Efficiency vs. Creativity

A recent Businessweek article on 3M highlights the trade off between managing for efficiency and managing for creativity.

I read the article on a recent flight and found the whole debate silly – why is this a polarized, binary decision? That either you have to be going for efficiency or going for innovation? It’s a very narrow way to think about how things work.

First you have at least two conceptual crossover points:

Creative efficiency. If efficiency is the goal, there are all kinds of innovations one could research for making a company or team more efficient.
Efficient creativity. If creativity and innovation is the goal, there are ways to speed how long it takes for ideas to get funding, and for staging their development from idea, to incubation, to production, without clipping wings.

Polarizing efficiency and creativity as mutually exclusive is shallow thinking. It’d be just as foolish to define customer satisfaction and profits as competing forces.

Second, as the article points out, requiring universal metrics in large organizations is guaranteed to kill good things you want to keep. In 3Ms case, the former CEO adopted corporate wide six sigma objectives and this apparently stifled creativity (surprise!). For the uninitiated, six sigma is a technique for reducing mistakes & costs that originated in manufacturing, where defects per million are a common metric. As the new CEO points out, this is absurd as you can’t control new ideas in this way.

The last section of the article does suggest you can do both, or that projects can be labeled on a spectrum of how aggressive/conservative they should be managed. And of course parts of any project can be ranked in the same way, with some getting efficiency goals and others creative/innovation goals.

So you have at least two more controls to use:

Goals per project. If a company has 7 projects, 3 of them might be mature and have primarily efficiency or incremental goals. 4 might be in new markets with more ambitious goals for risk taking and creative change. Every project manager has to be able to define where their project fits relative to other projects in their company.
Goals per part of project. Like a fractal, within a given project there are always a range of efforts. Some will be more mature and conservative, others more ambitious and aggressive. People responsible for parts of projects have to able to see how their area differs from other areas and be empowered to manage them differently.

So the problem isn’t six sigma or any other method – it’s how these methods match goals and how the methods are applied. The mistake 3M’s former CEO made was trying to solve his problems at the CEO level – with corporate wide efficiency initiatives. He’d have been better served by rewarding middle managers for paying greater attention to goal distinctions like those listed above.