Do You Let What You Know Limit You?

Posted by Kelley LearcloseAuthor: Kelley Lear Name: Kelley Lear
Email: kelley.lear@redmoonsolutions.com
Site: http://blog.redmoonsolutions.com
About: Kelley is a member of the executive leadership team and leads our sales and marketing efforts at Red Moon Solutions. Kelley’s extensive experience in project management, product management, and consulting with Fortune 500 and Global 1000 clients is extremely important in this role.See Authors Posts (127) on Dec 14, 2011 | 0 comments

Just  read a great Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post by Bill Taylor who is one of the founders of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself  (January 4, 2011).  He was commenting on points made by Cynthia Barton Rabe, a former innovation strategist at Intel, who wrote the book “The Innovation Killer.  I actually read this book before and enjoyed the main theme which ponders the question of “why are so many bright executives are so ineffective?”.  Hmmm…we actually might be able to apply this question quite readily to our political leaders as well.

The basic premise here is that the sheer breadth and depth of knowledge we have in our company and industry will limit our ability to think around our current issues, to come up with new solutions and just plain innovate. 

Paradox of Expertise

Cynthia offers up her premise named the “paradox of expertise” in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace, product line, industry, or even in your department, makes it “harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions”. “When it comes to innovation,” she writes, “the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.” This makes total sense to me.  Often times, I find myself thinking I should be able to solve a particular problem fairly easily, when come to find out I end up implementing a similar solution as last year, resulting in of course a very familiar end product.  What works best for me is to apply concepts from other disciplines to a particular problem.  For example, I might use a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) which is typically used in Marketing analysis and business strategy planning, and apply it to development priorities or a tax department planning activity. 

Rabe’s solution is similar in that she offers up the implantation or use of “zero-gravity thinkers”, to be dispursed into these leadership teams and/or planning or problem solving sessions.  These types of folks would be creative thinkers that come from outside the group, outside the domain and functional expertise.  They are typically from somewhere “within the depths of the organization” who can bring a completely new perspective to every situation and provide insight with a fresh set of eyes. 

Fresh Perspective Anyone?

Bill Taylor also shares a couple of interesting examples in which some very successful organizations have bucked the norm and instead of benchmarking themselves against their peers and/or spent multitudes of hours and marketing dollars on analyzing the competition, they have looked at companies outside their core business who were successful and applied those concepts to their particular problem set.  Interesting approach.  For example, a London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, an exceptional cardiac care hospital was struggling with poorly designed “handoffs” during surgery resulting in many errors, complaints and some deaths, looked to an industry that has the best “hand offs” under pressure of any industry – race car driving (Formula One Racing in this case).  They had the Ferrari pit crew come in and work with the doctors to understand what they were doing and come up with some new solutions.  The Pit Crew could not actually believe how poorly they were executing on their operations…Working together they were able to re-design their processes and significantly reduce their error rates. 

I think you should think about this within your tax department.   I have conducted process re-engineering and process mapping sessions for tax departments where we have brought in other teams such as Finance, Accounting, Treasury, IT  and others to participate in our sessions.  I have never had a session where we did not learn something valuable and exceptional from an external group.  Think about this concept.  Have you done this before?  Any ideas of how another team might be able to help you?  Another industry or profession?  We would love to hear from you!