Innovation Part 2 - Flexibility by Rami Lokas
I would argue that innovation requires more flexibility than the project triangle model allows. Innovation requires that one of the vertexes be broken and/or two sides be made amorphous. As long as there is a fear of achieving on any of the artificial sides of the triangle there will be an inhibition of ingenuity. Innovation can only be achieved in a free, trusting, and collaborative culture, much like the college incubation that has yielded many of the greatest ideas of the modern era. There is a serendipitous nature in collaboration that many fear to admit.
It is understood that many decision makers and executives require a well-defined scope within a well-defined timeline. As mentioned in Part 1, requiring both is a recipe for mediocrity at best, or, at worst, a recipe for disaster. I would submit that if one of these dimensions should be relaxed, it is scope. Time is always marching forward without regard to human life. Time is the most valuable resource that we have—and we have no control over it! If things go wrong, we can’t recover lost time. Not so with scope. Scope is a human construct. Therefore, we have the most control over it.
If the other two sides are, by their natures, not malleable, then we have only one dimension remaining at our disposal. So, I say, dispose of scope. If scope is defined how can there be innovation? After all, the results are already prescribed in the scope. In addition, fixing scope has a counter result as stated by Parkinson’s Law: “Work will always expand to fill any time allotted to it.” Therefore, in an unbound project there will be an infinite amount of work, which is not acceptable since nothing will be brought to completion. On the flip side, a bound project will never deliver all the work ahead of schedule. Clearly there may be exceptions to this rule when other factors are applied, but the realities of the above statements are self-evident in one’s professional experiences.
A story was once told to me that, in Apple’s early years, a senior developer (probably Laughton as opposed to Wozniak) would come to Steve Jobs to report when a job was done, at which point Steve would ask whether this was, in the developers estimation, his best work. The answer was inevitably, “no”. To this, Steve would request he work harder. This happened over several cycles but the result were tremendous. This is an example in which scope is the least important factor. Scope should never be fixed. If it is fixed, it had better be for a very short time frame or, by the time it is achieved, it may well be obsolete. Time is the greatest risk to fixed scope. Without scope there is room for both dreams and the impossible.
In the book, Fools Gold, the Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe, Gillian Tett, the author, quoted from a research and innovation group commissioned by JP Morgan to generate ideas for new profitable revenue streams, “…if you want to create the conditions for innovation, people have to feel free to share ideas. You cannot have that when everybody is always fighting.”
Projects and processes are often heavily encumbered with bickering, fighting, fault finding, etc. This is never going to be conducive to innovation. These issues arise usually because one of the triangle dimensions is falling behind. The common wisdom for resolving these issues is to implement more processes or to add management features such as early warning signs and progress reporting. It is humorous to me that decades of training and education on this front have still not remedied these ever-present issues.
I like to associate this with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from quantum physics. The harder one attempts to measure a single dimension or attribute, the less accurately one can measure any other dimension or attribute. Or, worse yet, the more accurate the measure of one dimension, the more it affects the other dimensions—a negative correlation. Take, for example, the practice of exactly measuring development progress against a schedule. This inevitably leads to less quality and/or productivity, not more.
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