5
How Effective Idea Processes Work
IN 1992, MARTIN EDELSTON, CEO of Boardroom Inc., a Connecticut-based publisher, hired the iconic management guru Peter Drucker to come and spend a day at his company. Edelston had no particular goals in mind for the visit; he simply wanted Drucker to take a look at his company and tell him how to improve it. At the end of the day, Drucker gave him a piece of advice that would transform the company: ask every employee to come to his or her weekly departmental meeting with an idea to improve the company or his or her own work. Edelston took the advice and started right in.
Initially, wanting to maintain control, he personally reviewed and approved every idea. His method was to go through the week’s ideas on weekends while working out on his exercise bike. He joked with us that this took him so much time that he became extremely fit.
One Sunday, however, as he was working through a stack of suggestions, Edelston encountered one for a software improvement from a programmer in the IT department. Because he didn’t understand the idea, on Monday morning, he hunted down the programmer and asked him to explain it. Half an hour later, Edelston walked away still confused.
Then came an epiphany. Edelston had hired the programmer for his expertise. He understood far more about the company’s IT systems than Edelston ever would. Why should Edelston be the one to decide whether the software change made sense or not? And, in general, weren’t decisions about ideas best made by those most familiar with the situation involved? Realizing that he was only getting in the way, Edelston changed the rules. Effective immediately, most decisions about ideas would be made by the front-line employees in their weekly department meetings. The only ideas he needed to see were the ones involving significant investments or multiple departments. Making all other decisions at the lowest possible level in the company would result in less work, better decisions, and faster implementation. (See Ideas Are Free for more on the Boardroom story.)
But if Edelston personally had to review and evaluate every idea, he was merely running a suggestion system, and the success of the system would be limited by his knowledge and time. The underlying assumption in a suggestion system—whether the suggestions are collected in a box or online—is that management knows best. Regular employees cannot be trusted to do what is best for the organization, because either they lack the necessary knowledge and judgment, or they will put their personal interests ahead of those of the organization. So the “adults” have to be involved in approving even the smallest changes. Under such a regime, it is hardly surprising that management becomes a bottleneck and employees feel disempowered. This is one reason that most suggestion systems get less than half an idea per person per year and implement less than a third of those.
Edelston’s epiphany was precisely what he needed to create a high-performing idea system. The quantity and quality of ideas soared, and by the mid-1990s the company was averaging over a hundred ideas per employee per year, with implementation rates over 90 percent.
When leaders feel they can trust their workers to make decisions about their own ideas, the question becomes how to design a system that operationalizes this trust. In the rest of this chapter, we describe the three archetypes of high-performing idea processes that do just that: the kaizen teian, idea meeting, and idea board processes.
THE KAIZEN TEIAN PROCESS
We first encountered the kaizen teian (Japanese for “improvement suggestion”) process—which we consider the first generation of high-performing idea systems—in Japan in the mid-1980s, where it was being used in many large companies. By the early 1990s, as leading Japanese companies began to globalize their manufacturing, they introduced this process to the rest of the world. Although the kaizen teian system historically grew out of the suggestion box process, and the two processes have many outward similarities, the kaizen teian approach evolved to mitigate or eliminate most of the flaws of the suggestion box. The best way to understand how this archetype works is to look at an example. We have chosen to describe the system of Brasilata, the Brazilian can maker we discussed in Chapter 1, to demonstrate that kaizen teian can also work in a non-Japanese setting.
CEO Antonio Texeira started the company’s idea system in the early 1990s, after reading a number of Japanese books and articles, and becoming intrigued by the dramatic results produced by kaizen teian processes. Today, Brasilata gets around 150 ideas per person each year, implements 90 percent of them, and is ranked as one of the most innovative companies in Brazil.
Each of Brasilata’s four facilities around Brazil has a full-time staff to support the idea system. At the company’s main operation in São Paolo, for example, ideas are processed by a team of seven experienced workers on temporary assignments from the factory floor (whose knowledge allows them to understand the ideas better and gives them credibility with suggesters). In addition, a team of two mechanics, two engineers, a toolmaker, and an electrician is dedicated to helping implement the ideas. Similar teams exist in the company’s other three facilities.
There are two ways to submit ideas, online or on paper. To facilitate online access, Brasilata set up a number of Internet cafés throughout its facilities, but some employees still find it easier to write their ideas on paper. The paper ideas are put into special collection boxes, from which they are picked up twice a day and entered into the system within twenty-four hours.
Whenever possible, employees implement their own ideas before submitting them. They simply approach their coordinators (Brasilata’s term for front-line managers) who can approve ideas that cost less than 100 reals (about $50) to implement. A director (the coordinator’s boss) can authorize up to 5,000 reals (some $2,500); above that amount, ideas go directly to the CEO. About 70 percent of ideas are implemented directly by the workers themselves, and a further 10 percent by the coordinators. The remaining 20 percent are escalated or become the responsibility of one of the implementation teams.
When an employee does not have the authority or ability to implement an idea him- or herself, that worker is expected to recommend the best person to review it. Often, this person is the employee’s coordinator, although it could be anyone in the company. Whoever ends up getting the idea has seven days to evaluate and respond to it before the item turns red on that person’s idea summary screen. Once an idea is approved, it must be implemented within 45 days. Once a month, the CEO reviews a list of ideas that have gone red or whose implementation is overdue, and follows up with delinquent managers with what a group of coordinators told us is often a “very hard talk.”
All in all, out of almost a thousand employees in the company, more than forty work full-time on processing or implementing employee ideas. Additional support is provided by Brasilata’s technical support departments. Coordinators told us that they spend about 10 percent of their time working with employee ideas.
Kaizen teian–type systems are rare in organizations without some kind of connection to Japan. As stated earlier, they are essentially traditional suggestion box–type systems that have been highly streamlined to mitigate their inherent limitations. To work well, they also require a culture of improvement that strongly encourages individuals to step forward with ideas. Because they depend on a strong culture, building high-performing kaizen teian systems requires persistence and discipline over a period of many years. It took several decades for Brasilata to get its system up to its current level of performance. We believe that the extraordinary patience and sustained discipline needed to build and nurture the unusually strong improvement culture that drives a kaizen teian system explains why so few organizations use this type of system today.
TEAM-BASED PROCESSES
Most organizations setting up high-performing idea systems today use the second and third archetypes of idea processes, the idea meeting and idea board processes, which are both team based. They can be ramped up much more quickly than kaizen teian systems, as they are integrated into the way that regular work is done, so they can start producing good results in a relatively short period of time. Team-based processes are designed so that people bring “opportunities for improvement” (OFIs) to their work groups or departments. An OFI is a problem, an opportunity, or an idea. (As an opportunity is the flip side of a problem, from now on we will use the word problem to mean both problems and opportunities.)
It is important that both processes encourage people to offer problems as well as ideas. Most people have learned through experience to view problems as negative, to be avoided or hidden. After all, no one wants to be blamed for them or to be viewed as a complainer for bringing them up. But because every idea begins with a problem, teams must learn to seek out and embrace problems, instead of avoiding them.
Opening the process up to problems will significantly increase both the quantity and quality of a team’s ideas. The quantity of ideas goes up because often the person who identifies a problem has no idea about how to solve it, but a teammate does. The quality of ideas is improved because the team brings multiple perspectives and much more knowledge to bear on the problem, so the solution will be better thought out. Sometimes, an idea is an unworkable solution to a real problem. In rejecting the idea, it is easy for people to miss the underlying problem. But by returning to it, the team can often find an effective solution.
We came across a good example of how this works at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), a college serving more than nine thousand students in the inner city of Springfield, Massachusetts. STCC is one of the few institutions of higher education we are aware of with a high-performing idea system. A number of years ago, when the system was launched, during the first idea meeting of a team in one of the pilot areas, an employee posted an idea: “Let’s put posters and table tents around campus to remind students to use the online campus system that allows them to check grades, pay bills, preregister for classes, etc.” STCC’s idea board process gave every team member two votes on which ideas the department should work on, and no one voted for her idea. Struck by this, toward the end of the session, the facilitator asked the suggester to explain the underlying problem.
The problem, she explained, was that students were not using the campus online system and instead were stopping into departmental and student support service offices to ask staff for the information they wanted. “Every semester, employees spend countless hours helping students who could easily be helping themselves,” she told the group. Hence her idea: advertise the online campus system to get students to use it.
The team agreed that students were not using the online tool and that they could easily answer their own questions if they did. “Why, then,” the facilitator asked, “did no one vote for this idea?”
The answer turned out to be that the idea had already been tried in several different forms and had failed. Many departments had created posters, signs, and table tent cards to advertise the online system, but the advertising had made little difference. Students continued to ask staff for the information they wanted.
The facilitator realized that, in rejecting the proposed solution, the team had also lost the opportunity to work on solving the underlying problem. But when she brought the group back to the problem, its members realized that just because advertising had failed, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t solve the problem another way. After a brief discussion, the group agreed that if students knew how to use the online system, they would. In other words, the root cause of the problem was a lack of training, not a lack of awareness. So the team proposed that the college implement self-help stations at various campus registration sites staffed by work-study students whose jobs would be to assist their peers in understanding and fully utilizing the online campus system. The idea proved successful, and the college estimated that it saved the staff almost seven hundred hours per year.
Most teams start out by wanting to work only with ideas and viewing their task as simply giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each. It takes time and effort for teams to learn how to move smoothly back and forth between problems and potential solutions as the situation dictates, but when they do, they will produce significantly more and better ideas.
The Idea Meeting Process
We first encountered idea meetings at Boardroom in 1996. At the time, as we mentioned earlier, the company’s weekly meetings were generating more than a hundred ideas per employee every year, with implementation rates over 90 percent.
In the generic idea meeting process, people bring their OFIs to a regularly scheduled meeting. This could be a dedicated idea meeting or a standing agenda item in a regular team/department meeting. The meeting is usually held every week or two. Any less frequent than this makes it difficult for the idea process to gain traction and become a regular part of everyone’s work routine.
The facilitator begins the meeting by reviewing the progress made on actions assigned at the previous meeting and addressing any issues that have arisen with them, and then calls on each member to read out and explain his or her OFIs. Each OFI is then discussed and the group decides what actions (if any) it wants to take on it. These actions could be to conduct further research into the issue, to implement an agreed-on idea, to escalate an idea to the next level of management, or to put it in a “parking lot” to revisit it sometime in the future.
Actions requiring follow-up work are assigned to individual team members and then entered into a tracking system, which is often a simple spreadsheet. This tracking sheet includes all pertinent information about the OFIs: what actions are to be taken, who is responsible for taking them, and the anticipated completion dates. It also records ideas that have been escalated and OFIs that the team wishes to table for possible action later.
The Idea Board Process
The idea board approach is essentially an idea meeting process in which each team or department manages its ideas using an idea board. This board might be a whiteboard, any other type of visible board, or an electronic flat-screen, placed prominently in the team’s workplace. For simplicity here, we will explain the process using a whiteboard.
The specific design of the boards varies greatly across organizations, but at a minimum all of them allow team members to post OFIs, record action items, and track their progress. Figure 5.1 illustrates a basic idea board layout for a team or department. The boxes across the top half are used to collect the team’s OFIs for each of its designated focus areas, which should correspond to the goals that have been rolled down from above. The bottom half of the board is used to manage the actions being taken. We will explain the design of this idea board in more detail shortly.
The idea board process has several advantages over the idea meeting approach. The boards’ highly visual nature reminds people about the importance of ideas, keeps them focused on key team goals, and creates social pressure to complete assigned tasks on time. It also allows higher-level managers to see instantly how active each idea group is and to review its current improvement projects.
FIGURE 5.1Sample team idea board
The Process. A typical weekly idea meeting begins with a review of the status of previously assigned actions. Completed actions, including ideas that the team has worked on and wishes to escalate, are recorded in a database and removed from the board, and the status of any actions that are still in progress is updated. Unanticipated delays on assigned OFIs are discussed and, if necessary, addressed with additional assignments.
Then the group turns to the OFIs posted on the top half of the board and prioritizes which ones to work on. Some of these will have been newly posted during the previous week; others will be holdovers that the group has not yet chosen to work on. The team decides what actions will be taken to move each of the chosen OFIs forward, assigns these actions with expected completion dates to team members, and records them on the bottom section of the board to manage follow-through.
The Board. As mentioned earlier, although all idea boards work in essentially the same way, their specific layout can vary considerably. On the basic board shown in Figure 5.1, the top is divided into three boxes, one for each of the team’s goals or focus areas. (Recall that in Chapter 3, we discussed how idea-driven organizations carefully align each team’s goals with the organization’s overall strategic goals.) Team members post their individual OFIs in the box they pertain to. Some board designs have more than three focus areas or include additional boxes for other purposes, such as one-time themes, “parking lots” for ideas put on hold, escalated ideas, or OFIs that don’t fit any of the focus areas.
Depending on the circumstances and nature of the department or team, the goals can be highly specific or relatively broad. For example, the focus areas picked by the warehouse manager at that Spanish/Portuguese electronics retailer described in Chapter 3 were “Shipments per week per employee,” “Percentage of orders shipped same day and correctly,” and “Inventory turnover.” This level of specificity was very effective for the well-defined task of filling orders in a distribution warehouse. In a less structured and more complex environment, more general focus areas might work better. In the claims department of a U.K. insurance company, the focus areas chosen were “productivity/efficiency,” “customer service,” and “reduction of rework.” Management felt that more narrowly defined metrics such as “claims processed per hour,” “customer complaints” and “errors per 100 claims” would have been too restrictive and would have limited ideas.
From time to time, we are asked how OFIs should be posted on the board. Some organizations use sticky notes, preprinted cards, or slips of paper. Others ask employees to write on the board directly. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Often, when people think of an OFI, it is inconvenient to get to the board immediately. So if the OFI has to be written on the board, it might be lost. If the system uses cards, a person can carry them in a pocket or briefcase and write down OFIs as they come up (even while at home or traveling) and post them on the board later. Posted cards can also be easily moved, and OFIs on related topics can be clustered easily without erasing and rewriting. Preprinted cards typically include spaces for the submitter’s name, the date, a description of the underlying problem, and an idea to address it, if there is one. The name and date help with accountability, and the explicit problem statement helps in getting the group to consider the underlying problems and alternative solutions for them. The advantage of writing directly on the board is that the OFIs are more visible, and during the meeting people can see all the ideas at once. This makes the idea meetings go faster and helps keep people engaged.
Teams are often concerned about publicly posting their problems on boards that can be read by visitors or people from other departments. But unless there is proprietary or sensitive information involved, making the boards visible demonstrates that the team, and the entire organization, is open to recognizing and addressing problems. In our experience, instead of embarrassing the team in front of visitors, it invariably impresses them.
For example, the CEO of a medium-sized New England company once hosted a group of bankers who were considering his company’s application for a major expansion loan. At one point, the bankers stopped in front of an idea board and one of them asked what it was. The CEO explained that the board showed some of that area’s problems and what the employees were doing about them. It also had some “before” and “after” photographs of completed projects. Later, the CEO told us that the moment those bankers realized the implications of what they saw on the board was also the moment when they decided to grant the loan. Companies that are open about their problems, and ensure that their people are constantly working to solve them, are the ones worth banking on—literally!
Publicly visible idea boards also communicate the specific issues a team is working on to employees and managers from other departments. People will often read other teams’ boards out of curiosity and to get insights and ideas for their own teams. We are often asked whether people should be allowed to post OFIs on other teams’ boards. In principle, this is something to encourage, but it can be a very sensitive area, as OFIs coming from outside the team can be viewed as criticisms. Our recommendation, at least until an organization’s idea system and culture are mature, is that if someone has an OFI to share with another team, that person should recruit one of that team’s members as a cosponsor.
Some organizations use dedicated electronic flat-screens as idea boards. One advantage of electronic boards is that they can easily be set up to allow team members to access them remotely at any time from their computers or mobile devices. In some situations, such as when team members are geographically dispersed, organizations take their boards and meetings completely online, typically using some kind of web-based project management application. While this reduces the quality of the team interactions somewhat, it does allow idea meetings to take place when face-to-face ones would be impossible.
FACILITATION
Because so much depends on drawing out the knowledge and creativity of team members, idea meetings must be well facilitated. Usually, facilitators are team leaders or supervisors, but they can also be members of the team. They do not have to be the most knowledgeable person in the room but must be skilled at managing a group process. Facilitators have to elicit input from all team members, particularly those who tend to be quiet. They must keep the group focused on issues that are largely within its domains and get it to prioritize the OFIs it wants to work on. They have to decide which OFIs the group should deal with quickly, which require more in-depth discussion, and which need more research. Facilitators have to get agreement on what actions to take, who will take them, and when they should be completed. And while keeping all this moving along briskly, they need to keep everybody engaged. Great facilitators even make meetings fun. Expert facilitation is critical to running effective idea meetings, and investing in training and coaching in this area pays quick dividends.
We have several tips on idea meeting facilitation. The first deals with larger ideas. Often a team will want to take on an idea that is too big to be completed in a week or two. Rather than assigning the entire task to a single person or small group, it is usually better to turn the idea into a project and break it down into smaller tasks. This allows the team to spread the tasks across many people and match their skills with the required work. The idea meetings then double as project meetings to monitor progress, assign new tasks, and decide on any adjustments needed as the project progresses.
A similar tactic can be used to incrementally attack large complex problems that are not resolvable with a single idea. By tackling such a problem with many small and easily implemented ideas, the team can incrementally reduce its negative impact and perhaps even completely solve it over time.
Second, ideas will often emerge that cannot be used immediately. Such ideas might include improvements requiring capital expenditures that need to wait for the next budget cycle, facility improvements that are best included in an upcoming renovation, modifications to software or equipment that are currently impractical but could be incorporated into the next upgrade, and product or service features that could be incorporated into future design changes. Such ideas should be recorded in one or more idea parking lots to be easily retrieved when the time is right.
Third, someone other than the facilitator should act as scribe in the meetings to record OFIs and decisions. A facilitator also serving as a scribe is distracted from the primary role of guiding the team as it addresses problems and develops ideas.
Fourth, facilitators need to know how to deal with ideas that cannot be implemented. Few things will shut down ideas faster than employees feeling their thoughts and ideas are not taken seriously. Otherwise good ideas might not be implementable for many possible reasons: money is not available; the ideas don’t support the company’s goals; other planned changes will supersede them; legal or regulatory restrictions may prohibit them. A good facilitator makes sure that the reasons for not going forward with an idea are drawn out and understood.
At this point, the facilitator has two choices: drop the idea, or, if appropriate, take the group back to the original problem to see whether it can take advantage of any underlying opportunities embedded in it.
Take, for example, what happened with one group we worked with. The director of a university alumni relations department had invited us to give a brief talk to her department on the benefits of starting an idea system, which we did. Several months later, she called us again. She told us that her department had enthusiastically set up a system and forged ahead. However, she and the staff had some concerns about how the process was working and wondered if we could come back and give them some additional help.
A few weeks later we went back and found the entire department of about thirty people assembled in a conference room. “Our biggest challenge,” the director said to nods of agreement from around the room, “is that we have no difficulty thinking of good ideas, but we don’t seem to have the time or resources to implement any of them.”
We asked her for an example. She picked up the list of ideas that had come in so far and read out the first one: “Give everyone training in Excel.
“This is an excellent idea,” she continued. “We all use Excel all the time. But when we looked into the cost of sending everyone to training, it was more than $15,000, and we would have had to shut down the office for two days.”
“Who came up with this idea?” we asked, looking for the problem that triggered the idea. A woman in the back raised her hand.
“What made you think of it?” we asked her.
“I needed to make a [particular kind of] chart in Excel but couldn’t figure out how to make it work,” she told the group. “It made me think that we could all use some Excel training.”
“I know how to make that kind of chart,” the person sitting next to her interjected. “If you have a couple of minutes after this meeting, I’ll show you.”
This solved the woman’s problem, so we moved on to the next idea. As we continued down the list, a pattern emerged. Many of the ideas involved throwing large amounts of money at problems that could be addressed more effectively and inexpensively with a little thought and creativity. (Unsophisticated problem-solvers often do this.) To illustrate the lesson that money and resourcefulness offset each other, we went back to the first idea.
“Clearly the office will run more efficiently if everyone knows more about Excel. But you can’t justify $15,000 on Excel training. Suppose you had only $50. What could you do?” Ruling out the expensive solution is a facilitation “trick” that forced the group to think more creatively.
Based on the exchange between the two women in the back, it didn’t take long for the group to come up with a much better solution than “Excel training for everyone.” In an office of thirty users of Microsoft Office, chances are that someone has the answer to almost any question about it. Why not put up a bulletin board (cost: $25) for questions people have about any of the Microsoft Office suite? Or why not identify several “power users” in the office as “go-to” people for questions? By going back to the underlying problem and ruling out the possibility of throwing money at it, the group developed a set of inexpensive ideas that solved it elegantly and much more effectively than two days of offsite training would have.
Most supervisors will need some coaching to hone their facilitation skills. One way to do this is to have higher-level managers regularly attend idea meetings in their areas of responsibility. They can observe their supervisors in action and coach them. Particularly in the beginning, it is helpful to make structured feedback an integral part of these visits to ensure that the coaching is done in a consistent and effective manner. Formalized feedback can be as simple as filling out a short form stating what the supervisor/facilitator did well and how he or she could improve; the form should be completed by the observer during the meeting and discussed with the supervisor immediately afterward.
ESCALATION
Sometimes decisions about ideas cannot be made on the front lines and will need to be escalated to higher levels. The ideas may require resources that are not available to the front-line teams (such as skills, time, and/or money), may require the involvement of other departments or functions, may require dedicated problem-solving resources (such as Six Sigma projects, kaizen events, or R&D initiatives), or may simply involve issues that require higher-level scrutiny or permission.
The escalation process should be rapid and transparent, clearly define how the various types of ideas will be routed, and articulate the decision-making authorities and expectations for follow-through at each level. When no clear escalation process exists, ideas are handled in an ad hoc manner and can easily get lost or stalled. Whenever escalated ideas are not promptly addressed, employee trust in the system erodes.
The escalation process at Scania, the Swedish truck maker whose system we discussed earlier, has all of the necessary attributes. At the end of each front-line team’s weekly idea meeting, the team leader puts escalated ideas on his or her supervisor’s board for consideration at that person’s weekly meeting with all his or her team leaders. If the supervisor’s idea meeting decides that an idea needs to be escalated further, it goes to the line manager’s board, and from there, if needed, to the leadership team’s board. Because the boards at each level are visible to everyone, front-line workers can follow the progress of an escalated idea all the way up the chain of command.
At Scania, most escalated ideas are dealt with in a week or two. But some may need more investigation or coordination among groups, and still others may have to wait until the next budgeting cycle. For example, one idea in the diesel engine assembly plant outside Stockholm had to do with the workstation instruction-sheet packets that traveled with each engine through the plant. Scania’s engines are custom-made, so every workstation needs specific assembly instructions for every engine. The idea was to replace the physical packets of documentation with flat-panel screens mounted on the conveyor carriages used to transport the engines from station to station. With the appropriate processing information displayed on the screen as the engine arrived at each station, an enormous amount of paperwork would be eliminated, documents would no longer get misplaced, and time would be saved since the workers would no longer need to shuffle through paperwork for their instructions. Because the idea had plantwide implications and would require a large investment, it was escalated all the way up to the leadership team. There, it was parked until it could be considered in the next year’s capital budgeting process, where it was approved. Although it took some time to approve and implement the idea, the important thing was that the front-line team members who came up with it knew exactly what was happening with it every step of the way.
An important rule in escalation is that before an idea can be escalated to the next level, all the research and support work that can be done for it at the lower levels needs to have been done. Borrowing a term from the British Army, we refer to this requirement as the need for “completed staff work.” Keeping staff work as low in the organization as possible allows more ideas to be handled faster and at a lower cost.
Ideas that are escalated with poor or incomplete staff work represent coaching opportunities. Not only should the ideas be sent back down for further work, but the reasons that the staff work was deficient should be clearly explained. If this is done consistently, over time team members will come to understand the kinds of information that upper managers need to make their decisions and will learn how to make stronger cases for ideas. Teams will then prefilter their own ideas, and decisions on the ideas they do escalate will be much easier and usually positive. As Larry Acquarulo, CEO of Foster Corporation, a medium-sized, Connecticut-based medical products company, observed after revamping his escalation process to require completed staff work:
It used to be that I would get all kinds of ideas, many of them half-baked, that I would have to check out myself. It wasted a lot of my time. Now I have become largely a rubber stamp.
In a similar vein, when ideas are escalated that should have been decided on at a lower level, it indicates that people may be uncertain about their responsibilities and levels of authority. We encountered such a situation during the pilot phase at the Big Y supermarket chain discussed in Chapter 2. A checkout clerk at one of the stores suggested that signs be put up in the parking lot to remind people to bring in their eco-bags. He had noticed that customers would often express embarrassment to him about forgetting to bring in their reusable eco-bags. His team liked the idea and forwarded it to the store director. This director, who had been with the company only a couple of months, also liked the idea and immediately escalated it to his boss, the district director. The district director also thought that it was a good idea, but because a store’s parking lot was the store director’s responsibility, he assumed the store director was taking care of it and took no action. However, after three weeks, the tracking software flagged the idea as stalled due to the district director’s inaction, and it was highlighted for review at the next senior management meeting. In the ensuing discussion, the group confirmed that the idea should have been implemented by the store director, and that the incident provided an excellent opportunity for the district director to talk with his new store director about his authority and responsibilities.
Many organizations also use their escalation processes to replicate ideas that can be used elsewhere in the organization. While the eco-bag sign idea was not escalated for this purpose, it did bring the idea to the attention of top management, who then made sure it was implemented systemwide. And when it was used in all of Big Y’s sixty stores, its value was greatly multiplied.
One final note on escalation: it is important to link your front-line idea system with the other improvement and innovation systems in your organization, such as lean, Six Sigma, quality improvement, and product development or R&D. Many of these links should be designed into the escalation process. We will discuss this topic more in Chapters 6 and 8.
THE ELECTRONIC SUGGESTION BOX TRAP
It is important not to confuse high-performance idea processes with traditional suggestion systems. Almost every organization of any size has tried, at one time or another, to set up some kind of system to collect employee suggestions. Although today’s suggestion systems are generally online, almost all of them are based on suggestion box thinking, and they handle ideas in exactly the same way as a nineteenth-century suggestion box process. Automating the process does not get away from its intrinsic limitations. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.
To avoid the mistake of setting up a glorified suggestion box process, it is vital to understand why such processes are fundamentally flawed.
The basic suggestion box process is as follows. Employees submit suggestions to defined collection points. Each suggestion is given an initial review and routed to an appropriate manager, subject-matter expert, or committee for evaluation. This person’s or committee’s recommendation is then sent to a decision maker, or sometimes a decision-making committee. If the suggestion is accepted, it is assigned to someone to implement. If it is rejected, the suggester is sent a nice note with some kind of explanation. Electronic suggestion boxes merely automate the submission, routing, tracking, and notification components.
Standard complaints about suggestion box–type processes include the following:
They get very few ideas, most of which are of questionable quality.
They are bureaucratic, slow, and biased toward rejecting ideas.
The results obtained are rarely worth the time, hassle, and overhead of running the system.
Armed with an understanding of how high-performing systems work, it is easy to see the reasons for the deficiencies of suggestion boxes.
The quantity and quality of ideas are low because the suggestion box process generally collects suggestions made by individuals from their own limited perspectives. The quantity is low because the suggestion box process is voluntary and not integrated into regular work, there is little accountability for managerial follow-through, front-line workers aren’t empowered to take initiative, and the process is limited to solutions and does not accept problems. The quality of suggestions is low because they do not have the benefit of being vetted by colleagues who discuss the underlying problems and consider possible alternative solutions. Furthermore, the suggestion box process does not focus people on the organization’s strategic goals, so most of the suggestions are of limited value.
Suggestion systems are slow and bureaucratic because of problems with how ideas are evaluated. Since the task of evaluating ideas is usually assigned to managers in addition to their regular work, it gets a low priority and responses are slow in coming. And when an idea is approved, implementing it becomes extra work for someone else who is also already busy.
What is more, the evaluation is usually done at some distance from the front lines, often by a person who has little understanding of the context of the idea, feels little urgency about the underlying problem, and has little time to spare. (We have come across cases where the evaluator was literally thousands of miles away from the situation involved.) To be confident in approving an idea, this distant evaluator needs more information and time to become familiar with the situation involved. But time pressure, combined with the risk involved in approving a bad idea, means rejecting an idea is safer than accepting it. After all, approving it means the evaluator accepts some responsibility if it fails. Rejecting it means doing nothing, which will not make anything worse. All this creates a strong bias for rejection.
In short, suggestion box–type processes are gigantic doom loops. Their voluntary nature means employees are going beyond their job descriptions to give in ideas. The poorly designed process means that the ideas are usually not of very high quality and represent extra work for the evaluators, who find it easier and safer to reject them. So employees lose interest and give in fewer ideas. When management doesn’t see many good ideas coming in, it thinks that employees don’t really have many good ideas and so gives the system even less support. The system spirals down into relative or even total oblivion.
It would be hard to come up with a plausible process that is better designed to shut down ideas than a suggestion box–type process. In many ways, having such a process is worse than having no process at all.
There are three archetypes of high-performing idea processes:
Kaizen teian systems, the first generation of high-performing processes, are essentially suggestion systems that have been highly streamlined to mitigate their inherent processing problems and turbocharged with a strong culture of improvement.
In the idea meeting process, people bring “opportunities for improvement” to their regular team or department meetings, where they are discussed and implementation actions are decided.
The idea board process also has regular idea meetings but incorporates a large visible board to help collect and process ideas. The board’s highly visual nature helps keep ideas front-of-mind on a daily basis and creates social pressure to complete assigned tasks on time. It also allows higher-level managers and colleagues to see instantly how active each idea team is and its current improvement projects.
Take a problem-focused perspective with ideas. Often the person who identifies a problem is not the right person to solve it, and even when a solution is offered, it frequently pays to go back to the underlying problem to explore alternative approaches.
Sometimes decisions about ideas cannot be made on the front lines and will need to be escalated to higher levels. The escalation process should be rapid and transparent, clearly define how the various types of ideas are routed, and articulate the decision-making authorities and expectations for follow-through at each level.
High-performance idea processes are completely different from traditional suggestion systems. Although today’s suggestion systems are generally online, they handle ideas in exactly the same way as a nineteenth-century suggestion box process. Automating the process does not get away from its intrinsic limitations.