Quality Management

by A. Blanton Godfrey


Creativity, Innovation and Quality


Creativity drives the generation of ideas,
and we need new ideas constantly.

One of the most frequent questions I hear is whether we can have quality management and creativity at the same time. Many people think that a rigorous quality effort stifles the creative juices. Not true. Outstanding companies drive creativity and innovation just as hard as they do quality. In fact, many of the same concepts, methods and tools we use for quality management are the same ones we use to drive creativity and innovation.

Any successful business needs all three. Creativity drives the generation of ideas. We need new ideas for continuous quality improvement, to continually reinvent our businesses and to create new goods and services.

There are a number of commonalities among creativity, innovation and quality. We'll concentrate on just three: removing barriers, having fun and teams.

There may be no better teacher of creativity than James Adams, chair of the values, technology, science and society department at Stanford University. In his book, Conceptual Blockbusting, he discusses several blocks to our creativity: perceptual; cultural and environmental; emotional; and intellectual and expressive. We've dealt with many of these blocks in creating effective quality improvement teams, quality design teams and high-performance work teams.

Adams describes six types of perceptual blocks: difficulty in isolating the problem, a tendency to delimit the problem too closely, an inability to see the problem from various viewpoints, seeing what you expect to see (stereotyping), saturation and failure to use all sensory inputs.

Adams discusses many different cultural and environmental blocks. Cultural blocks include: problem solving is a serious business, and humor is out of place; tradition is preferable to change; and any problem can be solved by scientific thinking and lots of money.

The examples of environmental blocks he gives are far too familiar to all of us working in quality. These blocks to creativity are the same barriers to high-quality organizations: lack of cooperation and trust among colleagues, autocratic bosses who value only their own ideas and do not respect others, distractions and lack of support to bring ideas into action.

Emotional blocks are also important. These include: fear to make a mistake, to fail, to risk; preference for judging ideas rather than generating them; and an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

We quickly notice one driving force to creativity, innovation and quality among truly successful companies. They are having fun!

Playfulness drives creativity. It is not an accident that the homes of the greatest practical jokers in the country are the major engineering universities such as MIT, Cal Tech and others. When I joined Bell Labs, many of the first stories I heard about working there were the practical jokes.

One of the strongest lessons learned by creativity and innovation researchers and by all of us in quality management is the power of teams. Cross-functional teams whose members bring a wide-ranging diversity to the table often astound us with their creativity and problem-solving abilities. The leading companies in creating new products almost all use some form of cross-functional, even cross-company, design teams.

Hewlett-Packard is bringing together a wide range of members from different divisions and customers of different products to create new strategic thinking and product ideas. Ford is putting designers, engineers, lawyers, finance people, suppliers, dealers and market researchers all together under one roof. Companies all over the world are learning the creative power of well-run teams.

Ideas don't just happen. If you believe they do, put up a suggestion box on the wall and wait, and wait, and wait. Companies with numerous creative, innovative ideas force these ideas. They create themes, focus topics, goals. They have group sessions, discussions, brainstorming. They refuse to give up.

The difference in organizational performance can be striking. A typical company in the United States averages only 0.16 implemented ideas per employee per year. Toyota Motor Co., on the other hand, averages 46 implemented ideas per employee. Toyota achieves its remarkable record of implemented ideas from an extremely well-organized and well-managed system.

We must unleash the imagination of everyone in our organization. We must create the playfulness and fun to unleash this imagination. Albert Einstein knew that great thinkers don't have to take themselves too seriously and that: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

About the author

A. Blanton Godfrey is chairman and CEO of Juran Institute Inc. at 11 River Road, Wilton, CT 06897. One of his favorite research areas is creativity, innovation and quality. The text of a recent workshop on this subject that he led with two of his colleagues at Juran Institute is on the net at http://www.juran.com. Blan welcomes comments or questions about this article either by fax at (203) 834-9891 or by e-mail at godfrey@netaxis.com.