A young man went to his father to announce he wanted to get married. His father asked who the girl was. His son told him it was Mary Lou, a girl from the neighborhood. His father sadly said, “I’m sorry son but the girl you wish to marry is your sister. Please don’t tell your mother.”
The son brought more names to his father only to be frustrated with the same response! So . . . the son decided to tell his mother. Mom, he said, “I want to get married but dad said the girls are all my sisters.” His mother smiled and said, “don’t worry, you can marry any one of those girls. You’re not his son!”
Whether at home or work, maintaining secrets requires attention to the human element of confidentiality and ever more to technical security.
Confidentiality
Employees tend to protect the organization for whom they work. However, no matter how loyal and careful the management and workforce may be accidents can happen. Several considerations to prevent “loose lips” include the following:
Assemble your team and explain the importance of the project to their company’s success.
1. Let them know the consequences to our company should the information get into the public domain or be obtained by a competitor.
2. Provide an incentive for the team to maintain confidences such as awarding stock, providing a percentage of new product revenue for a specified time or other rewards of value to the team. Furthermore, let them know the consequences they will experience should project information be divulged.
3. Tell the team how long information must be confidential. Remind them that a good practice when communicating electronically is to ask if the information should be secure. If the answer is yes, then encrypt or use another mean for communicating with other team members.
4. Give team members the opportunity to opt out of the project if they think they would be unable to keep secrets.
5. Some organizations will use non-disclosure agreements to be reviewed and signed by each team member. The document might include provisions discussed in this section.
A completely different approach to protecting secrets is employed by a variety of technology driven companies such as Apple. The team is organized into sub teams, that is, separate work cells. Each cell has a portion of the product to develop and the cells do not communicate with one another. As a result, no one can fully describe the product until its release. Reports indicate this approach was used successfully with iPhone development.
There is no foolproof way to prevent mistakes or deliberate mischief when working with people. The suggestions above only serve to minimize the chance for leaks. For that reason, it is helpful to have a plan B should information be leaked. For example, Lee Iacocca wanted to compete with GM’s Camero. Ford had experienced a disaster when creating the Edsel so Iacocca chose to do everything differently when creating his vision. During the design phase, the public and competitors were lead to believe the Edsel would serve as the model for the new car. The revised Edsel took America by storm, it was a Mustang!
Technology Challenges
According to the publication, High Tech Highway, the greatest threat to breach of confidentiality, is the growth of personal devices within the workplace.
Applications for preventing a breach or theft include:
1. Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions enable a company to lock or wipe devices if lost or stolen. As important as it is to secure company devices, it is as important to secure personal devices that can be left around or misplaced creating opportunities for information leaks and security breaches. This point should be clearly communicated to all members in the workforce.
2. Mobile Application Management (MAM) secures company technology by restricting access to certain data or systems based on defined criteria such as an employee’s position, pay level, reporting level or duties in the company.
3. According to Ryan Sobel in his article, Keeping Company Secrets a Secret with Geo Fencing reports that Geo Fencing is a system that can develop barriers in an office restricting or disabling mobile devices from sending photographs, texting or videos outside the perimeter.
Play Purposefully
“There is good evidence that if you allow employees to engage in something they want to do, (which) is playful, there are better outcomes in terms of productivity and motivation.”
—Dr. Stuart Brown,
Founder of the National Institute for Play
“I think there are some enlightened companies that are beginning to get this, especially companies in research and development and design,” said Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play.
Brown offers play consulting for tech and non-tech companies alike, including Whole Foods. The reason: Not only does having a playful atmosphere attract young talent, but experts say play at work can boost creativity and productivity in people of all ages.
Play can also lower your stress levels, boost your optimism, and increase your motivation to move up in a company and improve concentration and perseverance. There’s some evidence from animal studies that engaging in play opens up new neural connections in the brain, leading to greater creativity, he added.
All sorts of creative new connections are made when you’re playing that otherwise would never be made.
Playing also engages the creative side of your brain. When you’re fully engaged in play, you lose some of your psychological barriers and stop censoring or editing your thoughts. This allows creative ideas to flow more freely.
“It’s not just the activity of playing that encourages creativity. When companies promote play, it engenders a more lighthearted atmosphere.”
We need to trust to play and to be creative. The ping-pong table in the office reminds people they work in a permissive and playful environment. Putting a bunch of action figures or tactile puzzles in the center of a conference room table can automatically lighten the mood of the meetings.
You can look at the people standing in line to buy lunch and make up stories about their lives.
“Begin to have a sense of richness from your own internal thought process”, Stuart Brown said. Take mini-breaks, and think back to a time when you were more carefree, even to childhood; and visualize yourself doing something that was completely enjoyable. You may realize that something is missing from your life and re-introduce it. If you loved competitive sports, maybe you’d join a tennis league. If you loved photography, maybe you can bring your camera to work and take creative breaks.
“Work hard to bring that playful spirit into the office on Monday morning.”
Keep It Creative
Over the years whether redesigning corporations, setting up team-based operations, facilitating problem solving sessions, resolving conflicts and creating trust, conducting focus groups, and/or coaching leaders, I have discovered several proven steps that unleash the creativity you seek.
1. Become a facilitator.
Being a facilitator means first giving up the need to have the answer. Your job is not to lead others to your conclusion, instead it is to lead your group to a solution, product, service, or new organization that solves the challenge and excites the group. Second, your role is to ask questions that do not lead to an obvious conclusion. Instead questions should be open and look at the challenge in different ways to provide the best conclusion. For example, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, originally pursued the concept of replicating the Italian coffee shop. His question was, “How can I recreate the Italian espresso bar in the United States?” He later changed his perspective and instead asked, “How can I create a comfortable, relaxing environment to enjoy great coffee?” A different question creates a different set of solutions!
Asking the question one way, then altering the question for more ideas can be helpful in avoiding the trap of asking the wrong question. For example, when working with an engineering group the first question was, “How do we solve the parking problem on campus?” After brainstorming for a while, the question was changed to, What do commuting students face and what would they suggest?, then, What would faculty suggest? and finally, “What wild and crazy ideas do you have?” While some ideas were similar the new questions always created more ideas than before.
Your role as a facilitator is to ask the questions, record answers as expressed by members of your group, and refrain from offering solutions yourself. You will find they will suggest solutions similar to your idea and more that can create a more comprehensive solution. Group members typically get off track and begin having discussions. Refocus them on brainstorming by reminding them of the question being addressed.
2. Create play time.
When adults play, minds wander and the subconscious is given opportunity to go to work. This is why time off from work is necessary for creativity to bloom. I imagine you have been stumped when attempting to solve a problem only to find the answer while taking a walk or engaging in an activity totally unrelated to your work situation. I find that when unable to think through a problem, taking a run usually relaxes my mind permitting my subconscious to work overtime leading to resolution of problems or creation of a new idea. Harry Truman was known to leave Washington DC to return to his farm when being challenged with issues in congress. After cutting a cord of wood or plowing the back 40, Truman would return to DC refreshed and ready to tackle challenges thrown at him.
When working with a client I always have tennis balls, hula hoops, and a rope available to provide play time and help people think out of the box. Recently, I helped a small business think through ways to improve revenue and reduce costs. The owners and staff were given an exercise to go through a hula hoop together. My goal was to open their minds to new ways to collaborate and make decisions. The owners initiated regular communication and problem solving meetings with staff and their business began improving.
When you think about offering play exercises for your staff consider the following guidelines:
• 10 minute exercises create awareness.
• 10 to 30 minute exercises begin skill development
• 2 to 3 hour exercises begin changing attitudes.
The most effective exercises include opportunity for participants to see, hear, and touch during their time together. Having free time at work to play games, relax, and share ideas is also valuable for enhancing creativity at work. Keep children’s play toys and games around to encourage discussion and new ideas.
3. Encourage out of box ideas.
Creative leaders are always on the lookout for great ideas. You can do this by practicing mindfulness, which involves intentionally noticing things and letting your mind relax and focus. Research has shown we lose our creativity as we allow ourselves to work longer hours and sleep less. Failing to restore our bodies and minds with sufficient sleep leads to greater tension, more frustration and higher levels of anxiety. To set the climate for out of the box thinking, it is incumbent on any leader to get between 7 and 10 hours of sleep each night and encourage everyone in their workforce to do the same. Decision-making ability is depleted when we are tired. Bill Clinton stated every mistake he made was when he was tired. We are much more effective and able to create when our energy is not depleted. For that reason, any leader who encourages full sleep at night and naps at work will renew energy, mental alertness and creative thinking on the part of themselves and their associates.
Do not let accidents discourage or distract you. Instead approach them as learning opportunities that can lead to new ideas. Inventions such as Posted Notes and The Slinky were created because someone asked why their initiative did not work and how their unintended result could benefit in another way.
4. Develop concepts from list of “out of the box” ideas.
Two time-tested methods exist for making sense out of a long list of ideas in order to develop a new concept. Both methods are based on high level participation and consensus decisions.
A. The 80/20 Rule is based on scientific study that concludes eighty percent of anything is caused or cured by twenty percent of something. According to Wikipedia, “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity)[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.[2] Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper “Cours d’économie politique.” Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.[3] It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.[4]
McDonalds Corporation asked me to work with their Owner Operator market team in Colorado. This group of 20 to 30 restaurants was experiencing challenges maintaining inventory, long drive through times and order accuracy well below standard. We spent a morning clarifying the problem (ask the right questions) after which we brainstormed causes to the problems. Using the 80/20 rule, the operators voted on the six out of thirty issues causing most of the problems. The six causes were then listed on the wall, and a list of solutions were brainstormed for each cause. Twenty percent of the solutions were selected and put into an action plan for monthly review. This market team set new records for reduced drive through time and increased order accuracy. Additionally, they began sharing inventory so that no restaurant would run out of food or supplies.
a. B. Affinity diagram
b. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
c. Affinity wall diagram
d. “The affinity diagram is a business tool used to organize ideas and data. It is one of the Seven Management and Planning Tools. People have been grouping data into groups based on natural relationships for thousands of years; however, the term affinity diagram was devised by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s[1] and is sometimes referred to as the KJ Method.
e. The tool is commonly used within project management and allows large numbers of ideas stemming from brainstorming[2] to be sorted into groups, based on their natural relationships, for review and analysis.[3] It is also frequently used in contextual inquiry as a way to organize notes and insights from field interviews. It can also be used for organizing other freeform comments, such as open-ended survey responses, support call logs, or other qualitative data.
f. Process
g. The affinity diagram organizes ideas with following steps:
5. Record each idea on cards or notes.
6. Look for ideas that seem to be related.
7. Sort cards into groups until all cards have been used.
Once the cards have been sorted into groups the team may sort large clusters into subgroups for easier management and analysis.[4] Once completed, the affinity diagram may be used to create a cause and effect diagram.[5]
In many cases, the best results tend to be achieved when the activity is completed by a cross-functional team, including key stakeholders. The process requires becoming deeply immersed in the data, which has benefits beyond the tangible deliverables.”
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians requested assistance with merging two operations into a single program. The first step was to clarify their strategy, then analyze work processes and technology after which we analyzed human resource systems to insure everything would work well together. Particularly when assessing Human Resource systems we found affinity diagrams to be quite helpful. We were organized into a cross functional design team and using cards to list issues and sort through them kept deliberations moving forward and eliminated potential conflicts between the merging groups.
8. Develop a project plan
Create a prototype. Ford engineers used clay to design automobile prototypes, another organization used drawings to picture the type of organization being envisioned, others may use picture collages, and others may use child toys or legos to create the visuals for a new concept. Using any of these tools serve to bring clarity to your project while creating excitement and ownership on the part of the project team and stakeholders.
After gaining clarity, it is time to use your project management tools discussed earlier with decision trees and action planning to organize tasks and initiate development of your exciting concept.