The Edison Imperative

It is said that in Thomas Edison’s laboratory hung a sign that read: “There’s a way to do it better – find it.” For many, this is considered the mantra of a man on a tireless quest for the next great invention, rejecting the status quo and all notions of mediocrity. For me, it is a reminder of the corporate world’s insistence to revisit problems that have long since been solved. Let me tell you why.

We operate in a corporate environment that is as competitive as it is dynamic. Companies are under tremendous pressure to deliver productivity gains and cost reductions, just to survive. In the face of rapidly evolving customer sentiment executives look pleadingly to their existing workforce for solutions to their challenges, ranging from the routine to the novel. Managers respond in the only way they know how: by employing the “best efforts” of their best people to address these demands. The method to channel these best efforts is all too often deemed irrelevant and so is overlooked – because it is the outcome that matters. Cue the butcher’s paper and week-long workshops.

Contrary to what many managers may have you believe, typical “best effort” approaches are as tiresome and wasteful as they are frustratingly unproductive. W. Edwards Deming himself warned of the damage of unguided best efforts, imploring us to “think of the chaos that would come if everyone did his best, not knowing what to do”.

Ultimately, only two methods exist for arriving at Edison’s “better way”: design the solution entirely from scratch or leverage an existing approach. There can be no doubt that the former is necessary when venturing into uncharted territory, but wholly inefficient when addressing most issues. The unfortunate reality is that many companies believe their problems to be unique, and task their people with the mission of solving the problems while armed with little more than best efforts. In actuality, many of these problems are routine and, as such, have been routinely encountered and resolved, be it elsewhere within a company, an industry or globally. To reinvent the wheel is not merely inefficient; it is completely unnecessary.

With core roles and responsibilities of employees becoming increasingly blurred and lacking a defined structure, it is no surprise that people will, when prompted, readily embrace a tried-and-tested approach to deliver a result. The presence of structure is attractive for the same reasons that the use of a template improves quality and efficiency: it limits variation, provides predictability and forms an instant feedback loop.

The peculiar thing is that relying on empirically supported methodologies is commonplace in other institutions. Universities instil this methodology in the minds of their students from the beginning of their degrees. It’s a drumbeat heard from orientation until they cross the stage: peer-reviewed publications and detailed research form the basis for approaching a problem and guide the path towards its resolution. Yet exit the lecture hall and enter the boardroom, and you’ll find these principles have been discarded. After all, there can’t possibly be a place for textbook theory at the coalface.

I urge you, a leader, to entertain the possibility that the problem you are trying to tackle – or one analogous to it – has been encountered before. Like Edison, know that there is a better way and endeavour to find it within the vast repositories of knowledge that already exist. When challenges are encountered, insist that your team ground their course of action in an approach bolstered by research. In demanding a return to theory from your people, you provide a focal point for their “best efforts”; you cultivate an environment that celebrates leveraging best practices rather than simply paying lip-service to the phrase. Achieve this shift to guided best efforts and you may just find that the successes of your improvement efforts become reference points for tomorrow’s leaders.