To paraphrase the US Army, you’re a factory of one.
Stuff lands in your inbox, or on your desk, or is handed to you in a meeting — market research, budgets, trend forecasts, lots of venti soy half-caf pumpkin lattes — and out pops beautiful, creative, groundbreaking solutions. Answers to all the biggest questions your organization faces: should we expand into Latvia or Estonia? Should we extend our lobster bib product line by adding oyster bibs? How can we convince our CFO that we really need the Aeron chair “true black” colorway?
And if you’re a factory of one producing this stellar work, like any other factory, you should have a process.
But what I hear all the time is, “My work is too unpredictable to define a process.” Or, “My work is different. I’m not like the sales admin staff processing invoices, or the mail room guy whose job is just to send out letters. My work is creative.”
Yeah.
Of course it’s creative. But even so, you can define a process. In fact, I’ll go so far as to quote W. Edwards Deming:
If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.
Yeah, yeah, I know — you’re not a factory drone, stamping out widgets. But there’s a process, a system — standard work – for everything that’s done well. Even comedy.
Don’t believe me? Here’s Jon Stewart, explaining to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross how he and his team of writers produce their comedy:
You’d be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is, and just how the infrastructure of the show is very much mechanized.
People always think “The Daily Show,” you guys probably just sit around and make jokes. We’ve instituted — to be able to sort of wean through all this material and synthesize it, and try and come up with things to do — we have a very, kind of strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, that allows us to process everything, and gives us the freedom to sort of improvise.
I’m a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think you don’t know what to do with yourself. But when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it.
Get it? It’s a process. Even for something as creative as writing jokes, there’s a structure to follow. And by establishing that structure, they can unleash their comedy. Without it, they’d probably be a bunch of unfunny fat guys eating donuts and wondering why their show just got canceled.
Now, take another look at your work. Sure, you have to be creative. But whether you’d a doctor in an emergency department, the marketing director for a shoe company, or the coach of a professional football team, you can define a process. I’ll go even further: you can create standard work.
Of course there will be variability: the doctor never knows whose going to walk through the hospital doors, the marketer doesn’t know what customer will complain about an ad campaign, the coach doesn’t know which player will get injured (or in the case of the NY Jets, get arrested for stupidity). But these cases are the exceptions, not the rule.
If you try to manage your work for the exceptions, you’ll never get anything done. Jon Stewart said that it took him six years to write his first 45 minutes of material. Now, with a rigidly defined process (and, to be fair, a team of writers), he creates 30 minutes every single day. The structure, and the standard work you define, enable you to manage the unpredictable crises.
If something as evanescent as comic inspiration can be turned into a process, there’s no excuse for you to not create a process for your own work.
Pingback: Tweets that mention If Jon Stewart can do it, so can you. « TimeBack Management -- Topsy.com
Very well said. So many leap to the idea that creativity has to mean nothing is repeatable. That just is not true at all. The processes and system to allow creativity can definitely be designed and continually improved just like any process or system. See my previous post on Process Improvement and Innovation
John,
Thanks for the comment. You said it better than I ever did: “I do not believe process improvement is bad for innovation. Bad process changes can be bad for innovation.”
Excellent post, Dan. Deming’s quote in the middle captures (in Deming’s stark, humorless way) what Jon Stewart captures more humorously. Creative work can be enhanced with clear processes.
Thank you!
Pingback: Il meglio della blogosfera lean #60 — Encob Blog
Pingback: Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Management Improvement Carnival #114
Pingback: What would happen if you played with Barbies? « TimeBack Management
Pingback: What I’ve Learned So Far » Blog Archive » Why I Won’t Participate in That Thing You Were Talking About.
Hi Dan,
First of all, I love your logo! Clean and classy and clever. (I design logos and go crazy when I see a good one.) Great quote by Deming. I’ve never been a big process person or so I thought. Mainly because conventional companies often beat it to death. There’s little room to be creative you’re so busy genuflecting to the process.
I see what you mean about a structure. For example, when I start a logo, I do have a process – it’s just loose by its nature. Give out a questionnaire, then immerse myself in places that help free my thoughts – sometimes that’s a walk or to pick up books on completely different topics. Then I sketch. Then I move to the computer. Then I take break. Then I come back.
And it works! Thx. Giulietta
Oh – you amazing man.
I love it that you quote Deming. He is one of my heros.
And I would love for him to become more well known across the planet.
Giulietta — glad you like the logo. I can’t take credit, however. My friend, an employee at Ogilvy, designed it. You’ve realized the truth that it’s a false dichotomy between structure and creativity. They’re two sides of the same coin, and both necessary.
Meredith: I’m blushing. But I’m not the amazing one. Deming is. Glad to meet someone who sees the world the same way.