If inefficiencies result in anyone waiting for too long, if the majority of your people aren’t engaged in the work that drives your revenue most of the time, you risk being devoured from the inside out.
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The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, authors of the book Scarcity, have concluded that we make bad decisions when we are strapped for time, too busy to think, and struggling to manage our obligations. Even if we take only a few hours a week of unplanned time, we can develop a bigger-picture focus or strategies for how our business actually runs.
I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative - whatever form that creativity takes - and that to encourage such development is a noble thing. More interesting to me, though, are the blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company.
The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.
Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities - finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Those things, we can’t control. But the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want - so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.
The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.