Imagination, Creativity and Grasp of Structure Concepts are more important than Working "Harder" and "Faster"

First two exercises from Larson & Zimney (1990) The White Collar Shuffle-Who Does What in Today's Computerized Workplace AMACOM (New York)

1) Team exercise on a routine task- one timer, one worker:

Write your name repetitively for two minutes.

Write your name as fast as you can for two minutes- only requirement is that it must be legible.

What is the increase in production?

2) Team exercise on learning and conceptualization:

This is the work-flow diagram. Connect the numbers in sequence from 1 to as far as you can get in 30 seconds.Report the highest number connected.
Try it again with a fresh diagram. Did your performance improve?
Study the patterns in the quadrants. Have the other team member try it after this overview. What is the improvement?

3) A tennis Singles Tourmament has 149 entrants. How many matches will be required to arrive at the tournament champion? How would you approach this problem? (from Edward DeBono on Creativity and problem structure)

think of three ways to approach a solution.

4) A tale of German Military Intelligence:

	L	I
S	S&L	S&I
B	B&L	B&I

5) Reasons for Poor Productivity:

Low Output
High Input
Irrelevant Effort
Poorly Understood Goals

Sources of Human Progress:

Intelligence-- To discern the purpose

Laziness --To find the most efficient way to achieve that purpose

Avoid Confusing motion with direction
Rational laziness is a virtue

A.D. Little study on Breakthroughs (Nayak & Ketteringham, 1986) studied dramatic breakthrough products, such as

VCR's from JVC
yellow Sticky notes from 3M
Chemlawn
Tagamet
Walkman
Microwave ovens
Nautilus exercise equipment
Federal Express

Found , without exception, that these innovations were driven by "technology push" rather than "market pull".
Real innovations don't have a market until the product exists. This is the flaw in "market research".

Hammer & Champy (1993) exhort: people shouldn't ask "How can we use these new technological capabilities to enhance or streamline or improve what we are already doing? Instead, they should be asking, 'How can we use technology to allow us to do things that we are not already doing?"

Sometimes the problem with starting with an analysis of what is wrong with the current process is that someone might try to fix it.

Better not to automate the unnecessary or fundamentally flawed old approach. "Don't automate, detonate."

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