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CHAPTER 7
GETTING MORE AND BETTER IDEAS

In chapter 1, we described what happened when one of the world’s largest airlines subjected all its employees to creativity training and ended up frustrating them and making management look stupid. The multimillion-dollar initiative naturally led employees to believe that the company was eagerly awaiting their ideas. But when they returned to work, they found it just as unresponsive as it had always been. The real bottleneck to ideas all along had not been the employees’ lack of creativity but management’s inability to listen to them. A great number of organizations have made a similar mistake. It makes little sense to waste resources stimulating more ideas from employees, if you can’t handle the ones they already have.

Once a healthy idea system is in place, however, it makes a lot of sense to help employees come up with more and better ideas. This chapter is about how to do so.

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HOW PEOPLE COME UP WITH IDEAS

The starting point for thinking about how to help employees come up with more and better ideas is to understand how people spot problems and opportunities, and develop ideas from them. Consider the following example.

Less than a year after copilot Chris Moran began flying for American Airlines, business slowed, and he was furloughed along with six hundred other pilots. Because of his experience in the U.S. Air Force, he was able to get hired as a scheduler at American’s Miami hub. His job was to coordinate passenger demand, crew schedules, gate availability, equipment options, maintenance requirements, and the capability of different airports to handle various types of aircraft. He was also expected to take cargo into account, but like the other schedulers, he paid little attention to it.

During a slack period, however, he began wondering about cargo and decided to look into this side of the business. During his seven years in the air force, he had flown a lot of freight. He called some of the managers in the cargo division and asked to meet with them. They were a little surprised. Schedulers never visited cargo. Their decisions had always been based on passenger loads. At best, cargo was an afterthought.

At that initial meeting, the managers told Moran that cargo was immensely profitable for the airline, with margins approaching 40 percent. The problem was that the routes with high passenger loads often did not match the routes with high cargo demand. An example of this was the Dallas-Omaha route, where the passenger traffic was low but the demand for mail cargo was high owing to Omaha’s huge insurance industry. Nevertheless, the route was assigned Fokker 100s, relatively small commuter jets that were able to carry little more than passengers and luggage. The same problem occurred on Latin American routes, where the passenger traffic was highly seasonal, but demand to transport fruit and flowers north to the United States and Canada was consistently strong. Even so, as passenger demand dropped, the airline would take an airplane like the Boeing 767-300 off these routes and replace it with the 767-200, which had considerably less cargo capacity. This meant that the cargo sales team could not make commitments to potentially large customers who wanted to contract for steady shipping capacity. As a result, American Airlines often lost valuable cargo business. Even when passenger considerations were completely taken care of, cargo was still ignored. Airplanes like the MD-80 and the Boeing 727 were scheduled interchangeably because they had similar seating capacities. But the 727 could carry a lot more cargo. With minimal coordination and investment, Moran realized, the airline could dramatically increase its cargo revenue.

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Moran spoke with his boss, who encouraged him to explore the idea further. Soon, Moran discovered another problem. Each airport provided a list of the types of aircraft it could handle. He found that, at many airports, either the information on the list was incorrect, or an unlisted aircraft could easily be accommodated. For example, several airports listed as lacking the appropriate equipment to handle certain types of aircraft had actually acquired the equipment but had neglected to report it. In other cases, the only reason certain aircraft were barred from particular airports was that the stations hadn’t gotten around to painting stopping marks next to the jetway for those particular aircraft. Correcting oversights like these vastly increased scheduling flexibility.

In the end, Moran was able to demonstrate that in the top twenty-five cargo markets, American could make more money flying freight than passengers. He sent in an idea: Create a position on the scheduling staff for someone with a cargo background, who could incorporate freight considerations into aircraft scheduling. The idea was accepted for a one-year trial, during which cargo revenue jumped by $7 million. Today, cargo information is formally incorporated into the computer models American uses for scheduling.

The question we want to ask here is this: Why was it Moran who spotted this opportunity? American Airlines had been shipping cargo since its inception. For decades, hundreds of routing experts and operations researchers had been optimizing everything from fares and routing to fuel consumption and equipment purchases. Yet they had missed a huge opportunity that was right under their noses. But Moran had not. Why?

The reason is that his background in cargo gave him a different perspective from the other schedulers, one that led him to ask questions they did not. But his perspective alone didn’t give him the idea he came up with or the justification for it. For this, he also needed knowledge of the situation, which he obtained through his research. This is how ideas arise—a person with the right perspective and knowledge is in the right place at the right time.173

The late policy analyst Aaron Wildavsky made an interesting observation: A difficulty is only a problem if something can be done about it. Problems and opportunities remain invisible to people who are unaware of better alternatives, or at least the possibility that these might exist. To increase the number of problems and opportunities their people spot, managers have to provide them with appropriate training and experiences. We classify these employee development approaches into two general categories. First is direct training in idea activators—to give employees profound knowledge in areas where their ideas can have the biggest impact. Second is exposure to new situations and experiences that will broaden their perspectives.

IDEA ACTIVATORS

One of the pioneers of the modern idea system was Toyota. In the early 1950s, the company initiated a long-term drive for performance improvement, with the goal of just-in-time production. As inventory was reduced and processes were linked more tightly, smaller and smaller problems seriously disrupted production. The company was forced to pay extraordinary attention to detail, and managers alone simply couldn’t spot every tiny problem. The company had to ask its front-line employees for help and eventually developed a very active idea system.174

Over time, Toyota introduced training programs to help employees come up with many more ideas. Instead of showing people how to do specific tasks, these programs showed them how to improve key drivers of performance, such as quality, productivity, and safety. We have come to call such training programs idea activators, because their purpose is to spark more and better ideas by giving people a deeper understanding of their work. Some of Toyota’s activators are as follows:

• “Poka-yoke,” or error-proofing. A poka-yoke is a simple way to ensure that a certain kind of mistake—one that people are prone to making repeatedly—can no longer happen. It is an empowering and easy-to-learn method that helps people come up with a great many ideas.
• “5S,” or rigorous housekeeping. A good 5S training program sensitizes people to all kinds of ways they can become more productive. The five S ’s are seiri (putting things in order), seiton (arranging things efficiently), seiso (preventing problems by keeping things clean), seiketsu (doing after-work maintenance and cleanup), and shitsuke (showing discipline, following the rules). Anytime it takes people more than a few seconds to find something, they will ask themselves why. Simple concepts—such as air-free and shallow storage schemes, and the importance of using vertical space—make it possible to store things more conveniently, using less space. A decade after Toyota Kentucky began 5S training, managers there told us that employees were still coming up with thousands of useful 5S ideas each year.
• Quick changeover (QCO). The principles behind quick changeover can be taught in several hours and result in employees thinking of all kinds of ideas that they might not otherwise. With enough ideas, the length of time it takes to change machines over from making one part to making another can be reduced from hours to minutes.175
• Total productive maintenance (TPM). TPM involves a brutal measurement, “overall operational effectiveness,” to highlight problems that most organizations miss. With the advent of TPM, managers accustomed to reporting flattering efficiency levels—above 90 percent, say—find themselves sheepishly reporting overall operational effectiveness levels of maybe 30 to 40 percent. Opportunities for improvement that they had not seen before become quite obvious.

Toyota’s idea activators are well suited to the way it manufactures automobiles. But every organization has different needs and has to develop idea activators appropriate for its own situation. To clarify what we mean, let us look at an example from the health care industry.

Good Shepherd Services is a not-for-profit health care organization with a ninety-six-bed nursing home, located in northern Wisconsin. Its mission is to provide its residents with the best quality of life possible. To do this and to be financially viable in an industry that is under tremendous pressure to keep costs down, it strives to use best practices throughout its operations. This means that front-line employees—the certified nurse’s aides (CNAs) and other staff who have primary responsibility for the day-to-day care of the residents—have to know these best practices well, apply them, and develop new ones. While the typical health care organization is extremely hierarchical, with direct care staff having little input into how things are done, Good Shepherd gives them a great deal of autonomy to develop strategies and ideas to personalize the care of each of their charges. To help them do this, the organization uses six idea activator modules, each two to three days long:

• Observing and Understanding the Older Adult
• Elimination and Incontinence (on the causes of incontinence and how to address them)
• Skin Care (on the causes of skin breakdown and the treatment and prevention of pressure ulcers)
• Psychosocial Well-Being (on how to address difficult resident behaviors, and how to reduce or eliminate the need for restraints)
• Falls and Restorative Care (on preventing and reducing the severity of falls, and holistic restorative care for optimal functionality)
• Nutrition (how nutrition can affect the outcomes of specific kinds of interventions)

Each of these modules is designed to make caregivers aware of the latest thinking and best practices in the area. The sessions are developed by national experts using the latest research and are delivered by highly skilled practitioners. They provide new knowledge and understanding from which front-line employees can develop ideas to help their residents and better individualize their care. The following examples illustrate how this works.177

The first module we described briefly in chapter 1. The most common reason why older people enter nursing homes is dementia—severe loss of memory and cognitive capability, to the point where it is difficult for them to function normally. With these residents, safety is a primary concern. Among other things, they must be kept from wandering into potentially dangerous places—such as kitchens, offices, and boiler rooms—by special bracelets, which trigger an alarm when they enter these areas. On one particular door, the alarm used to go off constantly. Whenever it did, staff members had to immediately break off whatever they were doing and run to find the now-distraught resident and escort him or her back to safety. In one of the Psychosocial Well-Being training modules, the staff learned that people with dementia often avoid dark spots on the floor, because they see them as holes. One aide had the idea of painting the floor black in front of the troublesome doorways. When her team implemented the idea, it eliminated the problem.

The second most common reason why people are admitted to nursing homes is incontinence, an embarrassing problem for anyone. To sensitize staff to the difficulties their charges face, before attending the incontinence training module, each person is required to interview some incontinent residents. The interview consists of two questions: “What is it like to be incontinent?” and “If you weren’t incontinent, how would your life be different?” A great many staff members have been shocked to learn how drastically the condition changed their residents’ lives.

The Incontinence module explains the four main causes of incontinent episodes. One of them, for example, is that an elderly person becomes disoriented, perhaps when waking up at night, and loses track of where the bathroom is. This piece of information led to many ideas to help residents know where the bathroom is at all times. For example, when building or remodeling bedrooms, always position the toilet so that it is easily visible from the head of the bed. Similarly, when considering the way furniture is laid out, think about line of sight to the toilet.

Since the Incontinence training module began, Good Shepherd has been able to reduce the percentage of its residents who are incontinent to levels well below national and state averages despite the fact that it takes a much higher-than-average percentage of incontinent residents. As a result, Good Shepherd now does one ton less laundry per month and spends six thousand fewer hours (more than 3 full-time equivalents) per year dealing with incontinent episodes.

At most nursing homes, the biggest cause of injuries is falls. Among other things, the module on falls teaches the importance of tracking data. One staffer noticed that a disproportionate number of falls were occurring several hours before breakfast. Her group studied the phenomenon and discovered an important fact. Because Good Shepherd is in rural Wisconsin and many of its residents used to live on farms, they were accustomed to getting up early. They continued to do so at Good Shepherd, where they were often walking around well before breakfast. Naturally their blood sugar levels decreased, so they felt faint and weak and were more likely to trip or fall. The staffer’s idea: Put out trays of muffins, toast, juice and coffee a few hours before breakfast. The problem was solved. Using ideas like these, Good Shepherd has been able to reduce the number of falls from an average of some forty per month to about ten.179

Many of the ideas triggered by the idea activators are specific to individual residents. For example, one dementia resident was pinching the caregivers every time they lifted him in or out of his wheelchair. He would grab hold of the fleshy underpart of their upper arms so hard that he would give them bruises and cause them real pain. The standard solution would have been to put him on powerful psychoactive drugs.

But the Psychosocial Well-Being module had taught that there were many different ways to handle behavioral problems other than heavy medication. The staff asked for two weeks to come up with a better solution. They contacted the resident’s former social worker and learned that before the resident had come to Good Shepherd, his family had dealt with him by duct-taping him into his bed. The man wasn’t trying to hurt the nurses; he was merely clinging to them in fear. The care team came up with the idea of buying thick cooking mitts for him. From then on, when the staff needed to move him, they put the mitts on him, and he was able to hang on without hurting anyone.

Good Shepherd’s idea activators have done their job—they have increased the ability of line staff to come up with ideas, ideas that have significantly improved the quality of their residents’ lives.

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HOW TO BROADEN EMPLOYEES’ PERSPECTIVES

Idea activators boost the quantity and quality of ideas in specific and predetermined areas. More broadly based approaches to helping people come up with ideas involve giving them greater perspective on the organization and their work. Following are examples of some of these.

Job Rotation

Koji Kobayashi, former chairman of NEC, believed that “Job rotation is the miracle drug of productivity.” Job rotation gives employees different perspectives on how the company operates. It allows them to make connections they otherwise might not make, as Chris Moran did with his cargo idea at American Airlines. Furthermore, when people understand more about how the company operates, their ideas will be better and have greater impact, and they themselves will become more effective idea champions.

An MBA student from Thailand pointed out to us that rotating managers can also help employees come up with more ideas. Her father owned a number of hotels and resorts, and he rotated his senior management team every two years. The rotations were deliberately radical; that is, the head of accounting might become the head of housekeeping, while the head of customer service might be put in charge of food services. After each rotation, the number of ideas submitted would invariably soar. The reason was this: When an executive took over a totally unfamiliar department, he or she was unusually open to ideas about how to improve it, and the employees knew this.

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Adopting the Customer’s Perspective

Customer complaints are excellent sources of ideas because they identify problems. Consequently, organizations should make it easy for customers to complain and encourage employees to use complaints as starting points for improvement ideas.

But complaints alone represent only part of the customer perspective and happen only after a problem occurs. Being proactive in getting to know customers and their needs—through surveys, focus groups, shadowing techniques, mystery shoppers, “psychographics,” or simply by talking with them—can provide a wealth of ideas. In his book Winning at New Products, Robert Cooper (creator of the Stagegate process) identifies lack of market orientation—that is, not putting the voice of the customer into the development process from beginning to end—as one of the most common reasons why new products fail. Plenty of excellent books, articles, and training seminars are available on techniques for getting customer input. The trick is to get this input to the employees who can use it. Good Shepherd, for example, has quarterly “Care-Planning” meetings with every resident and his or her family. Any complaints or special requests become fodder for ideas.

This does not mean customer ideas should be followed literally. Although customers may be aware of problems, they are not necessarily in the best positions to figure out how to solve them. In the 1990s, the Scandinavian airline SAS extended its internal idea system to its customers. It was an interesting idea that backfired. SAS found itself having to spend considerable time explaining to customers why their ideas could not be implemented, for reasons that were relatively obvious from the airline’s point of view. Customers knew little about the systems and processes that they were proposing quite specific changes to.182

Many employees don’t deal with external customers directly. But everyone has internal customers—people who depend on what they do. Sensitizing employees to the perspectives of these customers and to the importance of asking their input, can also stimulate a great many useful ideas. We came across one of our favorite examples of this in a Baldrige examiner training session a number of years ago.

A hospital gave its staff members internal customer training as part of a quality initiative. For one of her class assignments, a nurse interviewed an intake clerk from radiology to see whether that department was getting all the information it needed from the completed form her group sent down with each referred patient. When she asked how the information on the form was used, she got a surprising response. Radiology, it turned out, used only two of the twelve items on it. For years, the nurse realized, her group had been asking unnecessary questions of thousands of patients, diligently logging the answers, and sending them to a department that did not want them.

Cycle-time Reduction

There is a lot of truth to the tired old cliché “Time is money.” Generally speaking, the faster an organization gets things done, the more productive it is.183

Looking at work from the perspective of reducing the time it takes is an excellent way to spot new problems and opportunities. Time is easily measured and people readily see when they are wasting it. A good number of the ideas discussed in this book began when someone decided it took too long to do something. Teaching people the importance of reducing cycle time, and the general principles of how to do it, can trigger a large number of good ideas.

Ongoing Learning and Development

Almost by definition, learning broadens people’s perspectives. Not all learning is directly relevant to the workplace, but organizations can promote the kinds that are in all sorts of ways. The most obvious is to support employees who wish to take classes, finish their formal education, or work toward another degree or advanced certification of some kind.

Less formal learning opportunities—such as trade shows, professional meetings, and study trips—are valuable, too. With a sense of purpose, these trips can be better sources of good ideas than traditional classroom-based learning. In the classroom, students are taught what the instructor thinks they ought to know. With more informal learning, people seek out what is most interesting or important to them—information or know-how that connects with a need they recognize.

Offering these informal educational opportunities to frontline employees can pay huge dividends. Danisco, the Danish sugar company, regularly sends its front-line employees to trade shows or on study trips to other companies, and they often come back with good ideas. For example, a maintenance worker went to a conference in Göteborg, Sweden, where he happened to attend a presentation by a welding company. He learned about a new type of hardened metal, and it gave him an idea.184

Danisco makes sugar from beets. When the beets are brought to the mill, they are dumped into a hopper outside, mixed with water, and then pumped inside for processing. During the harvest season, the huge pump involved moves some six thousand tons of beets every twenty-four hours. Because the beets came directly from the fields, they were covered with stone and dirt, and the slurry was extremely abrasive. The tips of the blades inside the pump used to wear down quickly. Every year, a maintenance team would have to take the pump apart to replace them. When the maintenance worker learned about the new hardened metal at the conference, he realized that blades tipped with this metal would last much longer. His idea was implemented, and now the pump has to be disassembled only once every seven years.

Another effective form of ongoing learning is reading. It is common for managers to buy books they like and distribute them to their employees. But without follow-through, nothing much usually happens. Not everyone reads the book, and those who do, do so in isolation. A good way to add the necessary follow-through is to set up a reading group.

Reading groups are flexible and can be designed for a wide variety of purposes. They may be limited to a single concept or book, or they can be part of an ongoing development program. We have learned several important lessons about how to run effective reading groups. First, the group should be large enough to ensure diverse perspectives but small enough so that everyone can be actively involved. Depending on the mix of personalities in it, a good size is six to ten people. Second, meetings should be regular and properly spaced so as to maintain continuity yet allow participants time to do their assignments justice. Usually, a period of two to three weeks between meetings works well.185

Finally, having a skilled outside facilitator adds credibility to the process, if he or she has expertise beyond what is in the books and practical experience applying the concepts in them. He or she can create a nonthreatening environment that gets everyone involved and can make it safer to challenge the organization’s existing orthodoxies.

Reading groups can result in profound changes in perspective. In 2001, we conducted one for the management team of a unit of one of the largest telecommunications firms in the United States. The first book assigned was Built to Last, by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. It is about what differentiates organizations that thrive over a period of decades, from those that don’t. In the very first meeting, the top manager opened by saying, “I felt heartsick, just heartsick, reading this book. I realized that this organization wasn’t built to last. We are essentially a bunch of start-ups that were bought and merged, and we have never done any of the things we need to do to be viable in the long term.” Think of how a change in perspective like that could open the unit to fresh ideas!

Benchmarking

Benchmarking involves looking outside the organization in an effort to stimulate performance improvement ideas. When employees see other organizations doing things significantly better, their eyes open to the fact that there is room for improvement in their own operations. Benchmarking is not about copying—it is meant to be a spur for ideas. That is why Granite Rock, the construction supply company and 1992 Small Business Baldrige Award winner, benchmarked its delivery processes against Domino’s Pizza.186

Another company that benchmarks extensively is Sewell Motors, a network of highly successful car dealerships in Texas. Owner Carl Sewell, author of the best-selling book Customers for Life, has benchmarked against companies as diverse as Chuck E. Cheese, MacDonald’s, and Disneyworld.

The approaches we discussed in this section were designed to help people see their organizations from different perspectives and to incite them to come up with more and better ideas. But sometimes having the appropriate perspective and relevant knowledge isn’t enough. Something more is needed.

IMPROVING ALERTNESS TO PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES

In 2001, Thomas Cantelmo, an American Airlines flight attendant, suggested a change in the procedure for handling coffee pots on airplanes. Before his idea, the pots were replaced with fresh ones after every flight, even on trips less than an hour long and even if the pots had not been used. He proposed loading coffee pots on only the first flight of each day and washing them out and reusing them throughout the day. After all, on longer flights the pots were already being washed out and reused a number of times. His idea was implemented, and the savings were calculated at $788,000 per year.187

Why was Cantelmo the one to think of this idea? Plenty of other people had the same opportunity. The catering process had been designed by professionals—they might have thought of it. The purchasing department, which had negotiated in detail the contracts for airport services might have thought of it, let alone the tens of thousands of other flight attendants on literally millions of flights who had used the same pots for several decades. Furthermore, most, if not all the employees who could have spotted this opportunity were on the lookout for exactly this kind of cost-savings idea. Robert Crandall, CEO from 1983 to 1998, had been relentless in his drive to cut costs. The idea system that he had started was a giant cost-cutting engine that every employee was aware of. With a 10 percent reward for money-saving ideas, anyone in the airline who noticed a way to save $788,000 in costs would have immediately sent in an idea. But Cantelmo didn’t think of the idea because his perspective was different from those around him or because he knew more than they did. He was simply more alert than they were.

Once people have perspective or knowledge that sensitizes them to the importance of ideas in a particular area, their ability to come up with ideas depends on how alert they are. The question then becomes how to increase one’s level of alertness. Cantelmo told us that his training at the U.S. Naval Academy had taught him to pay attention to detail and always to look for the meaning behind what he observed.

One person who thought a lot about how to sharpen his senses was Leonardo da Vinci. In the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb tells of how many of da Vinci’s startlingly original ideas came from his uncanny ability to notice things. It was a gift that da Vinci worked hard to develop. For example, to strengthen and test his olfactory powers, he would collect a variety of flowers, pile them on a table, blindfold himself, and try to recognize them by scent as his servant held each to his nose. Whether or not these exercises actually helped, his senses were certainly acute. He was able to draw pictures of the wing motions of birds in flight that no one could corroborate for hundreds of years until the advent of high-speed photography proved him right.188

Da Vinci also did more conventional things to improve his powers of observation—things we have come across others doing as well. Whenever we meet employees who are unusually prolific suggesters, we like to ask them how they come up with so many ideas. Frequently, they tell us about homegrown methods to do two things that da Vinci regarded as of primary importance. First, they discipline themselves to notice “exceptions”—things that seem odd or out of place. Second, they record their thoughts and observations.

Many ideas begin when someone notices an exception of some kind. A good example of this was the employee at Johnson Controls who saved her company $80,000 a year when she noticed some items sticking out of the trash that shouldn’t have been there. She realized that employees on the assembly line were putting parts in their pockets for convenience as they worked and were throwing them away when they discovered them as they left work. Her idea was to place special recovery bins by the exits to the facility, with signs reminding people to check their pockets on their way out. In the early 1990s, we asked the top suggester at Honda’s flagship plant near Tokyo how she had been able to give in more than two thousand ideas in the previous year. Her reply? “I don’t overlook exceptions.”189

The second thing prolific suggesters often mention is that they write their thoughts and observations down. In a typical example, at Marabou, a division of Kraft foods in Sweden, we talked with an employee who had consistently come up with several hundred ideas every year. When asked how he did it, he smiled and pulled a small dog-eared notebook from his back pocket. He carried it everywhere, he said, and whenever he noticed something that wasn’t quite right, he wrote it down. From time to time, he would look over the list. Whenever an idea occurred to him that had to do with one of the problems on the list, he would get out his notebook and write the idea next to that problem.

Many researchers who have studied the creative process have noticed how highly creative people usually keep some kind of notebook, diary, or journal. After outlining the various things that Leonardo da Vinci did to keep himself alert, one of the first pieces of direct advice Gelb offered his readers was this:

By the end of his life, Leonardo had accumulated seven thousand pages of notes.190

A third characteristic we have noticed in prolific suggesters is the willingness to spend time studying the problems or opportunities they spot. Chris Moran’s research into cargo operations uncovered all kinds of information that was important in formulating and championing his idea. Likewise, it took the staffer at Deutsche Post (discussed in chapter 1) months of legwork and experimentation to discover how his company could buy cheaper engine oil for its diesel trucks. Many ideas require considerable research before they can be realized.

IDEO, the California product design company made famous by the Nightline segment “Deep Dive,” uses a creative problem-solving process with several nice touches. The most important of these, in our opinion, is that the fact-finding stage emphasizes deep research into the problem at hand. Teams are sent out to study intensively all aspects of the product, what it is intended for, and how it will be used. The extraordinary depth and scope of this research allow IDEO to notice things that a less rigorous research phase would undoubtedly miss and so to come up with superior designs that have some impressively novel and practical features.

Another way to improve one’s alertness is to learn to be sensitive to change. Remember how change creates the need for further change? Since everything changes constantly, fresh problems and opportunities arise all the time. However, sometimes people have been working under one set of assumptions for so long that the problems and opportunities created by a new situation are invisible to them.

Consider what happened at Cloetta, the largest candy manufacturer in Sweden. One of its product lines is hard candy, which is made from a stiff sugary “dough” extruded into its final shape by machines. Before the dough is put into one of these machines, it has to be kneaded and worked. For decades at Cloetta, this kneading had been done by hand, on four special tables. Since the dough hardened quickly at room temperature, the surfaces of the tables were heated by hot water pipes running underneath. And because the heated tables were used around the clock, they were left on all the time.191

In 1981, the company purchased a new extruding machine that was able to knead the dough as well. Two of the four heated tables were no longer needed. People soon began using them as convenient places to set down tools, gloves, and ingredients. Since the company still had one of the older machines that required dough to be hand kneaded, the other two heated tables continued in operation until 1996, when this last machine was replaced. These tables, too, were soon littered with miscellaneous work items.

In 1997, a year after this latest change, one of the workers in the room sent in a suggestion. Since the tables were no longer used to knead candy, he pointed out, why not shut off the heaters underneath them? For sixteen years, without anyone noticing, the company had been keeping two of the unused tables heated around the clock, and the other two had been unnecessarily heated for the last year! Not only did this cost money, but since a lot of heat was involved, it had made the room so unbearably hot that the company had to invest considerable money in cooling it down.

In this particular case, the same people who no longer had to do the kneading on the heated tables continued to suffer from the heat, simply because they had become accustomed to it. The force of habit obscured the possibility of turning it off. What is more, during all this time, Cloetta employees were on the lookout for ideas. The company had one of the best idea systems in Sweden. It was a classic case of what some management theorists refer to as the “Boiled Frog Syndrome.”192

Supposedly, a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water will jump out immediately. But if it is put in a pot of cool water, which is then slowly brought to the boil, the frog will stay put until it boils to death. The conclusion drawn from this dubious assertion² is that sudden and dramatic negative change is obvious to people, but if the same change creeps in gradually, people can remain oblivious to it for a long time. And if people find it hard to detect fresh problems (i.e., negative consequences of change) when they are introduced gradually, how much harder is it for them to detect opportunities (i.e., the potential for positive change when things are already working satisfactorily) that may arise in the same unobtrusive way?

The need for a further change in a chain of changes can also be missed for another reason—namely, the division of labor. Change occurring in location A creates the opportunity or need for further change in location B, but different people work in locations A and B, and the people in B aren’t aware of the change in A. It is surprising that this kind of communication breakdown can still occur when A and B are physically very close to each other.

Take, for example, what happened in the forestry division of a state government in New England. In early 2001, a forester working in a state park came across a locked telephone box deep in the woods. Wondering what it was for, he made some inquiries when he got back to the office. It didn’t take long for the accountant in his office to track down what it was. In the mid-1980s, that same office had installed seventeen phones in remote areas of the forests to allow the foresters to check in when they were out in the field. The problem was that in the mid-1990s, the extension service had issued cell phones to all its foresters. But no one had thought to cut off the old land lines, and the division had been paying the monthly charges for them ever since.193

When the forestry service bought cell phones, someone should have asked what the cell phones would allow the service to do differently. But there was no single person who was in a position to see the whole picture. Even though the same department paid both bills, it is easy to imagine how no one there would question them. For all the administrative assistant knew, the phone boxes might have had other uses as well. Even the foresters who were issued with cell phones and knew about the phone boxes might have assumed the same thing. Or maybe they assumed that the phones had been disconnected and would be removed later. Anyway, now that they had cell phones, foresters didn’t have to follow the same paths through the forest as they had done before, and so might well have forgotten about the phone boxes. There are all kinds of ways that the organization could have overlooked the presence of the unneeded phone boxes.

The important thing is to realize that every change—whether initiated inside the organization or outside—can create either the opportunity or the need for a further change. When change occurs, it is a good time to be alert for another possible change. Ask the question “What new opportunities does this change create?” And after addressing these, ask the question again.

KEY POINTS

• Once an organization has an idea system in place, it should take action to help employees come up with more and better ideas.194
• Every idea results from a mix of a person’s knowledge related to the problem or opportunity and the perspective he or she brings to it.
• The late policy analyst Aaron Wildavsky observed that a difficulty is only a problem if something can be done about it. Problems and opportunities remain unnoticed by people who are unaware of a better alternative, or at least the possibility that one might exist. This is the rationale behind the two main ways to increase the quantity and quality of employee ideas: increase people’s knowledge and expand their perspectives.
• Idea activators give employees a deeper understanding of critical areas where their ideas are particularly needed.
• Managers can help their employees gain different perspectives on their work in many ways: job rotation, benchmarking, listening to customers, ongoing learning, reading groups, study missions, and trips to conferences and trade shows.
• Once people have perspectives that sensitize them to the importance of ideas in a particular area, their ability to spot a specific problem or opportunity often comes down to their alertness. Unusually prolific suggesters discipline themselves to notice exceptions, record what they observe, and spend time studying the problem or opportunity.
• Change creates the need for further change. Unfortunately, the force of habit often blinds people to the need for these subsequent changes. Whenever change occurs, it is important to ask, “What new opportunities does this change create?”195

GUERRILLA TACTICS

Five actions you can take today (without the boss’s permission)

1. Train, train, train. Identify the key leverage points of performance for your group, and develop idea activator modules for them. They don’t have to be long; sometimes fifteen minutes is all that is needed. Stay alert for possible activators as you read business books and magazines, interact with colleagues, and look over mailers from training companies.
2. Get out of the office. Attend trade shows, workshops, and conferences. Take advantage of opportunities to visit other companies, including ones that do very different types of work. Bring some of your people along whenever possible.
3. Record exceptions. Ask your people to record any exceptions they see. From time to time, probe these exceptions with your group to see whether they suggest any improvement opportunities.
4. Rotate your people. Rotate your employees into different assignments, so they see as much of the organization as possible. Approach your internal customers and suppliers, and ask whether they would be interested in trading people for short periods of time. The resulting alliances, and the exposure your people get to new perspectives and knowledge, will lead to more and better ideas.
   

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5. Encourage diverse perspectives. Ask people who you think might have a different perspective on your department’s work for their thoughts on how it might be improved. New hires, temporary workers, people who work odd shifts, recent transfers, and internal customers are all potential sources of fresh perspectives.