of the opportunity for improvement from applying system thinking lay in applying it to innovation, strategy, and the way we work together.
Just as Dr. Deming taught leaders how to transform manufacturing quality from a random act to a reliable science, Innovation Engineering teaches