Hell is Still Hell,
No Matter How Often They Remodel

By Al Fahden,
Innovation on Demand

The Work Revolution
That Ends Innovator-Maintainer Wars,
and Catches People Up to Technology

Deep in the bowels of Corporate America a quiet war rages, torching everything in its path. And no matter how we try to change at a deep level, all we seem to do is remodel. Yet, remodeling Hell only stokes the fires. Why is work Hell? Because war is Hell. Reengineering has been sabotaged in many companies by Innovators who wont adopt the new processes. (They hate rules.) Innovation has been blocked everywhere by Maintainers who wont adopt the new ideas. (They hate rule-breaking.) Team, with Innovators and Maintainers fair game for one another, has increased the tension and frustration. And technology has only made it worse. Who has time to think when dozens of e- mails need to be answered? Until we acknowledge the undeclared war between the two very different kinds of change instincts, Hell will continue to be Hell, and the next new patterned wallpaper wont change a thing.

In Any New Age, The Work Is Always
The Last To Change.

If it were the 1800s and you were a farmer trying to change from the old Agrarian Age to the new Industrial Age, would you come to the city and continue to work like a farmer? "Ill just plant these machine parts and bolts in the ground, and harvest them fully-assembled four months from now." Although this sounds like an absurd waste of time, it may surprise you that were doing the same thing in our transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. But we just havent yet realized it.

Old McDonalds Had A Farm.
With A Cash Cow Here, A Cash Cow There.

Up until the 1980s, the Industrial Age work model was just fine. A successful company could find a cash cow product or service, do the same thing over and over again, reap the revenue rewards and let the markets natural barriers to entry protect their market share.1 At worst, if a competitor gained ground, they could regain their lead by simply copying the innovation. When Wendys created the drive-thru, McDonalds and Burger King easily negated their advantage with their own drive thrus, and quickly recovered any ground they had lost. On the inside of the company, this meant that people didnt need to innovate very much, they just needed to maintain what they already had.

Is Your Corporate Culture a Rat Race?

Much like these leading Industrial Age companies, rats survive by waiting and reacting. When farmers in England staged a massive rat-poisoning effort, they found that only about a third of the rats actually ate any of the poisoned food. Two researchers from the University of Oxford put tiny radio collars on the rats, and found that the rats passed up the poisoned bait, and often went for miles to find familiar food sources that they knew werent tainted.2 Just as in those companies, the cautious rats survived and passed on this cautiousness to their offspring. The same principle that breeds cautious rat packs in farmyards, and creates cautious rat cultures in companies.

Do Something Brilliant, No One Will Remember.
Do Something Stupid, No One Will Forget.

Think about it. In most companies you (maybe) get rewarded for the revenue and profit you create, and usually punished for the stupid things you do. As a result people wind up sabotaging their peers brilliant ideas, and then not standing in the way of their idiotic ones. After all, in the old work model, if the other guy fails, you get the promotion. This can best be described as the cautiousness of the Rat Culture. "Let the other guy try the new food. If its poisoned, hell be the one to die."

Why Rats Spread the Plague, While Bees Make Honey.

Bees survive in a very different way than rats. They cooperate instead of compete; they act instead of react. When its time for the bee colony to move, several scout bees head out and look for the ideal location. In a sense they are all coming up with competing ideas. The difference between a bee and a rat culture? One bee will return and dance excitedly about the location she finds, until a peer returns with another promising choice. If on inspection, the peer has an even better discovery, the bee will immediately support the better location by dancing together with her peer.3 Bees have no ego attachment, only the interest of the common good. Because most cultures are still rat cultures, relics of the industrial age, its no wonder that yesterdays successful companies (the IBMs) cant move fast enough to keep up with their more nimble competitors (the Microsofts).

Welcome to Innovation Gap Hell.

In recent years, workers been asked by upper management to create new sources of revenue, new ways to pleasantly surprise our customers and new products and services to help us dominate our markets. Yet, in an eye-opening survey, while 80% of senior management said that the future of their companies depends on creativity and innovation, a minuscule 4% said their company was any good at it. What goes on inside a company that makes it so difficult to take meaningful action? Ive spoken to hundreds of companies around the country, always asking them what their obstacles to innovation are. The most common answer? The system. "Even if I come up with a good idea," audience members say, "no one wants to do it." In other words, there are built-in barriers to the implementation of innovation. Barriers that are often unseen, yet often fatal to good ideas. 3M is publicly called the Innovator for products like Post It Note Pads. Yet, it took great persistence to get anyone inside to buy the idea. As technology and resources equalize, your companys ability to create and adopt change will dictate its life or death. Up until now peoples change instincts have been like the elephant in the living room that everyone ignores, not knowing what to do about it, just hoping it will go away.

Innovator-Maintainer Wars.
The Enemy Looks Just Like You, and He Means Well.

You cant really pinpoint the enemy, yet you leave meeting after meeting wounded and weary just the same. If youre an Innovator, youve just had some of your best ideas challenged, dismissed, or even ridiculed. If youre a Maintainer, youve just seen your system, and everything youve worked to build, threatened by people who dont seem to think things through. These are change instincts. And from deep inside you they drive everything you do.

Adoption Instincts: 40 Years Of Research
From An Unexpected Source.

Little that you do will work until you understand Adoption Instincts . Once you do, you realize there are two kinds of people: those who adopt new things early, and those who adopt new things late. If you try to jam change through an organization, the late adopters will instinctively resist until the early adopters make it safe for them. This view of people comes from Diffusion of Innovation, a body of knowledge embracing more than 40 years of research, chiefly used in consumer marketing. If instincts for adopting change are such an important obstacle to success, then why no has one measured them in organizations before? Perhaps, because we tend to see only what were used to seeing. Up until recently no one acknowledged that how we accept change affects how we work.

Innovators And Maintainers:
You Cant Identify Them With Personality Tests.

While the Myers-Briggs, D.I.S.C. and Wilson Learnings Social Styles profiles so often used in team building are useful self-improvement tools because they deal with some of the inherent differences between people, they miss a major aspect about people working together: You cant innovate with late adopters. You cant maintain with early adopters. It goes against peoples most natural work instincts. Its doomed to failure, as resentment can build and build. If you dont like an Innovators idea, she thinks you dont like her. If you dont like an Maintainers Status Quo, he thinks you dont like him.

Even If You Can Get Adoption Instincts To Agree,
Action Instincts Can Still Stop You.

We must also measure another dimension. As you may be already painfully aware, agreement is not action. So even if you can get people to agree, some of the best ideas for innovation can fall through the cracks. The other dimension? Action Instincts. Some people are most naturally Thinkers, others are instinctively Doers. When a Thinker has an idea, a Doer is already plotting out the implementation plan. If youre an innovator pay no attention to action instincts, you wont get any ideas implemented far enough to be even a threat to a Maintainer. While this may sound like a pleasant truce, youll be losing the innovation war.

"Doing business in the Information Age without reinventing work is like rotating four bald tires.

- Mark Bergren

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Silicon.

The personal computer changed everything. As stated earlier, it used to be that a business could find a replicable pattern, a cash cow, that would last for years. Then, you could just improve your efficiency, defend your market share and add a few line extensions. It was Maintainer heaven. Then, along came the personal computer, and the barriers to entry for most businesses vanished. After all, you could suddenly publish something thats good, fast and cheap right from your desktop. And now you can distribute something thats good, fast and cheap over the internet. Whats more, since intellectual capital is now worth more to investors than physical capital, the funding barriers to market entry have come down at the same time. Now, thanks to technology, your company can get bypassed by anyone who has a good idea and can get it done. And as long as youre crippled by one group with its foot on the gas, and the other riding the brake, Innovator-Maintainer wars will keep you stalled.

It used to be "Fast, Good, Cheap: pick any two."
Now you can have all three, and add a fourth: "Fun."

Imagine a player in a very competitive new field whos trying to find an edge. He wants to create a cost advantage, but no one has yet figured out how to do it. So the boss starts to watch his employees and soon he notices that each one is good at doing one part of the work and mediocre or even bad at almost everything else. Realizing that labor is a huge part of his costs, he asks a key question: "Why am I having everyone do individual projects from start to finish?" Sure, it made each person responsible for an entire outcome, but it seemed like people were wasting valuable time doing the things that they just couldnt master. Besides, they hated those parts. "What if I could break up the work so that each person did what theyre best at, and then passed the next step on to someone who was good at that?" This one courageous boss saw the vision and changed the work system at its root. Instead of struggling 50-80% of the time, people traded their weakness work to others and got back only their strength work to do. The result? Something magical happened. This new system allowed people to be honored and respected for the parts of the work that they were good at, and for the first time not judged for their weaknesses. And productivity shot up beyond anyones wildest dreams.

The Boss Who Revolutionized Work.

What you just read did happen. But not yesterday or last week. The boss was Henry Ford, the year was 1912. Ford watched one person struggle to assemble a Model T Car in 12 hours. He also noticed that while John was great at engines and started out ahead of all the other assemblers, that he lost ground to Willy on axles. Then Roger pulled ahead on interiors, but only until Peter passed the whole pack on trim.

Why change the person to fit the work?
Change the work to fit the person.

"Aha," thought Henry. "Well just have everyone do only the parts theyre good at for all the cars." So, Jim did nothing but engines. Willy did nothing but axles. Roger did nothing but interiors. Peter did nothing but trim. Not only was everyone happier, better and contributing more, but in six months the time to assemble the Ford Model T fell sharply. Old assembly time: 12 hours. New assembly time: 1 hour, 26 minutes

What did that mean? The price of a Ford dropped from $4,000 to $600. So, for the first time, the masses could afford a car. It also meant that Ford had enormous competitive advantage in price and value, and reaped the corresponding increases in sales and profits. So what did Henry Ford do with the money? He did something unheard of that time and even since. He doubled his workers wages. Imagine if we used the same principle for all the mental work we must do so quickly today. What if you could do the part you do best, then hand off your idea to someone who does the next part best?

The End Of Innovator-Maintainer Wars.
The Road Out Of Hell Has No Speed Bumps.

Once you put the right people in the right place loving their work and understanding each other, miraculous things happen. One CEO build the whole company around balanced Innovator-Maintainer teams. He even had an Innovator-Maintainer based resource team that would fund the most promising innovation projects. By doing this they sustained large revenue increases quarter after quarter. A large telecommunications company built Innovator-Maintainer teams with their most lucrative clients, three layers deep into the customers company. In their toughest year, they were the only unit to make their numbers. And a famous soft drink company realized they could produce so much more together using this approach, that they decided to raise their own marketing goals by 50%. But most importantly, in a world where companies must live or die by new business, Innovators and Maintainers can work together in their magnificence; the Innovators originating new revenue and the Maintainers replicating it into profit.

The Road Out Of Hell Is Paved With Good Inventions.

Much has been said about the new organization that will successfully close the doors on the industrial age. If an organization cant successfully lead its market with new products and revenue, it wont survive to close any doors, except perhaps its own. Yet, we remain square pegs in round holes. And the only effort the company makes to right this misuse of talent, is "roundness training."

The New Organization: Mother Ship For Profit,
Tie Fighters For New Revenue.

Just as IBM successfully accomplished the PC project in the early 1980s by physically removing the players from the main culture, you can do even better by removing the right people. Imagine your company like a Star Wars Battle Fleet. Tie Fighters composed of nimble Innovator entrepreneurs, finding and inventing new opportunities, responsible, but unburdened by Maintainer instincts. Once a new venture starts to create revenue, the Innovators then phase it back onto the Mother Ship, handing it over to marketing Innovators and operations Maintainers for growth, efficiency and incremental improvement. (Key safeguard #1: Management would not allow the Maintainers to change the essence of the inventions appeal. Key safeguard #2: An Innovator with Action Instincts for Doing is the perfect go-between) Meanwhile, the Innovators would take off in their tie fighters to invent more and assure the future of the company, funded by top management and rewarded for their results. All from putting the right people in the right place.

How do you do it? All with fun, interesting training.

1. The Innovator-Maintainer assessment measures your change instincts, lets you map your group.
2. Quick, interactive experiences show you how to redivide the work and hand it off.
3. The rest is common sense based on revealing what you already know.

How do you know youre on the road out of Hell?
The road sign:
You Are Now Leaving Hell. Resume Hope.

1 George Ainsworth Land, Grow or Die, The Unifying Principle of Transformation, 1973 2 Marian Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only, The Search for Animal Consciousness, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1993
3 Ibid
4 Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, Fourth Edition, Free Press, 1962, 1995