Innovativeidealofperfecting

 An ideal of perfecting can be a motivating goal even if day-to-day we muddle through.

Things are complex, people are complex, organizations are complex, and the world is complex, particularly when you look at a situation and wonder how on earth things could have evolved in such a dynamic way. Therefore, problem-solving today is also becoming more complex, including both problem resolution and solution implementation. 

Strategic problem-solving is a balanced scenario from pursuing the perfect solution which perhaps does not exist to making continuous adjustment and improvement. Too little perfectionism leads to an undesirable endpoint; too much perfectionism leads to analysis paralysis and no endpoint at all. All stages must be handled with attention and proficiency to ensure success.

The strategy should stay focused, not be perfect. A strategy is a combination of an origin, a destination and a route to get from origin to destination. Start with a very precise and accurate evaluation of where you are now (origin) to be continued with a relevant and realistic objective (destination). Then you may find the premium route based on the right means and capabilities. Due to the dynamic business reality, the strategy is always flexible in order to reach the goals, striving for perfection, but living with the best opportunity. The thing is that the business environment continues to change, the strategy shows how to reach your long or mid term goal in a certain time frame. It may be perfect for a moment in time and then things change; the longer the time frame is, the more likely it is that the strategy has to be modified during the journey, in order to solve emerging problems proactively.

Strategy is both art and science. A good strategy is shareware, not shelf-ware. For a "perfect strategy" to exist everything and everyone would have to remain constant, unchanged including time. Even the best thought-out and documented strategy will not fully survive the first contact with the customer nor encounter with competition. Therefore, evaluate your strategy periodically in connection with the integrated business planning. You will spend years defining the perfect strategy; at the end your environment will have changed, and you will need to make adjustments. If your goal is to increase profitability, a strong strategy may be to identify and focus your resources on attractive segments where you are able to fulfill important customer needs better than competition.

Innovation is to pursue alternative ways to do things, not to search for perfect solutions: Innovation is a specific phenomenon and strategic imperative of the knowledge-based digital economy. The intention of innovation is not about finding the perfect solution but making progressive problem resolution. As striving for perfection is an asset to the implementation of an idea while at the same time it is perhaps a detriment to the idea's creation or prototyping. People, process, technology & tools are all important components of developing innovation competency. When a company "thinks differently," and implements new ways to solve problems, and then you have innovation. The goals of innovation at the business level is for achieving high performance, improving profit, optimizing resources, delighting customers, and making collective progress.

You can evaluate innovation in terms of company history, when you evaluate how the company produced or implemented new solutions that were totally different from its “business as usual,” or in terms of market evolution, that is a truly breakthrough solution, a radical or disruptive innovation in the market. Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, or best practices. Perfecting the art of innovation is not about pursuing a state of being perfect, but about taking a continuous journey of improving innovation management effectiveness.

There's no such thing as "perfect" process, as process is the means to end, not the end: Processes underpin business capability. Organizations should seek to optimize processes continually, but that work might look very different, depending on what you're aiming for. The very fact that organizations are now striving to be as adaptive to rapidly fluctuating conditions as much as possible means processes will be forever changing so trying to create one perfect instance seems to be unrealistic. While it may not be worthwhile to "perfect" a process, it often makes sense to improve one. Methodologically, improvement is easier after automation. You take advantage of the tools that help you do so.

The very characteristics of a good process could be - agility, flexibility, resilience, elasticity, etc. And processes can continue to be improved, even though certain process users or owners think the process perfect, from an enterprise architecture perspective, or from a governance viewpoint, the process may be not so robust, as processes need to be seen as pieces of a big business picture. From process optimization perspective, to adopt more of a "good enough is good enough" kind of mentality, not in the least because after a point, spending more to get better probably won't return enough benefit to make the investment worthwhile.

Successful business is very much about imagining and building towards a better world. An ideal of perfecting can be a motivating goal even if day-to-day we muddle through. From strategy crafting to process optimization to innovation management, the very goal of problem-solving is not to pursue the perfect solutions, but to fix the core issues, make tradeoffs, and take a journey of “perfecting” by making continuous improvements.

Posted in: Business Process Management,Innovation,Problem Solving,Strategy