Goal-Directed Action: a Paradigm for Projects Fostering Creativity

Copyright 2022 by Steven G. Buckley, all rights reserved.

Do you participate in or lead innovation-heavy product development? How do you plan for innovation? This edition of Let's Go! Innovation Leaders briefly shares some thoughts on this topic.

There is nothing that business leaders like more than a 5-year plan.?The plan shows that you have thought through a strategy, it presents well to the Board, and it gives the leader a feeling of security. It can take an executive team multiple weeks to put together, so … it must be good, right?

Wrong.?News flash: in most markets your plan is good for at most 18 months.?If you’re a genius, perhaps 24 months.?Why??Because the competition, the market, and world events conspire to change the conditions and try to take you down a notch every day.?Just like in war, where the enemy, weather, morale, and logistics require changes in plans on a daily basis, the fast-paced business environment demands flexibility.?Similarly, in innovative businesses, building innovative products, we cannot have long development cycles, unless we’re building a complex system like a jet airplane or a submarine.

Our certainty about the future shrinks the farther out from the present we go.?I may easily be able to predict what the business needs this week or this month.?This quarter, not so hard.?But 6 months from now, as market conditions change??That’s tougher.?How about 2 years??Nearing genius-level predictive requirements.?

When it comes to project planning for innovation-heavy product development, the same thing is true.

Step-by-step?

Traditional project planning outlines the details of an entire project, including tasks, roles, time spent, and budget, just like that 5-year plan that some business leaders are so enamored of.?This works well for building a prefabricated house, but not so well for pushing the envelope in technical product development.?In particular, application of traditional, detailed project planning in situations where substantial innovation is required results in blown budgets, missed schedules, and frustrated management.?Teams try mightily to hew to the schedule, following the plan.?Project managers push the teams, giving motivational speeches that Zig Ziglar would be proud of.?Marketing and sales leadership teach the patience of Job to their customers and to the salespeople chafing for a new product.?Projects are late, frustrations abound.

You see, humans are not terrific at predicting the future.?We have biases.?We linearly extrapolate present conditions and fail to anticipate so-called “black swans,” as coined by Nicholas Taleb.?We’re also optimists.?The “planning fallacy” describes the collective result of overconfidence and the illusion of control; most plans are overly aggressive on schedule.?The problem is compounded where innovation is required.?One beleaguered engineering group that I worked with had an inside joke that the project plans were all completely accurate if one simply multiplied the task duration by 3 and changed to the next larger unit of time measurement.?Oh goodness.

The solution to this over-planning problem in product development is what I term Goal-Directed Action.

Focus on the Milestones and on the Communication

The Goal-Directed Action development paradigm eliminates many of the details from the early stages of the traditional project plan – details that are unknown and unknowable at the outset of a truly innovative product development.?This paradigm applies particularly to the early phases of product development when the team is somewhat “in the woods” solving tough problems and a clear path cannot be charted, although the goal is still known.?Goal-directed action focuses on clear milestones, goal dates, and constant communication, as the innovations required to achieve success are tackled.?Milestones can be pursued in parallel, with sub-teams vigorously turning the Lean “Build-Measure-Learn” loop shown in Figure 1 introduced by Eric Ries.[i]?The composition and size of the team and sub-teams is driven by the speed necessary to reach the target product completion date.

Figure 1: The Build-Measure-Learn loop of Ries (adapted).

The order of milestones in getting to prototype and alpha designs may be influenced by technical risk and/or difficulty in implementation.?Interestingly, as the innovated product gets closer to final form and uncertainty is reduced, the later stages of product development are typically easier to plan and execute.?For example, once a design is frozen and transfer to manufacturing begins, we have a much more predictable process (more like building a prefabricated house), and traditional project planning can apply. Figure 2 illustrates this.

Figure 2: The Goal-Directed Action innovation phase.

In the innovation phase encompassed in the conical section we have a number of complex problems for which a creative solution needs to be devised.?These may be something relatively straightforward like the choice between a few known architectures, or they may require experimentation and invention.?Each of these problems is assigned a milestone and a goal date for completion.?Sub-teams are formed that execute the discovery loop for each milestone, with any required feedback along the way.?Multiple milestones can be pursued simultaneously until each of the innovations is complete and the entire product can be visualized.?The uncertainty decreases as time moves from left to right, as shown by the decreasing width of the cone.?This may encompass more than just an initial prototype phase, depending on how well the innovations work in concert.

The reason I call this Goal-Directed Action is because while the team knows the end state that they want to achieve for each milestone, the path to success is unknown.?We leave the path open for the team to choose, while giving them a goal, a timeline, and a budget.

What are the benefits of Goal-Directed Action?

When we don’t prescribe how tasks should be completed up front, we are keeping the solution space open for the team to explore.?Alternatively, had we prescribed three alternative solutions in the project plan, would the team have explored the fourth and fifth possible solutions as they arose??Under time pressure, focus naturally narrows.?With a set project plan, that focus narrows even further.?With Goal-Directed Action we eliminate a form of “functional fixedness” that arises from a set plan with a time deadline, enhancing creativity.

Through enhanced creativity we might expect a better product solution.?

Goal-directed action also fosters team ownership because the team must work together to define the path.?As they come to definition and develop the processes to solve product problems, they become more vested in the outcome then they would be if they were following a script or a roadmap.

Team ownership helps us to hit deadlines and control costs, because tightly knit teams drive harder for the goal and care more about the outcome.

Finally, teams that create great products, hit deadlines, and control costs – those are successful teams.?And successful teams are happy teams, which in my experience are full of happy and fulfilled employees.

Summary, Caveats, and Next Steps

What we’ve covered is the somewhat counter-intuitive but crucial need to give the development team room to navigate and innovate in the tough stages of product development using the Goal-Directed Action paradigm.?Do not submit to the small voice of Mao (or the business leader) that urges you to generate a detailed plan (5-year plan or otherwise) to direct innovation.?Break the problem down into bite-sized milestones representing tough problems, give the team(s) deadlines, budget, and timeline … and let the creative destruction akin to the capitalist model allow the best solutions to emerge.?As we know from history, capitalism beats 5-year plans every time!

Of course there are caveats.?For this to work you need a highly intelligent and motivated team of “A players.”?Egos must be small and teamwork must be valued.

In the next few installments, I’ll discuss two other important factors in leading innovative teams, particularly in the Goal-Directed Action phase of development: 1) decision-making processes and 2) the role of the chief engineer, who helps with schedule and budget.?Further along we’ll relate this thinking to agile methods for hardware development.?

Stay tuned and thanks for reading!?Comments are welcome, and please feel free to share this newsletter with friends and colleagues.?Innovatively yours … Steve

Reference

[i] Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011: Crown Publishing, New York.