Intellectual products can range from ideas to full blown plans, from concepts to global strategies. Decisions, policies, advice, concepts, guidelines and even budgets are intellectual products.
If you want to achieve the gold standard in the intellectual products developed by your organization, you have to master the basics. Think about it this way. It doesn't matter whether you are a golfer, musician, race car driver, chef, engineer, physician or a plumber. Your success depends on understanding the basics and being good at all of them.
You will know you have mastered the basics when you can answer yes confidently to the following questions.
- The Quality of Social Networks: Are you quickly able to find the right people to contribute at the right time, no matter what the intellectual challenge?
- The Degree of Social Capital within those Networks: Do people always interact in a way that adds to the bank account of quality relationships?
- The Sources of Pull that Influence Self-Organization: Do you know what matters and can you agree on it?
- The Language and Conversational Competence Applied to each Transaction: Does the quality of conversations lead to breaking through new understanding?
- The Degree to which Interactive Processes Add Value: Are interactive processes simple, spare and lean?
- The Quality of the Processes of Individual Contributors: Do individuals think and work lean?
These questions guide you to the six factors that determine whether or not your intellectual processes will be laden with waste, degraded products and lost opportunity. Creating intellectual products at the Tiger Woods level requires that you and your organization execute on every one of the six factors? Can you afford not to? This paper will answer that question.
The Quality of Social Networks: Are you quickly able to find the right people to contribute at the right time, no matter what the intellectual challenge?
A social network is the web of potential contributors to an intellectual product. An abundant amount of research has been conducted to determine where people go when they need information. Social networks are far more important, and more frequently used to access information than are databases, file systems and manuals. Cross and Parker[1], who have conducted scores of social network analysis studies note that: "In no case, did we see any technology come close to the importance people gave to other people for finding information and learning how to get work done."
Your people use social networks to find out who has the information, assess the quality of information and determine whether it can be supplied when it's needed. Superb social networks enable everyone to access the best people at the right time. They are fluid, fast and accurate. Waste occurs when the people with the best knowledge aren't accessible or when people become bottlenecks, or are underutilized because they are not trusted.
The Degree of Social Capital within those Networks: Do people always interact in a way that adds to the bank account of quality relationships?
Social capital is the residual value that is created when relationships include trust, rapport and openness. The conversations that carry information about the content of an intellectual product also convey information about the quality of relationships among the contributors. The good will that was either built or eroded in the last interaction resides as social capital or social deficit in the next. If you don't trust someone you will limit the information you share … even if it is relevant.
We all instinctively understand the importance of social capital. This is why, in addition to information about projects, people give each other updates on the health of the organization and insights about personal relationships. We build social capital with conversations not only because we seek community although this is an invaluable end in itself. We build it because we know that high quality relationships measurably enhance our ability to produce superior intellectual products and to do it without the waste that always accompanies social deficit.
The Sources of Pull that Influence Self-Organization: Do you know what matters and can you agree on it?
Self-organization refers to influences that cause people to seek the optimal relationships, communication channels and processes as you develop an intellectual product.
The phrase, "self-organizing" refers to the fact that what you care about determines what you do and what you think about. Those things that matter to you pull your actions and your ideas. To the degree that the requirements of an intellectual product matter, they will influence everything you do. Unless they are skewed or impeded, the requirements of the product will reliably pull the optimal choice of ideas, contributors and processes.
The problems start with interference to efficient pull. If the product doesn't matter enough or if there are mixed or conflicting motives or hidden intentions, the result will be waste and the product itself will be degraded. Other sources of interference can include blocks and constraints such as formal structures, and processes that are non-value added, or any restrictions to the free flow of information or even power struggles. They can include unnecessarily proscribed and bureaucratic processes. They can also include attitudes and norms that permit withholding of information, triangulating, using information in manipulative ways or any form of non-transparency. These not only lead to degraded products but can result in missed opportunity.
The Language and Conversational Competence Applied to each Transaction: Does the quality of conversations lead to breakthrough new understanding?
Conversations are the heart of an organization. They pump the information through which we create both our intellectual products and our human relationships. They can fill an organization with discovery, invention, vitality and resilience or sap its energy.
The processes through which we put language to ideas occur in a whole series of continua. They can range from optimal to destructive, from being clear, focused and purposeful to being complicated and confusing. They can generate breakthroughs or breakdowns. They can nurture solid relationships or feed suspicion and mistrust. They can waste people's time or leverage it; delve into deeper meanings or skim the surface.
Every conversation requires either the sharing and understanding of information (hand-off and coordination) or an interchange that results in the mutual development of a new understanding (collaboration).
Interactive competence refers to the degree to which the quality of conversation supports effective hand-off, coordination and collaborative interchanges. It comes down to how good people are at handing off information so that it is understood and, in the case of collaboration, working with concepts to create new thinking and knowing the difference between the two.
The Degree to which Interactive Processes Add Value: Are interactive processes simple, spare and lean?
Interactive processes include not only the tools that are used to promote group consensus and decision-making but also the sequence of activities through which the seamless unbroken forward movement of an intellectual product occurs.
Sources of waste such as wait time (time waiting for someone to take the next step), unnecessarily complex processes (such as back and forth activity as often happens with approval processes) and other process problems are typically identified during the mapping process.
But venue specific problems are rarely addressed. These can include. storage or warehousing (as often happens when people sit in meetings "just in case") or update handoffs that waste time in both preparation and redundancy to some participants or email broadcasts just in case which waste the time of the recipients, or lack of 27/online continuity. Our clients have discovered that 40% - 60% of time spent in meetings in non-value added. Email waste ranges from 20% -40% mostly because it is so easy to broadcast emails of marginal value just in case.
The Quality of the Processes of Individual Contributors: Do individuals think and work lean?
Individual processes are the engine of contributions that are just-in-time and that represent the best thinking of each contributor. Individual processes include everything from how to structure time and organize work to how to attend to each subject without the bleed-through of distractions.
Intellectual value streams can only operate in flow if the suppliers … the individuals who must contribute to them … apply lean principles to their own thinking and work processes. Lean individual processes enable people to deal with the complexities of their day and, at the same time, contribute to the multiple value streams to which they are suppliers. There is no magic to these processes. It simply requires that individuals develop the skills of focused attention, the capacity to maintain mental continuity from subject to subject and efficient work processes and work space.
Where do you start? Choose a core intellectual product that matters. Treat it like the value stream that it is. Understand that the supply chain is a social network of individual contributors. Map it so that the "as is" for all of the factors is transparent. This requires value stream and social network mapping, pull analysis and interactive transaction analysis. Apply metrics for finding out how you are doing on each of the six factors.
Then you are ready move toward individual and collective mastery of the basics. Bring the same rigor to "qualifying" your knowledge suppliers that is expected of the suppliers of parts for an assembly line. Provide a 360 feedback survey that focuses on the "supplier" behaviors and attitudes required by each of the six factors. Combine this with coaching and training in individual work processes. Redesign your interactive process. Make sure that your on-line software supports collaboration and hand-off conversations 24/7. Develop new norms for meetings, email and all other interactive venues and train your leaders to implement them.
Train them in the attitudes and behaviors required for effective hand off and collaboration and the ability to distinguish between the two. Then provide coaching, facilitation and consultation to rigorously address all sources of pull distortion.
It is time to untangle the maze of practices, skills, processes and support systems that are currently in use in order to develop intellectual products and to re-order them into a mutually reinforcing system. This shift requires a change in the way each individual thinks about intellectual products as well a change in the principles, practices and competencies through which they are developed. It then requires an uncompromising commitment to mastering the basics for each of the six factors.
There is a better way to produce superior intellectual products – a less wasteful and time-consuming way, a way that creates lasting benefits for the organization, for its teams and for the men and women who work there.
[1] Robert Cross and Andrew Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, Harvard University Press, Boston MA, 2004, pages 11-12.
Lewis E. Frees, Ph.D. is president of Harmony, Inc. an organizational development consulting firm. Harmony trains, coaches, facilitates and provides process consultation to develop inspired high performance organizations. This article is based on the book he is currently authoring: The Five Questions: How to create an Inspired Organization. He works with companies to ensure that they master the five competencies and the know-how required to develop superior intellectual products and big value outcomes. Services include intellectual value stream mapping, social network mapping, pull analysis, 360 feedback surveys, and collaborative software application implementation of the five competencies needed to create and inspired organization.
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