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Now I'd like to talk about time constraints.

Time constraints are going to help us answer one of the basic questions of this

week, which is why are some things just hard.

So time constraint has to do with the amount of time that we have available to

accomplish something.

And we're going to talk a little bit about lag times, about windows of opportunity,

it's sort of a law of nature, but really time is sort of its own thing.

And let me just talk about why that is.

Time constraints, this idea of clock time,

clock time is, we think of it as this immutable force of nature.

Like time just goes on, everyone has 24 hours in a day.

And we think about, we talk about it in that way.

But that's not always the case.

Sometimes in organizations people say, we don't have time for that.

They just use it as a way of shutting down an argument.

Not really because they haven't really thought about how much time there is.

But because they're trying to shut down an argument, end of discussion.

But a relationship to time is worth talking about.

We really should think about how it is we talk about time in our organizations.

We talk about it as something that we can learn through, that we can control?

Or is it something that controls us?

Do we think of time as something as an exogenous, an outside, that effects us?

Or is it something that is inside,

that we can actually use as a resource for other things.

So our understanding of time actually really does matter a great deal.

One aspect of time we want to think about is sequencing.

Interdependence let's call it.

Like what has to happen before

something else happens before something else happens.

Where the order in which things have to happen.

You know we have a car, in a car assembly you can't put the hub caps on a wheels

before you put the wheels on the axles, right?

And these are the kind of things that happen or in this case you

can't hire a cater before you decide what kind of food you want to serve.

And so there are certain things that have to happen in a certain order.

Some other kinds of tasks may not be interdependent.

That is, that we can perform these tasks in parallel.

So we're digging a ditch, and you start at one end, and I start at another end, and

we meet in the middle.

That can actually happen very quickly.

And so in this case, time does not become as much of a constraint if we can put more

people to the task.

Think of this idea of when we don't put first things first.

And so I'll tell a story.

I was visited once in my office by a woman who said, I'd like to get a,

if you could put me in touch with a company that develops prototypes.

Because she knew I did work in product development and

she thought that I would be able to help with it.

I said, yeah, sure,

I could put you in touch with a number of companies like that.

An she said well is it going to cost any money?

I said, yeah, sure its going to cost money because that is what they do for

their job.

I mean that is what they do.

They make prototypes and they charge money for that and that is how they live.

And she said, well I don't have any money left.

And so it turns out the story was that she had invented a device for

use in a hair salon.

This is not her patent, but a patent like that.

She developed a device for hair washing in a salon, and

so she wanted to make this product, sell this product.

And so I said well you have to invest in it,

you have to put some money towards this prototype you want to have develop.

She said well I don't have any money because I spent $20,000 on the patent.

As you spend $20,000 on a patent for

a device that she doesn't even know if there's a market for it.

And so this is the kind of problem where the sequencing of things

that have getting a patent.

Patent is actually a commercial tool.

A patent stops competitors from coming into your market and exploring the market.

If you don't have commercial ends that is if you don't know you have a market, or

if you don't know who's going to buy your product,

having a patent doesn't do a whole lot of good.

And so in this case, associate these all the resources for the patent, and

did not have any money left to develop the device that would actually

be able to be tested in the market afterwards.

And so this is a problem where sometimes we get things out of order

out of ignorance, or because we don't know, or because we get bad advice or

because we have wrong ideas, but

nonetheless putting these things in order actually does matter.

Another problem with time is these long lags.

That is, we may do something and the feedback for

what we did takes a long time to get back to us.

There's a great book, Why Things Bite Back,

by Edward Tenner, who talks about Kudzu.

And Kudzu in Japan was an ornamental plant.

It was used to graze animals and in the US, they've actually

brought some over in the 30's, and started planting it to stop erosion,

to feed animals, even for ornamental purposes.

What happened was in the South of the US., it actually were ideal conditions for

this stuff to grow.

And this stuff started growing out of control.

And to this day, it still grows.

They believe that the estimates of the amount of crop land loss

is about $500 million worth of crop land is lost annually

because of the spread of this thing through the center of the United States.

It's about 150,000 acres a year is lost because of Kudzu.

And so there's this thing that was- they thought it was a good idea, but

the lag time for us to see the adverse effects of it was so

long that it was too late to stop it by the time they got to the information

about what the problem they were causing with this.

Another constraints leaving time for learning.

And so think of this, look at it this way.

We've talked about a learning curve before, but

basically you start out in a project, or in a innovation, or

in a domain of thinking where you don't know much.

We call this exploration.

This is the beginning of the learning curve where we know very little, but

through time, we've spent some time,

we work up, we get up to a desired level of mastery, we call it exploitation phase.

And so we could think of this as George Eastman fooling around with film, and

emulsions, and plastic, starting out in the late 1800s, in the exploration phase.

And them by the 1980s when we checked in with Kodak,

they were at the exploitation phase at least as far as film goes.

And so this requires time actually to get from the one stage up to the other stage,

so you get to move from one to the other.

And sometimes we fail to consider this or

we fail to acknowledge that there is some time required in there.

One thing that happens is organizations may try to jump the learning curve,

is what call it.

That is we say we're at the exploration phase.

We don't know very much and we really want to get to that desired level.

How can we do that?

So we may hire someone,

an expert from another company to try to jump, to try to shorten that time.

We may try to suboptimize.

That is, we may make our project a little bit less aggressive,

a little less innovative in order to reduce that time.

All these behaviors towards this time

spent learning really suggests that learning is waste, right?

Because the time from where you start to the time where you want to be,

any time that you spend there is really wasted time.

And your goal is to minimize that time to an extent possible.

So, again, it is to say, spend as little time as learning as possible and

get to the exploitation phase.

The problem is, we know that that takes time.

This kind of attitude towards time can be caused by forgetfulness.

Yeah, we worked on this project before, there were all these things that came

up that we didn't realize were going to come up and

it really took us a long time to get to the place where we were trying to be.

We don't leave learning because we forgot.

In some organizations, the time spent learning is considered waste time.

When we talked about the group invasion process constraints,

we talked about that really early stage where you're still trying to figure out,

and you're exploring lots of different ideas,

a lot of organizations would consider that wasted time.

And say, you're brainstorming now, but when are you going to get back to work?

As if work was this thing making things happen.

So if we don't plan for that learning time, that's problematic, and

that's going to form a kind of constraint, because we're not going to be able to get

to the level of expertise, level of performance,

level of desirability that we set out to do with our innovation.

So how do we overcome these time constraints?

Constraints of sequencing and coordination, the long feedback loops, and

the constraints of the time that we need to actually learn.

One thing we do is really to watch the clock and so

the idea here is that to estimate how long a project will take.

And sort give ourselves steps to reschedule and plan this things out.

Planning for feedback loops, planning for learning times, planning for

windows opportunity if your product, if your innovation has to be delivered

before, Christmas, or before some big gift giving season.

How do you have to plan that in order to make sure that by the time the thing is

made, and transferred,

and put into the stores, that enough time has been allowed for that?

And so also you can think about, if I'm trying to get to this place,

what's the simpler or faster, better, cheaper way to get to this place as well.

And so here we're thinking about the time aspects of the innovation,

in addition to just the innovation itself.

So what the development process by which we get to that.

So in time, it plays a big role in there.

Also this idea of first things first.

Of understanding what has to happen first, what has to happen second,

what has to happen third.

In many organizations, and in many individual attitudes,

are project management is over,

the people who do really detailed project management is over.

That stifles things, that over constrains things.

That means people have to follow these intense rules.

Well, actually the project management can be your best friend because it can help

you anticipate what are the things that we have?

What are the problems that we might run into?

Now all of us might not be good at that.

Some of us may be set up as radical innovators

just even through our brain wiring, and so we need these kind of people in our lives.

People who can help us schedule these things out.

So it's not to not schedule, is to have the schedule and to look at it and say,

have I thought about all the things that need to happen?

Or have I sequenced them in a way that I can get through them most efficiently?

Another aspect of the problem of first things first is that, sometimes, and

I think it may be unconsciously that people don't want to know it may not work.

That they're afraid of that information and so by planning it out you'll say okay,

here's this really critical issue that has to be resolved.

If this issue is not resolved, it's not going to work.

So, for example,

we talked last week about Richard Branson and his space tourism thing.

If that legislation had passed, his innovation was dead.

It was not going to work.

And so, in that case, sometimes we're afraid to know that.

And so, we don't want to do a plan because it will force us to see that thing.

That will sort of say, wow, when I hit this test here, it may not work, and

everything I've done up to this point will be worth nothing.

Well, you have to overcome that.

We really have to put down the plans.

Say, if this is the thing that's a showstopper,

this is the constraint that's likely to make this thing die, I need to know that,

and, actually, I need to pull that thing forward in time.

That's a constraint I need to test first.

That's to the contrary to overcome first if I'm actually going to succeed in

the long run with this project.

Time for learning.

We've spend a fair amount of time talking about that.

Again here, the idea is how much time do we need to learn?

I was talking to an organization once that, they had given a company a plan for

the implementation of a new IT system and they said, in the plan I saw this big

chunk of time here and it said, time for training, staff training.

I said is that training?

I said what's the difference between training and learning?

They said, well, you know, this is just training and so

what's going to happen is we're going to train these people to do that, and that,

and I said well what happens if there's some unanticipated problem?

Well, there won't be.

I said, well how many products have you done in the past where there has not been

an unanticipated problem?

He said, well, actually every project has had an unanticipated problem, but

we can't plan for that because every problem is different every time.

It really depends on the client that we're working with whether

which problem that they have.

And so, for me, it's suggests that we need some time in there for

the unanticipated problem even if we don't know what that problem is.

So leaving some time in there for

that is going to be important and it's not training time, it really is learning time.

We know how our system works but we don't know enough about this organization works

to understand how our system,

when implanted into this organization, is actually going to function.

And when is it they're going to come up the learning curve to

a place where they're actually truly functional with it.

And that's why many organizations,

if you do kind of IT mobilization it will leave both systems running at once.

Because you know that there's some unanticipated problems that

are going to occur.

You may have to jump back to the other.

And that same kind of hedging, we also want to leave time for learning,

because that's a way of hedging as well.

It's not to reduce urgency, but it's to leave time for learning.

The learning gap.

There is a tool that is used often in this technological layer.

This is a technological view of innovation called a technology road map.

The road map really sort of suggests the gap between where we are and

where we're trying to get from a technological perspective.

Let me give you an example here.

An example that we've talked about, Kodak.

Kodak's road map looked at the kind of technologies that were involved

around making digital cameras happen.

And from their perspective, all these things, all these different technologies,

high quality printing, ease of use, scalable manufacturing were going to

require technological development that they said they kept estimate 25 years.

You come back later and 5 years later, 25 years.

Come back later 5 years, that's going to take 25 years.

And so from their perspective these technologies were developing at a rate

that was much much slower than for example Sony's solemn.

Sony's saw these things happening very quickly.

There's slightly different technology, they're going to pursue in different ways.

Because, as we talked about before at

the industry level Sony had a different idea of what performance was.

So performance for Sony was sort of good enough images, but

they saw these things rapidly converging.

And so they saw that from a technology roadmap perspective,

how these things overlapped and how is it they could actually pull out an area,

define an area, and say that's the area we're going to be.

These technology roadmaps generally in the vertical access,

they have different kinds of technologies or different functional technologies.

In the horizontal aspect, horizontal access is time.

Here's one, literally one from the semiconductor industry where they're

predicting path, basically, feature sizes, so

in a chip you have different features in there, different trace widths and things.

How big they were going to be or how small they were going to be.

In fact, through time, so people predict these things out.

So again, from- in the case of Kodak, the one that we talked about last time, you

had these different technologies that were basically proceeding at their own rate.

These were technologies that were being pursued by these other organizations for

other reasons.

Remember, each of these had their own competitive field they were working in.

And so as these things,

if you're able to watch them, if you're able to see carefully,

you might find the place where the overlaps able to happen.

We're able to define something where it is.

And so technology roadmaps are the tools we use to track this kind of coevolution

to understand what's possible at any given point in time.

So again, why some things are just hard?

Well, because time is involved.

Because time is, we may not have enough time.

We may have a window of opportunity.

There may be long lines for feedback.

These could all be reasons why some things are hard to do.

And I've given you now some examples of ways that we might use to overcome them.

Next up, environmental constraints.

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Putting First Things First

Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers

Meet the Instructors