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Never stop looking for alternate solutions
Carroll on Work
By John Carroll
Someone once said, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” You do not have to be in a negative or difficult situation to look for a smoother, faster, simpler way of doing things. If you are considering alternatives on a regular basis, you will discover opportunities for improvement in some unlikely places.
Think of a situation that requires repetitive handling of a regular task, such as the paperwork required for your job. By simplifying a form, adding a specific piece of information or combining two forms into one, you reduce a system’s complexity, increase communications and streamline the task so that it saves time and energy, reduces errors and makes it easier for someone to learn how to do it.
You might say, “I’m too busy doing my job to stop and think about how to do it differently.”
Rather than resisting efforts to improve processes, ask yourself these questions on a regular basis:
If I could start from scratch, how would I do this? This is called zero-based thinking. It affords you the opportunity to build a task or job from its foundation, considering all the opportunities and pitfalls involved.
How could I remove a step or combine two steps into one? With every step involved in a task, the opportunity for things to go wrong increases. Depending upon the source, a four-step process has between 16 and 24 opportunities for error. By reducing that process to three steps, the error factor is reduced to a range of six to nine.
(Two formulas for likelihood of error: the number of steps in the process multiplied by itself or each of the steps multiplied in sequence. The math for the four-step process: 4 x 4 = 16 or 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 = 24.)
Consider a daily task reduced from four steps to three. During a working year, by removing that single step, you can remove between 2,600 and 3,900 opportunities for error. If the cost of an average error is ten dollars, the reduction of that single step could save the company nearly $40,000 in one year.
Consider the unusual. Author and speaker Mark Sanborn tells of the challenge faced by the Denver Zoo’s exotic animal collection, specifically how much money it takes to feed and care for those animals. Specialists must be added to the team, and special food must be provided for the animals to survive. How would the zoo cover the expense?
In this case, they took what was left of the food after the exotic animals had “processed” it. Then the zoo canned it, labeled it Zoop, and now they sell it in the zoo’s gift shop.
What sort of challenge or opportunity do you face on a continuing basis? What creative or unusual solutions would you offer to address it?
Someone said the inventors in human history were truly lazy, and in each case, the fact that they did not want to work hard to accomplish something led to an amazing and valuable invention. What inventions are sitting inside of you?
Tapping your creativity
As a human being, you have a natural tendancy for to creativity, the key to finding a better way. You were born a highly creative person but may have lost some of that creativity along the road to adulthood.
How do you get back to that highly creative person? Use some tools and exercises to force yourself into creative thinking situations.
A great creative thinking exercise is called the 20 Idea Method. Take a clean sheet of paper; list your challenge in the form of a question at the top of the page. Then, in one sitting, write 20 answers to the question.
These answers can be as serious or as zany as you wish; you must write 20 answers to finish the exercise.
The first few come easily, the next five or six are difficult and the final eight to ten can be extremely challenging to complete.
Use this exercise on a regular basis, and you will find answers closer to the end of the list are often what you needed to solve your problem.
The third right answer
To remain creative in your problem solving, whether professional or personal, leave yourself open to multiple right answers. You do not live in a black and white world. You also are not limited to one or even two right answers.
Consider the possibility of an answer you have never found. Use tools such as the 20 Idea Method to find a third right answer and put it into practice.
Help others find a better way as well. Often, an outside perspective can come up with the perfect solution. This will likely generate a source of help for you the next time you face a challenging situation.
Whatever you do in your work, apply the force of continuous improvement.
Rather than accept that you will always have to do things in a certain way, look for better ways, faster systems and simpler solutions to the challenges of your work and personal life.
Such innovation could be a great career enhancer.
John Carroll is a business consultant, speaker, author and president of Unlimited Performance Inc. in Mount Pleasant. E-mail him at jcarroll@uperform.com.
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