Inside the “Box” Innovation
The “box” is your friend when it comes to innovation and breakthrough results.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, your goal isn’t actually to get outside the overly cliched “box” – it’s to get better inside of it. Merely asking for more time, more money and/or more resources is fool’s gold and usually the easy way out. When you’re working with real constraints, that’s where creativity has a chance to come alive. GE Healthcare knows this first hand.
A few years back, GE Healthcare’s ECG (electrocardiogram) analysis system was due for an upgrade. It’s a device that records electrical activity of the heart to check for different heart conditions or abnormalities. GE didn’t increase the development budget, or even keep it the same. It cut the budget to about one-twelfth of what it was and limited the upgrading time to eighteen months. On top of that, the machines needed to be portable, scan at a low cost and be battery operated—all new constraints from the ECG’s heavy and expensive past.
Now... how many times have you been in a situation, personally or professionally, where you didn’t have enough time or enough resources to do things as you might have expected (or thought you wanted)? And worse, maybe expectations for what you can deliver are even higher… Just about everyone right?
Now that perception of too-few-resources might be a stopping point for many. But for GE and all of us committed to new results #NoMatterWhat, it’s merely a place to start. The new constraints forced the GE team working on it to get more innovative, to get more creative and to think differently (thank you, Steve Jobs). With some hard work, ingenuity and I’m sure quite a bit of discomfort, they met every single requirement asked of them and GE Healthcare’s MAC 400 ECG machine ended up revolutionizing rural access to medical care.
Was it just luck?
Nope.
Postmortem research on the project revealed that the development effort was a success not despite those limitations but because of them. Check out the HBR research here. Said another way: with more time, more money and more resources – they likely wouldn’t have achieved such a successful end result. It was the “box” that made them successful.
Don’t get me wrong, too many of the wrong constraints can have the opposite effect. As you know if you’ve read Hunting Discomfort, if something is impossible by the laws of physics – it’s impossible no matter how hard you try. But anything short of that is fair game.
So what game are you playing? Ready to find out? This week I challenge you to find a place where you can take a perceived shortage of resources and fire up some creativity, ingenuity and grit. Let me know how you’re making out in the #NoMatterWhat Community. When you share your breakthroughs, it inspires others to work towards the same. And if you’re stuck… well, we can brainstorm about that, too.
Don’t fall victim to the common wisdom that tells you that you’re stuck by constraints, or limits, or the “box”.
Those constraints are necessary avenues to new growth… and eliminating them leads to complacency and a default path of least resistance anyway. That means more of the same old boring results. The secret to innovation, breakthrough results and growth is getting inside the box of more constraints and using it to your advantage.