A subject of intense debates during client implementation sessions is the need for setting up the Idea Classifiers to feed a workflow.
Idea Classifiers are relatively important as they enable us to see an idea’s “area(s) of effect(s)” or “area(s) of benefit(s)”. It makes sense to be able to place some categorizers on an idea because it allows us to break the information down into more manageable chunks. An idea that explains a cost saving scenario versus a policy change is different and will be handled by potentially different people, departments or processes; even if the idea type is the same, it’s constitution will often require different expertise and resources than an other idea in the same category.
The are typically two main reasons why these discussions tend to take a long time (and sometimes are not recoverable and will go in a bad direction – leading to the wrong decision).
- People want to use the company’s department structure as at least one dimension of the classifiers
- People want to over-categorize things because they perceive that the data will me more manageable
Before I go on, let me say this: targeting where an idea should go is not about hitting “the bulls eye”; it’s about being “close enough”. You will rarely if ever be able to precisely pigeonhole an idea no matter how much time you spend listing tens…hundreds…thousands of classifiers, because you will always miss some. And the combinations are limitless – so to have an automated workflow to route the fuzzy front-end is like going prescribing therapy before knowing what the patient is suffering from. Innovation is about breaking out of your comfort zone. And a good starting practice is to apply this new approach to categorization. Innovation is also about trying new things – when an idea comes in and doesn’t have a proper category what happens? In reality there will be two outcomes: Either the user will pick a bogus option just to get past your “road block” or they won’t get past the road block and simply won’t submit for lack of the proper selection (confusion and let-down – immediately followed by disengagement).
1 – Using departments
One of the main reasons why this is a bad idea is that it requires a complete understanding of the company hierarchy in order to be effective. While this may make sense for a lot of middle managers and most (one would hope) members of upper management – it becomes completely meaningless to the majority of the company’s rank-and-file frighteningly fast. The other problem is that many large corporations have in excess of 20 departments and business units. What could one expect to happen when a new employee (my favorite kind of employee, unaffected by any negative culture exposure and enthusiastic about making a contribution – they’re often more capable to think outside of the box) with an excellent idea and has to pick one department from a list and sublist of 62 selections. In 99% of the cases where they still end up submitting the idea, they will get the department wrong. In the case of long-standing employees this error margin comes down but never really goes below 40%.
The other problem with departments is where does the idea go when it affects equally two or more departments? Or what about the new product/service type of idea that doesn’t have a department? For those of you that consider adding a department called “Other”, here is a fact: If you have “Other” as a selection, and the right category from their perspective isn’t available, people will pick it out of intellectual laziness; or for lack of the necessary alternative. So the intention of using departments to be precise goes out the window with the error margin, actually prevents submission of content by setting up a huge road block and finally will give you mountains of work in the end; as someone will have to manually throw these ideas around hoping that one day they land at the right place – that is if they have the flexibility to quickly circumvent the “hard-wired” workflow and still maintain process rigor and task accountability.
If you ever wonder why ideas take forever to be processed at your company, chances are that you started with a department list early in your process.
2 – Too much selection
This usually happens when someone has the clear mindedness of not going with departments but ends up asking for too much feedback for alternatives without setting a threshold. Again the purpose of categorizing ideas is not to be able to position them in the company using the precision of a pin hole. The intent is to be “close enough” so that during the entire process and the continual R&D of the idea you will refine its purpose and content which will give you the tools to have more precision.
You cannot be precise about something that is vague – when you get an initial concept through an innovation system it will be vague. The collaboration and evaluation processes are the tools that people use to build the concept, augment support, reinforce validation and refine it into a proposal; and only when it’s good enough can someone make a decision to take it to the next level.
In conclusion, Innovation can be a scary concept because it forces people into a position where they have to admit that they can’t know – when you don’t understand something, your first instinct is to try to “put it somewhere” so that it becomes easier to understand. The problem with that approach is that if you apply it early on, you are expecting too much too early. You have to be able to accept (and move on) that you will receive a vague concept early on but that it will be developed over time. When it will be developed enough, then it will be ready to be formally processed. Expecting someone to submit a “ready to go” idea that has everything you need on initial submission may guarantee quality but low volume; it will also guarantee that all the random ideas with big potential but no immediate clear shape will never be received or advanced to their full upside.