Lessons Learned from 3 Innovation “Barriers”: Episode 1 - Unreasonable Deadlines

In my second series of articles on LinkedIn, I address some lessons I’ve learned from what on the surface seemed like impediments. At the time, these issues appeared to be roadblocks that were stifling progress and innovation.??I’ve since come to see these constraints as tools to help break traditional modes of thinking on development and innovation.??The first such barrier is the?Unreasonable Deadline.

Building the 1st?LED Light Bulb Under $10

During my time at the LED company Cree, I was recruited onto a team that was working to launch the first LED A-lamp (light bulb) under $10.??This was 2012, and as crazy as it sounds today, LED light bulbs at the time cost $25-$35 each and sold in very low volumes.??Our team had identified $10 as the magic price point at which volume would dramatically improve.??That outcome would be both good for business as well as for energy conservation by removing millions of energy-hungry incandescent bulbs from use.

I joined the development effort in September of 2012, but the team had been working since April.??They had a hard deadline – produce one million LED bulbs for delivery to Home Depot before the end of March 2013.?There was a technology hurdle that had yet to be overcome – and I was assigned to it.??

I did everything I knew how to do, engaging the largest suppliers of a particular component in the world to do something they’d never done before – and it wasn’t enough.??It was the end of October, and I didn’t have a solve.??I went to the Chief Technologist and explained the roadblock I’d reached.??The two of us then went to the intrapreneurial startup leader and explained the situation.??This was a Friday.??We now had 5 months to deliver a million bulbs.

The coming weeks provided three lessons about the power of Unreasonable Deadlines to me.??The first was this: to beat an Unreasonable Deadline, one must?Be Ruthless About Sunk Cost.??A select group of leaders from Cree got together on the following Monday (including one who had booked a ticket and flown from Hong Kong the moment he heard about the roadblock) and huddled up.??On Tuesday we got the new marching orders: completely new design direction – go!

After 7 months’ worth of design effort and with only 5 months to go before the deadline, there must have been a strong temptation to stick with the same approach and wait for the next opportunity to place product on the shelves in the Fall.??But the leadership group understood the fallacy of sunk costs – they are GONE and have no value other than the learning incurred in their spending.??The only things that matter are the time and capabilities you have today and moving forward.??They made the call to take a simpler and initially more costly approach that had the potential to achieve the goal, rather than continue down the previous path.

The second lesson was the response of the design team to the pivot: to beat an Unreasonable Deadline, a team must?Whiteboard Design the Solution Immediately.??I can still remember the conversation we had standing in front of a whiteboard that morning.??What were the critical elements of the new design???We had to make a million quickly – so it needed to be very fast to assemble – no time-consuming manual operations allowed.??Everything had to snap together in moments.

It was immediately apparent that we’d need a custom interconnect component between the power supply and the LED board.??Through a hash of scribbles on the whiteboard (and some actual pantomime of the component, using hands and feet to represent metallic contacts) we worked something out.??We didn’t have time to think things through individually, to put things into CAD, or even have a traditional “brainstorming” session.??We needed viable solutions within HOURS, and a collective “low resolution” design approach was the only thing that was going to get us there.

That led to the third lesson we learned: to beat an Unreasonable Deadline,?Refuse to Take “No” for an Answer.??Lead times are mostly an issue of “won’t” not “can’t”.??This isn’t uniformly true, as the supply chain crunch of the past 18 months has shown us.??But under normal circumstances, getting something done unreasonably fast is more an issue of will than anything else.??In our case with the $10 light bulb, we needed to qualify materials for the interconnect through high temperature testing within weeks – which meant getting correct-material parts in our hands within days.

Fortunately, our lead Mechanical Engineer had contacts with a supplier that was used to unreasonable requests like this and helped us get our hands on the parts in time to validate the design.??How did they do it???The company’s owner/operator hand-held the parts all the way through the process, eliminating bottlenecks on the fly.??Not something that could be done with every order or request, but for this critical program from a known customer, he was willing to do it.??

On a different project and under a similar deadline push, it meant being told “no” by dozens of vendors before finding one that could help achieve the needed outcome in time.??Later in this same project, after being told we would need thermal testing that would take six months to get safety listing, it meant digging through the safety standard to find a way to test at (much) higher temperatures to compress the testing to two weeks. Refusing to take no for an answer is really about grit – never quitting in the face of difficult circumstances and exhausting every possible option.

My three lessons of that flowed out of Unreasonable Deadlines are?

·??????Be Ruthless About Sunk Cost

·??????Whiteboard Design the Solution Immediately

·??????Refuse to Take “No” for an Answer

No matter what kind of deadline we’re working under, I believe we should?act?like we are working under an Unreasonable Deadline.??When I’ve been assigned a design element with six weeks allowed for completion, my tendency is to plan on using the six weeks.??Why not try to have a viable solution identified within hours???To have an 80% representative prototype complete within days???And to have a completed design ready to quote within a couple of weeks???If things go wildly wrong with the first attempt, I now have plenty of time to pivot.??If things go well, I now have plenty of time to help my teammates.

I should say specifically I’m NOT advocating to cut all your design team’s timelines in half with the expectation they’ll magically become more innovative in the process.??Repeated and routine schedule crashing results in stressed-out, burned-out development teams – not shiny new innovations.??The Apollo space program was built in a meticulous, thorough, and methodical fashion.??When it came time to save the astronauts of Apollo 13, it was “all hands on deck” to discover a solution in a truly unreasonable timeframe.??But that was the exception, rather than the rule.??In my notes above I’ve been highlighting ways that Unreasonable Deadlines can break us out of our rote ways of thinking and open new potentials for innovation and achieving outsized outcomes rapidly.??I’m advocating for learning those lessons without the necessity of imposing the looming Unreasonable Deadline.

What do you think???Do some of the lessons of Unreasonable Deadlines ring true???I’m looking forward to hearing from you!