Fresh Eyes Peer Review

As I walked into office today, I found a not-so-little black book on my desk. Curious, I picked it up and glanced through the pages. Now let me clarify, there was no ‘Confidential’ mark on it and so reading it is not a violation of regulations. Anyway, I found that it was a copy of a case study submitted by an ex-intern with the team I worked for, who was trying to study the role of this function in a typical organization.

It was an interesting read, especially since it spoke in an external perspective about a function I am involved with on a day to day basis. The study was done about an year ago, before I was part of the team, and so it actually gave me some information about the recent history as well as some extinct service lines. I saw entertainment value in the exercise, but I am sure there is more to it than just that.

When you are facing a nagging problem on your project – one of those kinds where you are sure you know the solution, but just can’t place it – it is often useful to have someone else take a look at it. It is a form of external consultation, except that instead of a subject matter expert or some individual specialized in offering consultancy services, you depend on someone in your peer group who would have sufficient knowledge to understand the problem and suggest a solution. This cancels the effects of fatigue caused by repeatedly tackling the same problem.

Let’s call it a ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’. The most obvious shortcoming is the risk of confidentiality breach and therefore please be careful while applying it to sensitive projects. This is probably common practice in some teams, but might be useful to those who have missed out.

Assuming there is some problem to be solved, and that problem is a human error, there is a clear logic that applies to why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is so effective. It plays on psychology, and I must warn you, most writers tend to take psychology as a subject to wax eloquent on, even without a good foundation on the subject – a science misunderstood by laymen, but that is a fact we can pick up on another day. Coming back to the topic, let me take you through why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is generally so effective. And for that, let us consider the essential elements of such a peer review exercise:

1.    One is given the opportunity to express his opinion on another’s work/idea and possibly find fault with it

2.    One is able to comment on a project he/she has not put in an effort into building, and therefore has no stake in. This enables the reviewer to suggest disruptive changes and daringly innovative, fresh ideas

3.    There are no personal favorite elements in the project for the reviewer; so there is no reason for thoughts on the lines of “We worked too hard on that part, so let us not mess with it. We can change anything else”

4.    The reviewer has a potential opportunity to contribute to the project and is likely to make full use of an idea that has merit

Many of these points dwell on the personal behavior of people and some of them border on ego and selfishness. It is not a perfect world; and the intelligent ones have to be reasonable and expect some such elements in every professional. The really intelligent ones take this thought and leverage it for the success of the business – or any other endeavor you are part of. Now that is one more reason to use the ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’!

Flashback: An End to Outsourcing?

Outsourcing – a concept which took the world of business by storm a few years ago – is slowly becoming a more complex arena, say experts. In the beginning it was pretty simple: Certain business-related activities which are too expensive or cumbersome to be carried out in-house, is taken care of by an external agency specializing in the area. The primary benefits included specialized skills and cost savings – especially if the outsourcing is done to a foreign destination where labor and infrastructure are significantly cheaper.

Asia in general, and India in particular, has traditionally been one of the leaders in outsourcing destinations, primarily due to the savings in labor and availability of certain specialized skill sets like IT. However, this is slowly beginning to change, if recent trends in the industry offer a reliable clue. Take our own IT services scenario as an example - the increased demand for IT skill sets in Asia have driven up the costs incurred in hiring and sustaining an IT professional. Similar is the case with business infrastructure, where the costs have skyrocketed for the same reason. As a result, IT service organizations are compelled to drive up their prices and hence the companies wanting to take advantage of outsourcing are beginning to realize that there is little or no ‘advantage’ left!

Think of it as inflation: Costs drive up prices, which in turn drive up costs – to put it simply. This has recently begun to have significant effects on outsourcing. Last year, New Call Telecom, a British organization dealing in telecommunications, was in the news for recognizing this and actually taking steps towards this. The company has scrapped its plans for a call center in India, and instead set it up back home in Lancashire! Also, countries like Brazil, China and Egypt are the new contenders for ‘favorite IT destination’.

The IT outsourcing industry is changing fast. We, the people, must essentially change with it.

Social media: To trust or not to trust

We live in a world where a human being can seldom control his/her exposure to the public eye. It isn’t easy to keep secrets any more, and they say anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever.

I wrote earlier about how close we are to a world where a manager gets information about prospective employees from his/her colleagues and former managers (and vice versa), through leveraging social media. On the one hand, it makes it easy for a manager to do the screening process, and prepare himself and his team for the arrival of the new team member. Similarly, an employee can prepare himself before joining a new organization or a new team, based on the opinion of people who have had some kind of experience at the place. But this gives rise to two possibilities that needs immediate attention.

Firstly, whoever seeks opinions through social media must have a clear idea of who to trust and who not to trust. Untrustworthy sources can wreak havoc with the process and the seeker may end up with a grossly contorted result. Given the very nature of social media, a filtration process may not be that simple to implement effectively.

Secondly, as I mentioned before, it is said that anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever. We have read plenty of stories with the same moral, each citing a case where someone was terminated from a job/rejected at a job interview due to embarrassing photographs uploaded on a social networking site. In a business context, what is ‘embarrassing’ for an organization may be very different from what an individual might choose to keep hidden. The essence here is, social media may have drastically reduced our margin for error – one mistake made long ago may come back any time to haunt an organization or even an individual as long as it exists on the web.

Gathering intelligence using Social media

I was looking at a review for mobile app called Local Mind. If you are thinking of going out tonight, all you need to do is quickly open Local Mind and put a question across to fellow users who are already at this place you intend to go to. If so inclined, they can give you a real-time update on how the place is, what the crowd is like and even quick tips on the offers that are currently on. It is the social networking equivalent of calling ahead and checking with a friend what a place is like – except, your ‘friend’ base is suddenly expanded and you can get answers from the people who are at that place right now!

Stop for a moment and think – what else can this system be used for? The concept is really simple. Take something you do in everyday life, where you are likely to call a friend and check in advance, then do the same on a social network. We usually depend on the past experience of a friend, about how he/she felt about something/someplace he went to some time ago. This time, you are getting real-time updates from people.

How about doing the same when you are about to join a new project, under a manager you are not familiar with? Or on the other side, how about doing the same about a new team member who is about to join the project you manage? From one’s fellow team members and former managers, you can collect a lot of information, even though you really don’t know them personally.

Social media can do so much more for a business than branding it in front of potential customers and investors. The easy part is getting the answers, while the tough part is to choose from what you get! More on that in the next post

Coincidences and the Innovation Butterfly

At its simplest, an Innovation butterfly is the very initial cause for a particular instance of innovation. It may be a thought, a complaint, a protest, or even a rough sketch drawn playfully on a napkin while having coffee – something that seemed insignificant at the moment.

The mobile phone probably began with a thought by someone, who was stuck in the middle of nowhere, wondering “Now where do I find a telephone booth?”. Tata Motors claim to have hit upon the idea of an affordable car (which we now call the Nano) when someone noticed a family of four trying to balance themselves on a two wheeler. Start thinking of this scenario applying the extremes of pure logic, and you can break it into a number of vital pieces:

1.    Potential inventor drives by on a busy road

2.       Family of four gets on the two wheeler on the same road at exactly the same time

3.       The person (inventor) looks outside and sees them

4.       Visibility and weather conditions were good enough for him/her to see them and take notice

5.       He wasn’t preoccupied enough to let the sight escape his mind

6.       He/she wonders how the family can be helped out of this predicament

7.       He/she thinks of, or probably discusses with someone or hears about the possibility of building an affordable car, while this memory is fresh in his mind

Each of these 7 appear to be independent of each other and and are seemingly insignificant to the bigger picture. But if any one of them had changed, the inventor never may have noticed the family and may never have noticed a business need for such an invention. This is what is called the Butterfly effect, as applied to innovation. And each of these steps could be the proverbial Innovation Butterfly – a seemingly insignificant and possibly underrated beginning to a major event of Innovation. Theoretically, any event before these seven could have been a contributor, such as whether the family was going for a movie, or to visit someone at a hospital.

You never know what could start a revolution. Keep your eyes open for the next big thing, but most importantly, keep your mind open!

Innovation: Who is the best judge of ideas?

Great minds think alike. The greatest go ahead and patent it.

There is only one thing that hurts more than saying “Why didn’t I think of it?” after reading about a new invention. And that is having to say, “I had actually thought about it a few months ago and didn’t realize it was a good idea”. Around the world, it is estimated that the conversion rate of ideas to usable products is about 0.000002%. That means roughly 2 in every million ideas are taken forward to be fashioned into some meaningful product. I can assure you that’s a conservative estimate, and the real number is far less.

In any case, the gist of it is, a lot of ideas come to people and very few of them are worth pursuing. But then, what separates a good innovation ecosystem from the rest is how these viable ideas are identified and brought forward through a good judging process. In the million ideas, there may be 50-100 more ideas that are actually usable, but fall by the wayside because no one was able to appreciate the merit. Famous examples in technology are the mouse and graphical user interfaces, which were originally invented by engineers at Xerox, where they were both dismissed as ideas which are of no use to people. Other companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc swooped in and took it from them with minimal effort. Also think of the first few talent show judges who rejected Elvis Presley and The Beatles as not worth it.

Now that thought typically has two types of effect on the people of an organization:

1. Potential innovators gain in confidence, thinking their ideas may have more merit than others have been giving them credit for.

2. People in charge of filtering ideas may get more nervous, fearing “How can I reject an idea today, if it may come back tomorrow as a huge commercial success and mock me?”

So, does this mean that a culture of innovation will cause some not-so-good ideas to pass through the filter and generally lower the standards? Yes, but this would again indicate a flaw in the evaluation mechanism, rather than the idea generation engines. Do not let the former kill the latter. In the world of journalists, we often lament the many writers who have died on the editors’ table. This is more or less the same plague that has affected innovators of modern times.

Collaboration for Innovation: When and How does it Work Best?

 

The work life of a modern day professional has two key phrases in its description:

1. Continuous innovation and idea generation

2. Making oneself relevant to the business and the organization

These two key phrases are essentially tied to the concept of thought leadership. The Global CEO study by a major IT MNC showed up some telling numbers when it comes to innovation. 40% of corporate chief executive officers and other business executives suggested that employees are the primary source of innovation. About 35% attributed it to customers, while fewer than 20% suggested that ideas primarily come from internal R&D. The reason is pretty simple: At an employee level, there is tremendous amount of collaboration between unrelated thought processes. Customers may not have this luxury, nor will an R&D unit that works according to a predefined thought pattern – exceptions possible.

The first step in any major instance of transformation is when someone thinks about a situation and realizes there is a definite problem to be solved. Then comes the organized thought process and hopefully, a stage where a solution is found. But this poses a question – At what stage is an instance of innovation mature enough to be presented before the people?

If you have an idea, research upon it, build a prototype and present it, it works well for the business in the sense that it is a product that is ready to go. But in this case, you are depending heavily on yourself and your inspiration to get a product out. How often is this viable?

Several ideas that come to you may have been dismissed just because of the fact that you don’t know what to do with it. But someone else might have some excellent follow up thoughts on it, without ever having got the original spark. Collaborating at a very early stage of the innovation process will produce better results than working together on a prototype at a later stage – in terms of the number of ideas reaching the market and also the quality of the product created from the idea