PS: Part of the problem is that you get isolated, right? Sometimes people you have to talk to are the ones who aren’t in the room when these sessions are going on.
LK: Yeah, I found when I would host brainstorms specifically, in my realm, it was a marketing situation, but still marketing affects the operations team, it affects the merchandise team, it affects the custodial team. So I would invite a representative from those teams to join us, even though marketing wasn’t their expertise.
I wanted them early on to have a stake in what we were doing, because I told you about a principle called “assisters or resistors,” right? I like to invite those resistors early on because I want them to have a piece of it, have a stake in it, so they have a little bit of ownership to it when it goes live. There’s nothing worse than coming up with an idea in isolation and then going to your legal team and your HR team afterwards, because they most likely don’t understand how we got there, and so the first thing they’re going to do is try to poke holes in it.
So I say, let’s involve those people early on, because again, they will help collaborate with you. And when it comes time for execution, they will own it more and they will become those assistors to help you bring that idea to life.
And I know it’s probably difficult in your environment, but there’s probably standard meetings where those teams get together. Let’s set aside time just for, “hey, this problem might come up, let’s talk about solving it now, before we get to the reactive part of it, right? Let’s do that part together and have input on it together.”
Also, you can’t argue with facts. I always talk about how important the step is before you get to ideation: empathy, walking in your end users’ and your consumers’ shoes. What I always tell my groups is, trust facts over assumption. You can make intuition later, but exhaust all the facts you have because it’s hard to argue with data. Everybody has an assumption about what’s going to happen when that critical moment happens, but if somebody in your organization has data that shows, “hey, actually that’s not going to happen, here’s how we see it, so we do have an opportunity here,” that’s a beautiful thing. But the trick of that is, everybody has to have that a-ha moment together. Do it as a collaborative group, get that data, throw it out on the table, make connections with it and decide together.
This story originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Plant Services. Subscribe to Plant Services here.
