CHAPTER 12: FORMING THE INNOVATION TEAM
Curt Carlson, Ph.D.
Professor of Practice, Northeastern University and Distinguished Executive in Residence, WPI
HOW WE WON AN EMMY FOR HDTV
Form the smallest possible team, but no smaller.??
Mission Impossible
Innovations go through many stages, from concept to prototype to product. As the program manager for developing the high-definition television (HDTV) prototype innovation at SRI's subsidiary, Sarnoff, Norm Goldsmith had his work cut out. We- needed to develop a full working model of our system in just over one year. It had to be delivered to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for rigorous testing in Washington, D.C., on a specific date. If we didn't show up on time, we would be disqualified. Tens of millions of dollars of research and development would be wasted. Billions of dollars of future business were at stake. Both corporate and personal pride ran deep in the competition to have the winning entry in the race to establish the U.S. standard for high-definition television.
Norm's problem was that our team knew it would take a year and a half to build a system of the required magnitude, not the thirteen months we had. As a result, we were facing a mutiny by the team. Everyone was saying how completely crazy it was even to pretend we could finish the prototype. Many thought it was foolish even to think that an all-digital approach to transmit HDTV would work in the first place, much less complete this prototype in the time available. In addition, to succeed, we would have to face the unknown difficulties of pulling together engineering teams from four other companies [1]. It was clear that we should face reality and give up.
Despite the pessimism around him, Norm went to work putting together a detailed innovation plan. With Glenn Reitmeier and Terry Smith, our terrific overall system architects, they interviewed everyone. They helped each person think through their subtasks to ensure the right people would work on them. When they were done, they called the team of sixty engineers together in the auditorium at Sarnoff in Princeton, New Jersey.
The Critical Path: A detailed computer printout of the innovation plan covered the entire front of the room. It was a monumental task. On the printout was every task that had to be completed, how each task interacted with the others, when each task had to be done, and the name of the person responsible for each task. A bright red line down the middle of the chart represented the "critical path." If you were on the critical path and you were late, the project was late too, and you would get lots of attention. No one wanted to be on the critical path and be late!
As the team entered the room, you could feel everyone's pessimism, if not enmity. People had their arms folded in front of them and had that "you must be kidding" look on their faces. Norm and Glenn stood up and began the presentation. Glenn started by giving an overview of our progress up to that point. It was a technical pep talk to help convince everyone that it was possible because our computer simulations showed it would work. We had built lower-performance parts of the system before, and at no point did it violate the laws of physics. Glenn made a compelling case. That was fine, but everyone knew there wasn't enough time to build it.
Next, Norm calmly described the printout and how it was constructed. He reviewed how he and Glenn had interviewed everyone. He said he had taken everyone's plan as proposed, but with a few exceptions. You could feel the team members think to themselves, "Exceptions?" Then he said, "Bruce, I think you were too aggressive in your plan, so I gave you another week. And Charlie, you need to integrate several other people's work. That is hard. I gave you two extra weeks." Norm, Glenn, and Terry went around the room going through the tasks, one at a time. Not once did they shorten anyone's plan [2]. They also explained how our terrific colleagues at Philips would build several subsystems. When done, he pointed out that the plan showed we would miss our deadline by just two weeks. You could feel the amazement in the room. We were close.
Then he said, "What do you think? If we work together, can we find a way to make up those two weeks and deliver the system on time?" Much to their amazement, the team cautiously nodded their heads yes.
Norm and Glenn then explained how we would make up the time. A final plan would be created with the most critical elements identified and resources moved to those tasks as they arrived on the critical path. It was the same basic plan, but Glenn, Terry, and Norm would strategically move a few staff as required and available to stay on schedule. When someone needed to take over the system to test their part, they would be King for a Day and wear a Burger King crown to show they were in charge. Glenn had the ability to make sure all the parts would mesh. As the system architect, he understood the overall details of the plan.
That was the beginning of an incredible journey. Everyone had a critical role to play. We set up an isolated development lab in a building on the edge of our campus — a "skunk works." We brought food to the team three times a day and set up cots for sleeping. The team worked around the clock, eventually ramping up to three overlapping shifts a day, seven days a week. People were working 70 to 80-hour weeks while achieving the near impossible. It was a classic "The Soul of a New Machine" setting [3].
Norm's project plan was on the wall so everyone could see how we were doing. The team performed amazingly, and we stayed up-to-date on the critical path. But then, several weeks before the deadline and with victory in sight, the equipment failed to work. We had fallen off the critical path.
Our prototype system filled twelve refrigerator-sized racks of digital circuits and equipment. It was a monster composed of miles of wire and thousands of chips. Looking at it, you wouldn't believe it ever could work. It didn't.
?Figure 12.1: Some of the members of the HDTV team at Sarnoff, SRI's subsidiary, in front of the equipment comprising the prototype HDTV innovation. Engineers from nine different companies forged an effective team to help create the final HDTV system for the United States.?
The system had three major parts: an encoder, a transmitter, and a receiver. The encoder and transmitter would ultimately be at a television station. The function of the TV station encoder was to compress the high-definition video image by making billions of calculations each second to reduce the video's data rate by fifty times to be sent as a signal by the transmitter over the air to homes. At home, an antenna would pick up the signal, and the HDTV receiver would decompress it and reconstitute it for display on a high-definition TV screen.
It Didn't Work: A unique attribute of digital equipment is that the entire system may fail if anything fails. That was our problem. We would put a signal into the transmitter, send it over the air, and then the receiver would display the signal on the screen. But the screen only showed scrambled lines and edges — no images. The team worked feverishly to find what in the system was broken. But it stayed broken.
Our schedule slipped, but fortunately, so did our deadline — the competing teams and the testing labs were having problems, too. But even with the delayed deadline, the system stayed broken until the final few weeks. We were beside ourselves.
Jerremy Pollack, a super technician, worked around the clock checking every connection. [5]. Miraculously, the system started to work, but not perfectly — it still had many periodic hiccups that had to be cured. The remaining few weeks had the entire team hunting for needles in a haystack —looking for a single digital bit that was wrong out of hundreds of millions that were fine. The debugging was so intense that planning was an hour-by-hour exercise. Glenn meticulously kept track of the debugging efforts on a large whiteboard where the entire team could see it. No one ever needed to ask, "How are we doing?" It only took a glance at the board to know the answer. Problems were fixed one by one, and eventually, the system was "good enough" to ship to the testing lab in Washington, D.C. The prototype system continued to work over the next few months during the FCC tests, achieving the best picture quality among the competing systems. The team completed a fantastic result.
Without Norm, Glenn, and Terry, this project would have failed. They were all champions for their parts, and they ensured that everyone was doing the proper job, that the right connections were made between the team members, and that there was a clear plan for everyone to see. At all times, they were respectful of their teammates. Norm could have come in with a plan that made the schedule. He did not. He depended on the team's genius to help make the right decisions by having them be fully involved. Norm, Glenn, Terry, and others formed a high-performance innovation team and succeeded [6]. Eventually, critical parts of the system were included in the final HDTV system for the United States, and the team won an Emmy Award, the highest award in the nation for broadcasting excellence.
In developing successful innovations, there are several phases teams must go through to achieve success.?The initial phase, Phase 1, entails the crafting of compelling value propositions for both the customer and the enterprise. ?Phase 2 is the identification and mitigation of risks that may impede progress. Phase 3 is the development of a complete innovation plan. Phase 4 frequently entails the construction of a functional prototype to prove the system functions property and to allow testing with partners and prospective customers, like we did for HDTV. Finally, Phase 5 is the creation and successful delivery of the product to the marketplace. These phases may involve different teams with different skills, but the fundamental human ingredients at each stage are always the same.
The Three-Legged Stool of Collaboration
Collaboration provides fuel for the value creation engine. When team members really "click," they can win. The HDTV story exemplifies many of the attributes of productive innovation teams. Addressing the motivational issues was as important as the system's design. Failure to deal with them successfully would have resulted in project failure. This one vignette from a ten-year project also illustrates that inventions are not innovations. The key inventions were not the issue at this point. The challenge was to deliver a practical, working prototype to our first customer, the FCC.
Just about everyone has either watched or been part of a high-performance team. The New England Patriots, for example, pick players who fit together rather than looking for the star player. They won the Super Bowl three out of four years, from 2001 to 2005. On the other hand, the Los Angeles Lakers under Phil Jackson in the early 2000s had some of the most individually talented players in the NBA but could not master teamwork and didn't win.
One of our colleagues coaches a basketball team for eleven-to-thirteen-year-old girls. Every year, the girls play a boys' team for fun. The girls always win. Why? Yes, the boys are stronger and faster. But the girls pass the ball and play as a team. At the end of the game, the boys can't figure out what happened to them. Someday, they will realize they learned an important lesson about collaboration from those young girls.
Collaboration is powerful. Only through teamwork can one gather the skills and knowledge needed to solve the most critical problems and make an impact. Most of us enjoy working on collaborative projects with supportive colleagues. We want to make a difference and have our contributions valued. These are strong human needs.
Collaboration is possible when its essential elements are in place. Imagine a three-legged stool, where written on the seat is "collaboration," and on each leg is one of these three elements. The Three-Legged Stool of Collaboration is fundamental to team formation. People form partnerships and collaborate only when all three elements are present:
Jerome Barnum, the inspirational founder of the Experience Compression Laboratory, called this a three-legged stool because if one leg is missing, the stool falls over, and collaboration stops [7]. But these three ingredients are not satisfied automatically. Constant, respectful communication is needed to keep the Three-Legged Stool of Collaboration intact. Respectful communication is the glue that holds the three legs together. Without it, the stool collapses.
Norm, Glenn, and Terry and their HDTV innovation team were a perfect example of the Three-Legged Stool of Collaboration. They would have failed if they had not all shared the same strategic vision and ensured that team members had unique, complementary skills and shared the rewards. The HDTV team remains the best example of managing an innovation at the prototype stage we have seen.
Shared Strategic Vision
A clear, compelling vision is a force for change — it pulls us forward. It is an image of the project or initiative, before it is achieved. For a Champion to gather a team and inspire everyone to achieve the objectives, there must be a clear, uniting vision—often with a higher purpose. As Proverbs 29:18 in the Bible says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
Doug Engelbart's vision was to find ways for people to work together to "make this world a better place using computer systems that significantly augment and extend human intelligence." For the HDTV team, it was to "reinvent television for the digital era by creating a profoundly improved television viewing experience for consumers, set the U.S. standard for digital HDTV, and form the core for video communication for the next century."
In addition to describing the initiative's success, the team's vision must meet four criteria to help propel the organization toward successful innovation. The vision must be:
You can only have an innovative enterprise if some of your teams' visions align with the organization's overall vision and mission. Each team's vision must also be clear, compelling, and forceful.
A Dilbert-inspired example doesn't quite meet this standard: "To be a leading worldwide innovator, producer, and distributor of state-of-the-art electromechanical subsystems with customer focus, moving value-based solutions to the market with maximum speed and high customer satisfaction, limited guaranteed performance, and online customer service for the good of the consumer, our employees, our stockholders, and humankind" [8].
An example of a clear vision comes from DIVA Systems, which provides video-on-demand over cable TV networks. We asked Paul Cook, DIVA's chairman, to describe the vision for Diva. He said, "To provide immediate access in your home to all available movies at the same cost you rent them for today with no late fees and with all the functions of your VCR." Unlimited choice, lower cost, convenience, hassle-free. Sign us up!
A striking vision can stimulate interest. When a member of the Collaboration Institute, a consulting group, says, "Transform the workplace through collaboration to create innovation teams," it informs you of its core vision. You can easily formulate questions like "How does collaboration work?" or "What is the nature of high-performance innovation teams?" Someone who asks an associate of the Collaboration Institute, "How do you carry that out?" gets the institute's guiding mission:
These principles allow the associates to explain their vision in more detail. For example, customers are often intrigued by what "guaranteed quality" means. Guarantees are rarely given in consulting businesses, but the answer is straightforward. "You are the customer, and you get to decide whether you are satisfied. If for any reason you are not satisfied, you get your money back." The client has yet to ask for money back, partly because all the members are committed to the group's vision, and the guarantee ensures that the members of the Institute live up to the commitments made under their guiding principles.
Money is not a vision. When you talk to successful innovators, they rarely mention money; their sights are aimed at a higher purpose—a more critical and transcendental level. Like the HDTV team, they want to make a difference. Other examples: "Reduce patient recovery by five times using minimally invasive surgery." "Construct a worldwide online education system for children with cancer" [10]. "Develop the next-generation computer voice-recognition interface to the Web." For Tesla it is, “to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." When people focus on money rather than the innovation for which there is a passion, they usually lose sight of the original vision. Most innovators we have known who focused primarily on money have had limited success. Financial rewards are facilitated by a strong vision, not the other way around.
Unique, Complementary Skills
As Jim Collins noted, "Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats" [11]. Only team members with unique, complementary skills who can collaborate have a place on a high-performance team. Every member must feel secure about having a significant role in the project. After all, you can't dance when someone is stepping on your toes. Ambiguity about each team member's role prevents the commitment and collaboration needed for team success.
The collective intelligence of the members of the team powers innovation teams. When team members are engaged in an iterative value-creation process, they can achieve customer value tens, hundreds, or thousands of times greater than each individual could achieve alone. However, each team member must bring the critical skills necessary for the project's success. Each individual on the project must clearly understand their role and its importance to its success. The team members must also trust their teammates' skills, judgment, and determination to push through their parts of the innovation project.
As noted in the last chapter, the decisive advantage of a team composed of people with complementary skills is that each member provides a different perspective [12]. That is why the collective IQ of a productive team can be at the genius level.
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Although you should aggressively collect ideas from many, you want to form the smallest team possible when developing the innovation. The Mythical Man-Month is a classic book on the difficulties of developing computer software in teams [13]. It explores why, paradoxically, adding more people to a software project can slow it down. You might think itwould speed up productivity since the lines of software code that can be written are proportional to the number of staff. But the coordination time between staff also grows as staff is added. At some point, the advantage of more staff is overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing cost of team communication and coordination, which is an example of the law of exponential interconnections. The smallest possible team works best.
Once a group gets much beyond ten to twenty people, communicating and coordinating can become a champion's full-time job. If many employees are needed to accomplish a job, the only reasonable solution is to break the effort into logical subgroups to minimize the communication costs. The same principles we discuss here apply to the larger group and each of the subgroups.
Forming teams takes time and effort — it is a project. It must be planned and managed. It is hard work. But a by-product of working with people with different skills and perspectives is the potential for an exciting and rewarding experience. Teams open up new intellectual worlds that can help you grow.
Shared Rewards
Rewards, like good meals, should be shared. In innovation teams, each team member expects to be rewarded for their contributions to the project.
Rewards come in many forms. A primary reward can be the opportunity to work on a terrific project with wonderful colleagues. In a company, rewards mean a plaque, a bonus, or a promotion. In a charitable organization, they might be recognized at a yearly banquet, highlighting the voluntary contributions of each team member. In a start-up company, there might be stock options. For the men and women of our armed services, the primary reward is the sense of achievement and camaraderie that results from performing an important job well. It is worth noting how proud military personnel are of a simple medal that symbolizes a moment of sacrifice or honor. A heartfelt "thank you" or "good job" is often the best reward. All forms of recognition are essential.
Rewards can also say a great deal about what the organization values. At SRI International, there is an inspiring honor called the Mimi Award. It recognizes outstanding individuals who mentor and help further the professional development of others, which is a vital role in all enterprises. The Mimi Award is named in honor of the late Marian Stearns, who brought out the best in all the fortunate people to have worked with her. She would write notes of encouragement saying, "You are the best." She helped make sure it was true.
Rewards must be based on actual achievement. A challenge for champions is to subordinate individual achievement and recognition to the project's overall success. Often, that means that if the project is unsuccessful, there are no rewards for any team member — "all for one and one for all." This type of reward is often seen clearly on sports teams, where individual superstars give up personal achievement goals, develop and nurture a team identity, and win championships. At one point, the Boston Celtics, Green Bay Packers, Montreal Canadiens, and New England Patriots were all examples worth studying. For M. Edwards Deming, the prophet of the quality movement, teamwork and cooperation were effectively a religion. It was simple to Deming: nothing of significance can be done on time by yourself.
Although it is common to celebrate success, there are times when it is even more important to acknowledge disappointments. Often, bad things happen in business or life even though everyone on the team did their best. At these times, everyone is most disappointed that recognition of all the hard work is most appreciated. It also makes getting up the following day and starting over easier. Moreover, in our experience, when working on an important problem, "the customer need does not go away." These defeats are often bumps on the road to eventual success, and more work is required to find the solution. We need to keep our eyes on the eventual goal.
Managing people's expectations about their relative contributions can challenge Champions. It is human nature to overvalue your contribution and undervalue the contributions of others. We tend to do this because we know firsthand what we did and how hard we worked, but we have only secondhand knowledge of others' contributions. Our colleague Carmen Catanese says that everyone would be happy if you could give out 200 percent of the credit.
One way, as we have said earlier, is to focus on significant problems, not just interesting ones, where the outcome is much greater than the sum of all the team members' contributions. And with outstanding achievement comes the ability to give out more than 200 percent of the credit. If you have ever experienced what it feels like to be on a championship sports team, you will know this is true. Our success in helping create the U.S. standard for HDTV greatly rewarded everyone on the team.
There are other ways to make team members feel fully rewarded while you are working toward your goal. For example, we had the privilege of working with Sam Grant, a program manager for the U.S. government. Sam is one of those rare individuals who manage—through insight, determination, courage, and prodigious energy—to overcome the daunting difficulties of working within a bureaucratic government and make significant contributions to the United States. Sam is an energy emitter, not an energy absorber. He often said, "An attractive feature of credit is that there is an infinite amount to be given away." He does that. Emulate Sam.
The DNA of Change
Change is hard. You have probably heard the quip, "Change happens. Get over it." Well, yes, but only up to a point. The HDTV example shows how hard change is even for a superb, highly motivated team. All innovation entails change, but personal and team change happens only when three fundamental building blocks exist. People change when they have:
Just as DNA is the fundamental building block of life, these elements specify the basic architecture for change.
Unless an individual or organization desires to move from the current situation, no matter how unattractive that situation might be, that individual or organization will not change. If people understand that there is a need to change but have no clear vision of where to go, then change is impossible. With a convincing need to change and a compelling vision, change is possible only when a plan to go from the current circumstance to the new vision has been accepted.
If you have introduced an innovation, played a sport, or performed on a musical instrument, you have already seen the DNA of Change in action. Take the first-time skier, Stan. He falls down on every turn, spending most of the time sitting on the snow with a cold bottom and a desire (D) to do better. When he looks up the mountain and sees his friend having fun, whooping and hollering "Yahoo," he glimpses a new vision (N). He, too, would like to have the thrill of competent skiing. He hires a ski instructor who helps with the action steps (A), and the personal transformation begins. The coach says, "Stan, edge your skis, shift your weight, and face down the hill." As Stan brings the skis under control, he gains confidence, and his skill level increases. Within days, he is skiing down the very slopes he had looked at longingly, and others say, "How does he do that? I can barely stand up on my skis." Stan has experienced the DNA of Change.
Consider as another example the short history of HDTV described earlier. The team understood the need for change; they had some appreciation for the new vision to get there, but there was no action plan. Consequently, the team came into the meeting with their arms folded in front of them: they weren't going anywhere. The HDTV team got on board only when the new vision and action plan were spelled out.
The DNA of Change applies to individuals, teams, and organizations working to develop innovations. In each case, there has to be agreement on the desire for change, the new vision, and the action steps necessary to get there. If you have all three, the change will be successful. When any one piece of DNA is missing, the person, team, or entire organization will be paralyzed and incapable of change.
Have you ever gone through a significant professional change, such as a merger, a job relocation, a promotion, or a change in direction for your team? If you have, you know that people use the words describing the DNA of Change. Initially, they say, "I don't see the need for this change." But once a desire for change has been established, they will say things like, "Yes, we need to change, but what is the new vision?" Finally, they will say, "The vision is good, but how do we get there? What is the plan?" If you listen closely, you can tell where you are in the change process and when to move to the next phase of enrolling the team.
Continuous, Respectful Communication
Collaboration is not free. It takes time and effort to create a shared vision, form an effective team, communicate over and over with the team, and manage all the personal interactions between team members. Because these activities take time and effort, the project must be significant enough to justify the investment.
Continuous, respectful communication is the glue that holds the Three-Legged Stool of Collaboration together, giving it strength and resilience. If there is no glue, the parts of the stool separate, and it falls to pieces. If there is continuous, respectful communication, the stool can be made sturdy and withstand lots of weight.
Maximizing the potential collective intelligence of a team requires continuous, respectful communication between team members. Because of the team's different skills and viewpoints, there will be misunderstandings about concepts, words, expectations, and rewards. These misunderstandings are especially true now that we have teams with different cultures working worldwide. The champion must take responsibility for identifying and solving these communication problems.
Our colleague Judy Fusco runs the exciting Internet-based collaborative education project Tapped-In, which we described in Chapter 11. We asked her what the most critical elements were in making the project successful with the thousands of researchers involved. She said, "Respect and trust."
We said, "Yes, that is true, but what else is important?"
She said a second time, with some emphasis, "Respect and trust are the most important elements in success."
We got her point. As an innovation champion propelling her team, Fusco spends much time helping mediate the relationships between team members and ensuring that respect and trust are maintained.
You can engage in constructive criticism when you value each member, work together to solve conflicts, and see them and yourself as tightly interwoven. You neither avoid difficulties that arise nor do you ever threaten or coerce. You collaborate. You work out issues, move forward, meet team members' needs, and help them succeed [14]. The best results are achieved when difficulties are worked out as soon as you know them.
Some of our colleagues who balance individual support, high performance, and continuous team improvement are mothers with teenagers. There is an "I care about you" affection with a practical, no-nonsense focus on the outcome. The same approach works with teams.
Here is a quick checklist for you. It would be an excellent exercise to give copies of this short assessment to your team members to see how each member rates the team on these crucial dimensions of team operation. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "not at all" and 10 being "totally," rate the following characteristics of your team. Write your numbers in the blanks. To what degree:
Then, ask your team members to fill out the scales individually. If individual scores vary widely or are not at least medium to high, you still need a high-performance innovation team.
Support
No worthwhile project or undertaking can be characterized as "easy." People who are stepping up to a problematic challenge need a great deal of support from others. Our HDTV team moved into an isolated building to focus on the project. However, the team members knew they had the support of all the mangers and companies involved. If someone from anywhere in any of the five partner companies could help the project, that person was made available at a moment's notice. Colleagues and supervisors understood that members of the HDTV team wouldn't be attending other meetings or working on anything else. The support of the entire organization was critical to success.
Perhaps most importantly, under the extreme conditions of the HDTV project, we tried to be sure that all of the spouses and families understood our vision and the exciting mission for which their loved ones were sacrificing. Whenever a spouse or family member called an engineer on the HDTV project, we would ask to speak with them — to say thank you for their sacrifice, support, and understanding. The message sometimes wore thin, but we never stopped saying thank you.
On one occasion, we arranged to have a new wife fly in to spend a weekend with her "estranged" husband. That expense wasn't in our budget, and it was against official company policy, but our terrific CEO at the time, Jim Carnes, agreed, and we did the right thing. The project fared far better than if our engineer had traveled home. The couple remained happily married, and when we finally shipped our HDTV system, we ordered sixty dozen red roses for all the spouses.
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