Creativity May Start with Knowing What You Don't Know

Success Through Cross Functional Teams

Throughout my career I was responsible for creating new revenue streams and solving operational problems. In almost every instance I used a cross functional team that had members from each division of the company (finance, sales, accounting, IT, production, logistics, etc.). These teams had remarkable success in creating new revenue streams and solving operational problems. 

These teams were successful because each individual brought a different point of view and bias. It was not unusual to have a sales problem solved by someone from the accounting or finance division or an IT problem solved by someone from production.

In my last blog I described a cash control system that I designed that was successful after the finance executives failed to design a successful system. The system proposed by the financial team relied on centralized cash control while my system put cash control responsibility at the operating unit level and was decentralized. 

You may wonder why the corporate financial team didn't consider or propose a decentralized system or why I didn't propose a centralized system. The reason is in both cases we didn't know what we didn't know. The central office folks viewed operations from their command and control position. I came from store operations and had a view from the posiyion of a store manager.

In my view the cross functional team approach was successful because each individual team member had a different view of the organization that came from their position in the organization. They addressed opportunities and challenges from their position in the organization. In sum total, the team benefitted from an exchange of discovering what was unknown to them. This led to novel ways of developing new revenue streams and solving problems.

So how do you discover what you don't know?

In almost every case a manager or leader will ask for data that will help solve a problem. That data will be analyzed and reviewed in an effort to find a solution. The problem is that the bias is already in place. The data studied will be drawn based on the thought framework of the leaders and their past experience with similar problems. For radically different alternatives you may need to analyze data not in your organization's memory.

In my last blog post, I asked AI to design a cash control system and it proposed a centralized system. That may have been based on the normal view of corporate cash systems and data available to AI or it may have been on how I set up the prompt. At this point AI didn't even suggest a decentralized system was a potential outcome.

So what happens if I ask it to consider a radically different option? In the case of AI, it will still assume a corporate bias. In the case of cross functional teams the result would still be within the construct of the organization's goals.

You may still not know what you don't know. 

So, the best way to create new approaches to solve problems is to ask for improvements on each proposed solution. You may want to start with generating the number of jobs you are trying to do with each opportunity or challenge you address. One way might be to develop a MECE hypothesis tree that was developed by McKinsey. This approach requires a Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive listing of hypotheses, each of which can be studied further.  

An example of the use of an MECE hypothesis tree would be to determine how one might have more money at the end of the month. An individual can have more money by either making more or spending less (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). If a person chooses to make more money then a list of hypothetical ways to make more money would be curated and each of those hypotheses would need to be explored.

A simpler way would be to explore each potential solution with an alternative approach.

If you use the MVOSSTE approach you can have several alternatives generated at each phase of the framework. Thus you would have several mission, vision and objective statements generated and research to be conducted on each. This would like generate separate strategies and execution and tactical plans. This approach will certainly give you the ability to explore options you might not have considered.

If you would like to explore these approaches, you can contact me at gary@gwrresearch.com and we can set up a brief conference call.