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Did you hear about the other ‘D’ in “DEI”?
When you hear the word “diversity”, it may conjure up a company-wide initiative relating to demographic diversity of race, gender and ethnicity. In fact, diversity is defined in one way as: the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. Efforts around diversity have been growing for years and are helping to shape our current businesses and society for the better.
Let’s review another type of diversity - experiential diversity – where the range of skills and talents of team members are leveraged to improve team and business performance. Imagine a team where everyone thinks the same way because they have similar experiences, skills, and talents. Would they be able to anticipate the needs of a wide range of customers? Would they be able to overcome obstacles creatively? Or would the team members be hampered by having the same assumption set?
Consider a simple example: you need to remodel your kitchen. Would you prefer to have three carpenters do the job, or have one carpenter, an electrician, and a plumber updating your kitchen together? I guess it depends on how good the carpenters are at electrical work and plumbing! But you get the point: each individual brings a unique set of skills, perspectives, history, and experiences - diversity! Businesses need to leverage this diversity to accelerate progress and achieve results.
Now imagine a team of people from diverse educational backgrounds, diverse methods of thought, and diverse skills gained from previous experiences. Some of the team members might be good at organization, others at individual technical work, and still others at leadership. Combining the experiential diversity of team members to optimize the team’s performance requires an awareness of each person’s skills, background, likes and dislikes, strengths, and previous project experiences. In other words, it is not always obvious how to organize your team for success. Don’t assume that people’s current assignments are optimal.
Scan your current team, what experiential diversity do you see? Did you ever take note of it before? Do you know the skills, strengths, and likes/dislikes of your team members? Are you assigning projects based on their skills and where they could make the biggest impact? Or are you assigning projects to whoever’s available (even if their skills do not align well with the project needs)? Have you talked to each team member to assess their desired focus areas? Hiring the best employees into your team is critical, but if you do not recognize and utilize their experiential diversity, you may be sacrificing business results. Always work to leverage and support diversity, whether demographic diversity or experiential diversity. The outcomes will be incredible.
For more guidance on setting up your team for success, reach out to CAEDENCE. Our team development program, emerging leaders coaching, and “hands-on” work with client teams are all options to help accelerate your results.
Danger is lurking around every corner in a new product development / new product introduction project. Avoidable risks wind up blindsiding teams, always at the worst possible moment. Risks blow up into problems because teams misjudge their nature and origin, and lack the right tools and processes to effectively identify, assess, and mitigate them. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction
There are dozens of tools for reducing risk in new product development and introduction. We know because we've used them to successfully launch dozens of new products in highly demanding industries like automotive and aerospace. Let CAEDENCE show you a few of our favorite tools that you can use immediately to dramatically reduce the chances of disaster on your next NPD/NPI project.
Risk is inherent in new product development and introduction. Regardless of your personal risk tolerance, it's critical to understand that unmanaged risk could ruin your business. We're not saying "don't take risks". We're saying "take risks with your eyes open". Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Many risks in NPD & NPI are visible. New process steps that must be implemented with caution and back-up plans. Unique product features that are challenging to accomplish. But there are other risks lurking. Things that can derail your project before you even realize. A bit nervous now? You should be! But, don't worry. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Successful new product development and introduction projects require carefully balancing dozens of critical parameters, any one of which could sink the ship. At the end of the day, each of those dozens of NPD/NPI success measures relates to an aspect of just 4 main stakeholder care-abouts: Launch timing, Project budget, Product margin performance, Quality / delivery (customer experience). Learn the systematic method to reduce risks in your new product developments.
CAEDENCE has decoded decades of business experience to reveal the intuition and practices of top performing teams and individuals to radically accelerate people and teams toward excellence. We know the theory, but we've also lived everything we teach and honed best practices for decades. This arms us with tons of real-world examples to engage students and clarify techniques. We often help clients out of crisis situations, but our passion is preventing crises from occurring in the first place. This means (a) establishing robust systems, (b) empowering leaders, and (c) upskilling teams.
We challenge our problem solving classes to play “20 questions” – can we guess a randomly selected word using just 20 yes/no questions? Engineers often say it’s impossible. But, 99 out of 100 times, we find the word! How? There’s no magic: what’s on display is the power of binary decision making, what we call “splitting the dictionary”. And you can apply it to all sorts of real-world problem-solving scenarios. “Splitting the dictionary” is a problem scoping technique of asking the right questions to eliminate as many incorrect possibilities as you can, thus focusing your root cause search in the right area. Effective scoping is key to efficient problem-solving. Once the problem is clearly defined, think of the root cause as a needle in a haystack. Before you start examining hay, first ask “Am I on the right farm?”, then, “Which haystack should I search?”, then “Which portion of the chosen haystack is most likely to contain the needle?” Scoping out the possibilities with a simple tool or test can radically acc
Many teams and companies struggle to get the most out of structured problem solving methodologies because they make one or more of the common mistakes shown, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it! (We’ve shown the 8D process here, but whether your company uses 8D, Six Sigma DMAIC, PDCA, A3, or another paradigm doesn’t matter.) The issue is HOW any of those methodologies are used by real teams in real time in the real world.
“The people we nominate to help in this situation are either going to be the chicken or the pig.” The room went silent. The “chicken or pig” comment came specifically in response to resistance someone had to sending some people to the remote site. After a pause, the executive went on to explain “when you are making breakfast, the chicken contributes, but the pig is committed”. We weren’t going to resolve this problem with remote and part-time help. To get the job done, we would have to send people truly committed to working hands-on and to staying abroad for weeks until the job was done. “chicken or pig” became team shorthand for level of commitment. Next time your team is faced with a big challenge, I strongly encourage you to reflect - are you and your team sufficiently committed for the team to succeed? Are you going to be chickens or pigs?
When trying to improve or optimize a business or manufacturing process, there is one main rule: your actual process is never what you think it is. You need to "walk the process" (literally follow and watch every step of the process) to understand every step and detail. This will reveal steps and activities that are non-value added or causing significant pain. In addition, when working with teams, if people see that you’re really listening to them, they will be open to listening to you.
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