There is little doubt that companies that foster a culture of creativity will outperform, by a large margin, those that do not. A number of sources have proven this fact and I recommend reading The Future of Management for great examples.

Unfortunately, it seems to be difficult for companies to actually create an innovative culture. One where creativity is fostered and expected at all levels of the corporation. Companies that truly innovate tap into the creativity of each and every employee. They strive to enhance the creativity that exists in each individual.

We all enter this world with a vast amount of creativity. Think about your childhood and the how creative you were. Did you make up silly games? Did you tell fanciful stories? Did you sing, draw, dance? You were a very creative individual.

As we enter school, and eventually the workforce, the "system" strives to extinguish that creativity. We must become similar, we must not deviate outside the norm, we must comply. What a dull and uninteresting world we are creating. Corporate America seems to have perfected this ability to create a workforce of sameness. Training programs and rating systems are created to ensure everyone is molded into the same corporate citizen, much like the Stepford children.

This can be reversed! We can find and unleash our creativity! Why? True innovation is born from a thousand ideas. Creation of thousands of ideas is not the domain of the few. Thousands of ideas are created by fueling creativity across all employees. It is from these thousands of ideas that we find the game changers. It is the game changer that catapults profits.

Why then do we not unleash the creativity bottled up in every employee? There are many barriers but one is that change will upset the status quo. When every employee becomes a creative force then why do we need to have jobs specifically for creativity? Often these areas of the organization feel it is their responsibility to monitor for "unauthorized" creativity. They then fell a responsibility to maintain the status quo by dousing the fires of creativity that threatens their existence. Dousing creativity which is exactly what we need to foster in our companies.

My advice, as a good friend of mine likes to say, nurture the freaks.

• Encourage creative thinking
• Encourage people to bring non-work skills and passions to the workplace
• Encourage people to foster their unique strengths
• Encourage  people to step outside of job descriptions
• Encourage people to have fun
• Encourage people to resist compliance

Have you ever been in a situation where you have not gotten enough sleep for some period of time? At some point you are able to sleep normally again which does wonders for your recovery. In times of extreme exhaustion we might want to sleep more than a normal amount. We believe we can make up for our earlier deficit of sleep. As my wife is fond of saying, "you can't catch up".

In fact, sleeping too much in an attempt to "catch up" can exacerbate the situation. There are a number of studies that show too much sleep can lead to increased anxiety, mood swings, and continuing to feel sleepy throughout the day. What seems intuitive is not.

Similarly, the same "catch up" behavior often occurs in software development. I've heard more than once in my career something like this - "we have some extra bandwidth with our business analysts so we're going to "catch up" on requirements. We can get enough done so that we will be 6 - 8 months ahead of development".

I hope most of you agree that this is wrong thinking. Do you agree that this is not an optimum approach? Why do we fool ourselves in behaving this way?

What's The Big Deal

Software development has inventory just like any other organization that produces something from raw materials. It is very difficult to see that inventory. Just ask your company how much inventory do they have and I'm sure you will get a questioning look or a statement that there is no inventory in software development. Any work we do that produces output (e.g. requirements documents) results in inventory. Requirements are just one example. What other examples can you think of?

Why is this inventory bad?

Uh Oh, It Is No Longer Fresh

This analogy may break down but why do grocery stores not stock their shelves will months of inventory, say bread or vegetables? Those products must remain fresh to provide value to the customer. If they are no longer fresh then they must be thrown out and that is waste.

Continuing with the requirements example, they too must remain fresh. Do you believe that requirements created 6 months before they are acted upon have not changed and are still "fresh". Not likely and in fact, some of those requirements may no longer be relevant. You'll either have to rework them or throw them out and that is waste.

Focus On The Constraints

Software development creates a variety of output needed to build functionality delivered to the customer. The process of software development creates inventory which has a real cost. We operate under a model that seeks to keep all resources at maximum capacity. We believe creating something is the higher order goal and we don't recognized the potential waste.

The Theory of Constraints would show us that our focus should be on eliminating bottlenecks in our development system. This is a very different view from what I've described and it implies situations may exist where we do not maximize output in all stages. This is NOT how most companies operate and that focus on maximizing resources unwittingly causes dramatic increases in unseen costs.

Be careful about "catching up", it can be a very expensive proposition and not one that provides value to your customer in the most efficient manner.

I'm absolutely captivated by this area of study and have more to say. If you would like to learn more then I would recommend the following texts:

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
• The Future of Management
• Agile Management for Software Engineering

Does this look familiar? Someone comes up with a new idea. That idea is shared and has promise. It is then sent up the "chain" where it increasingly meets resistance. More often than not, it is killed. Why?

How much of your time is spent helping colleagues across your company? Are you so entrenched in your day to day work that you don't have the time to help when you could? Are pressures on to ignore those in need, those that could benefit from your skills?

I've been thinking about this lately and the lost opportunities as a result of not helping others. I wonder if a lack of a helpful spirit impacts our ability to innovate and the notion of building T-shaped people. If you've not been exposed to the concept of T-shaped people then I can recommend a few sources of information:

• Fast Company article - details on page 2 of the article.
• Collaboration by Morten Hansen - from the standpoint of increasing collaboration
• The Ten Faces of Innovation by Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman

In a nutshell, we're looking for people that are extremely competent and effective at doing there jobs but have the added attribute of being able to build connections across a company.

I think a component of creating T-shaped behavior is using your unique skills and abilities to help others. You represent a mix of capabilities unlike any other person. There may be others with deeper knowledge for a particular topic but no one else has the same mixture of skills as you.

Using those skills to help others creates connections that are real and beneficial. Connections that are built upon respect and gratitude. Connections that become a catalyst for bringing people together.

How do we promote the creation of T-shaped behavior with so much already on our our plate? I thought about the famous Google notion that every employee is encouraged to spend 20% of their time on some project that interests them. A phenomenal technique and has been noted by Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time (listen to this audio for more about this). What if we encourage employees to spend 10% of their time helping others? What if we actively reach out to look for opportunities to help others? Would that spark innovation? Would that help create T-shaped behavior?

I believe spending 10% time helping others will have a positive impact upon a company's ability to deliver new and compelling products, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Some of the benefits of 10% helping include::

• Opening more channels of communication
• Reductions in effort for those being helped
• Creating a sense of pride that you helped a colleague
• Bringing differing ideas together to spark innovation
• Increasing the number of view points leveraged to solve problems
• Continual improvement and sharing of practices
• Breaking down organizational barriers to collaboration

As usual, I don't have the answers and have more questions than answers. Do you feel this technique can provide benefits? How would you measure benefits? How would you prove that time is being spent helping others? How would you ensure help is delivering business value?

It is something I'll be thinking about and I would be very interested in your opinions.

What is collaboration? How would you define it?

A simple definition that works for me is: Collaboration - one or more people working together to accomplish a goal.

We almost always accomplish our goals by working with others. Teams working int he same location will find it relatively easy to accomplish a common goal. I would guess that many of you routinely work with others that reside in other locations. You are as likely to work with someone in another country as you are with someone in the same office.

How does this impact your ability to accomplish your goals? What challenges do you face?

I've worked with some wonderful teams in my career. Some of those teams had an ability to deliver a mind numbing amount of value. Those teams had gelled into a high performing group. (Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco talk about this gelling of teams in their book Peopleware.) Personal connection is an important element. Working together in the same location increases the odds that personal connections develop. There is more to the creation of high performing teams but personal connections are an important ingredient. How much more difficult is it for us to create those connections with distributed teams?

Collaboration capabilities provide tools to help teams accomplish goals and they should also provide capabilities to increase personal connections. This is the social side of collaboration which is often looked upon with suspicion in most companies. It is easy to justify investment to provide capabilities to allow teams to collaborate on materials and manage projects. Little effort is put into creating capabilities that help teams build personal connections.

People working together deliver value. People that are able to build personal connections are much more likely to gel into a high performing team. Social networking capabilities can help bring about those connections but they must be handled with care. They must be used to build the right connections. Measurements to gauge team effectiveness must be put in place. These measurements are designed to show value and how a team is able to provide value. It may be of interest to track how many times a person micro-blogged, or used a wiki, or commented on a blog post but that doesn't provide an indicator of value.

Social tools can help create deeper connections across a team. Greater personal connection will remove barriers to collaboration which increases alignment across the team and greater focus on accomplishing the vision and providing value.

I would love to hear more about how you are using social tools to help increase team effectiveness. Feel free to join the conversation by commenting.

As a child I remember cartoons which had two slightly different images and your task was to figure out the differences. Sometimes the differences were hard to spot but eventually, I was able to find them all. Of course, it might have taken me days to do so... I always like that game and it got me thinking about how this applies to business. In a world of sameness, what are your differences from your competition?

Some cartoon differences were frustratingly difficult to identify. Do your potential customers have this frustration in determining what makes your business stands out from the pack? Do they struggle in understanding why your business is different and in a manner that is important to them?

Or, is your business more like the cartoon differences which were spotted within seconds? Are your differences easily spotted by customers? How do you make that happen with your business?

What Makes You Different

If you have trouble understanding what makes your business stand out then you need to do some soul searching and identify what separates you from the competition. What do you excel at like no one else and what core value do you provide to your customers?

We all get caught up in the minutia of "work" and allow ourselves to forget what is most important. We get so overwhelmed that we soon forget what really differentiates us. Capability analysis includes a set of techniques that can help you clearly understand "what" is important and is a practice that will help you determine where your effort should be focused.

I won't go into great detail about the concept at this time but I do want to provide you with links to information that I think will prove to be valuable in understanding these concepts.

First stop should be a book by Ric Merrifield called ReThink. ReThink provides an introduction and overview of these concepts. This book provides the foundation and has great examples of where these techniques have been used.

Another person you should become familiar with is Dennis Stevens who has done a lot of work with Ric Merrifield on these concepts. Dennis has a very active practice and his blog is a great resource of information. In particular, see his post Toward A Next Generation Capability Maturity Model.

Dennis is also working closely with Mike Cottmeyer and they have begun writing a book where you will see these concepts and their continued evolution. See Mike's post called The Capability Conversation.

I find this approach to be a powerful one and worthy of study and use. In future posts, I'll provide more details as I learn more about it.

(Image from cartoonstudio.co.uk)

Are you inadvertently locking up your knowledge? Are you hiding information from your peers? Are you limiting the spread of useful information?

I'm on a campaign, of sorts, to get people to think outside the inbox. A campaign to start leveraging more collaborative capabilities for sharing information and working together.

Does this scenario feel familiar, I receive an email, probably one with many recipients and the inevitable game of ping pong, back and forth dialog ensues, and some decision is made. What happens if someone wants to revisit that decision, tries to remember why a decision was made, or a new colleague needs some history about that decision? Those that participated in the discussion will probably remember they exchanged email and can search for the background material in their mail system. What about others? What do they do?

Email as the collaboration platform has created a situation where that information is now locked up. Is there a better way? I think so. If this dialog occurred within a discussion forum, a blog, or a social network platform, then that knowledge would be more accessible by others in organization. Searches might quickly find this dialog - that assumes a working search infrastructure that supports federated searches across sources of information.

Email is an important platform but it is not always the most appropriate collaboration platform, especially when making group decisions. Some of the benefits of using other collaborative capabilities, especially when backed with good search infrastructure include:

• Ease of understanding why certain decisions have been made
• Allowing others to benefit from prior research and dialog
• Helping new employees to become more knowledgeable and productive in a shorter period of time
  
• Reduction in email storage costs - How may times do you need to send that 3 MB file around?
  

The use of appropriate collaboration tools can level the playing field and help spread organizational knowledge. As we become more geographically distributed it becomes even more important for us to think outside the inbox and leverage more collaborative capabilities.

I encourage you to thing about how your daily work habits contribute to locking up knowledge. How might you leverage collaboration capabilities to set information free? Have you shifted from an email centric mindset to more collaborative tools? If so, what benefits have you seen?

I would love to get your thoughts on this.