Developing
Emergency
Creative Teams

by Alexander Watson Hiam

Most businesses today are limited by the inability to break through periodic performance bottlenecks. These bottlenecks take many forms: a marketing group struggles to find a new way to position a product; a factory manager searches for a way to reduce machine downtime; a human resource department confronts a specific, hard-to-fill position. Add to this mix the dozens of urgent issues that pop up on voice-mail and the in-box-not to mention those chronic irritants and profit-sinks that nobody gets around to fixing-and most managers wonder when they will ever have the time to be creative and address the root causes of lackluster performance.

Wouldn't it be nice to just pick up the "bat phone" and have some super heroes rush in to solve your problem? (And then rush out to leave you in peace.) But instead, you must either do it yourself or (heaven forbid) spend tens of thousands on a consultant who wants to take months to solve your problem, instead of hours.

But you don't have to choose between two marginally acceptable options in that familiar, "either-or" manner. Consider creating the capacity within your organization to send in a team with a fresh perspective-trained in creative problem solving, prepared with some consulting skills, deployable in a short time frame and at minimal cost-to tackle just the kinds of performance bottlenecks you would most like to resolve.

Going beyond the "either-or" dilemma

It may seem like the alternative to not spending a bundle on a consultant is to continue to live with the problem. One way out of this disheartening rut is the emergency creative team. The ECT is analogous to the on-call paramedics used by small towns for their flexibility and low cost. Normally, ECT members do their regular jobs. But when a manager or team encounters a logjam, they can send for the on-call members of the ECT-who then rush to pick up their briefcases of problem-solving and creative-thinking tools and go to the aid of those who rang the alarm.

Developing ECTs means gaining an internal capacity to perform short-term, problem-specific consultations completed by a multifunction team of staff members familiar with the business, its mission and customers, and its culture. This team is trained to bring both creative problem-solving expertise and a much-needed fresh perspective to performance bottlenecks and administrative logjams.

Using a selection process that combines volunteer initiative, preliminary skill assessment and complimentary functional specialization, ECTs will be able to deliver several results to your organization:
An expanded "solution set"- The first problem to overcome in solving organizational performance problems is to stop using old solutions. The comfort and predictability of tried-and-true solutions are generally a big point in their favor and also the source of their limited results. ECTs can break this barrier with new eyes, new questions and a new way of thinking about persistent bottlenecks.
Faster dissemination of organizational learning- The second problem to overcome in solving organizational performance problems is the slow speed at which innovation spreads. Due to their multifunction composition and their roving nature, ECTs will forge new neural pathways in the organization's brain along which new perspectives and new skills can travel-as well as the enthusiasm that accompanies such events!
Increased collaboration and cooperation for better productivity and profitability-All the current clich& eacute's, like "doing more with less" and "working smarter, not harder," promote an organizational environment characterized by collaboration and cooperation. And performance innovations and improvements are products of creative human beings, not fancy computer programs or new machinery. ECTs will provide a live model of cross-functional collaboration, and other organization members will spontaneously follow this lead.

In addition to building new skills in organization members and creating new ways of using the most talented people, ECTs can be used to address any urgent management problems. And they can help your managers and project teams achieve breakthroughs like these:
Developing new product ideas
Identifying new market segments
Developing productivity improvements
Cutting red tape in complex admini- strative processes
Resolving persistent quality problems
Finding new best practices against which to benchmark organizational performance
Finding cost-saving strategies to reduce overhead
Increasing customer satisfaction with products and services
Enhancing worker and workplace safety

Implementing ECTs

Establishing ECTs begins with specifying the process for identifying members, training the team, facilitating them through their first "client" engagement as a key feature of learning and demonstrating the use of these teams. It also includes evaluating the results with the client and perhaps other organization members.

Membership on creative problem-solving teams should be voluntary, and organization staff members at any level and from any function should be free to volunteer. The resulting team will have a multidisciplinary or "cross-functional" composition.

ECT training should cover interpersonal and group process skills, "conceptual maps" and other tools that facilitate creative problem solving and critical thinking, and managing a client engagement. The training requires about five working days.

Managing the ECT is initially accomplished in a joint fashion between an ECT consultant and an internal senior manager. The manager trains with the team members and receives assistance from the consultant in team-management issues, so that the ECT consultant can exit the loop.

Testing and applying the model occurs with the identification of an actual performance or policy problem presently experienced and unresolved in a unit or team of the organization; the fledgling ECT conducts an internal consultation with this volunteer group under the consultant's management and facilitation. This part of the process is used to apply the skills in a "real world" setting and to teach the group-process component of client engagement.
A detailed debriefing follows the conclusion of the client engagement. This feature of the overall consultation is used to assess the results of the effort and identify any needed modifications or improvements in the team's training and skill building. This feature may also assess what follow-up support the creative team needs, either from top management, human resources or the consultant.

Managing the innovation

To gain credibility, the ECT needs to become part of the organization and needs to have some visibility and accountability. Visibility is developed and maintained by satisfying ECT customers and by providing updates to the top management team, which should receive reports of the ECT's progress and accomplishments. Process accountability is established through the reporting link with the senior management staffer who deploys and oversees the team's work and projects. This individual will have ongoing access to the consultant for any needed assistance.

Ongoing evaluation of the innovation occurs through brief written evaluations and comment sheets completed by unit members with whom the team consults. The team's specific "work product"-whether it be an idea, a strategy, a redesigned policy or process-can be monitored to assess the quality of its impact on unit performance.

The ECT becomes an internal resource that is responsive and accountable, capable of providing applied creativity on a moment's notice. And ECT membership creates a new development path for future managers.

A positive approach

Healthy, vital and prosperous organizations that deliver value to customers take risks, make decisions, try new approaches. The ECT concept invites an organization to increase its ability to learn and innovate. This will enable the organization to chart its own course in response to a dynamic environment.

The best way to undertake such an effort is to invite organization members to participate in an experiment that may make a significant contribution to overall organizational performance. And experimenting is a good analogy. Experiments are carefully developed, creatively implemented strategies designed to test a new concept in a thoughtful way, using the best learnings from previous experience coupled with a willingness to leap off into unknown territory.

Experimenting presumes the use of previous knowledge applied in new ways, which may generate unpredictable results. Experimenting suggests that the risk takers will come up with something wonderful, mediocre or not very useful. In any case, the risk takers have the freedom to risk and the permission to be wrong sometimes. Asking ECTs to be bold risk takers only works if they are allowed a learning curve and some promising misfires.

An ECT case history

Plant Manager Alice James is working on next year's budget and plan. But she keeps coming back to a key problem-the company has asked all plants to achieve 5-percent to 7-percent productivity improvements per year, but the productivity growth rate at her plant is 2 percent to 3 percent per year. To make the required profit goals next year, James must either boost productivity dramatically or make some big cost cuts-probably through a 15-percent downsizing of her payroll. Yet that would add to her labor problems-she knows she'll have a tough time renegotiating the union contract when the present agreement expires next summer.

So James is stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, unwilling to commit on paper to bigger productivity gains than last year and also unwilling to adopt a destructive downsizing strategy. What to do? She is about to send in an unrealistic plan in a futile effort to postpone the decision, when she remembers the new ECT program that recently came out of headquarters.

The ECT of five employees arrives the next morning and takes over the best conference room. One of them, someone considerably her junior at the company, demands that she hold all calls and spend the entire morning with them. She wonders if this is going to work.

By mid-afternoon, James is considerably more enthusiastic about the ECT-and about next year's budget as well. With the team's help, she has in hand three new creative strategies, at least one of which she hopes will do the trick.
The "end run"-After some persistent questioning, the ECT discovers significant loss at the plant due to incorrect orders for raw materials and supplies. Fixing this would result in a sizable cost savings over the year, and the ECT helps her sketch out a plan to overhaul her present order-triggering and product "spec" processes.
The "cooperation strategy"-The ECT discovers that vacation absences around national holidays like Memorial Day and the 4th of July seem to be linked to overtime generation in order to meet stiff production deadlines. They propose a fair and easy-to-track process to prevent such staffing problems and the accompanying overtime costs. They suggest a cooperative approach to this problem in which union officials are asked to select a solution such as a lottery system for the most desirable vacation slots. They also point out that the sales force could easily adopt a variable-lead-time approach to customer orders so as not to commit to unrealistic delivery dates around holiday times, reducing pressure on production costs and requirements from both directions.
The "problem redefinition"-An ECT member points out that the plant stores large piles of parts and finished goods-some of them unusable because of quality problems or product-line changes. The ECT calculates that a 50-percent cut in inventories next year would have the same practical impact as a 6-percent boost in labor productivity. They recommend forming an inventory reduction team composed of production-floor staff, a manager and a representative from the plant's biggest parts supplier.


When Alice James sits back down at her desk to write next year's plans, she feels much better. Now she can sketch out several proactive strategies to cut costs and increase productivity. Then she can create reasonable projections for the resultant gains, which could be sufficient to close her budget gap without any layoffs. The following week, when James hears about an experimental manager's ECT, she is quick to volunteer.

About the author . . .

Alexander Watson Hiam is president of Alexander Hiam & Associates, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based consulting firm. Hiam served on the faculty of American International College and Western New England College before joining the faculty of the School of Management at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently researching new approaches to change management, team development and leadership. He thanks Pat Meny of The Industrial Services Program (in Boston) for her help in developing the ECT concept.

Hiam's books include: The Vest-Pocket CEO: Decision-Making Tools for Executives, The Portable MBA in Marketing, Closing the Quality Gap and his latest, The Portable Conference on Change Management.

Hiam is currently testing the ECT concept in organizations and welcomes feedback from readers. Contact Alexander Hiam & Associates at (413) 253-3658 or fax (413) 256-8960.