The Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict by Jeff Degraff

Author:Jeff Degraff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Luminous Pragmatism of

Engineers

She may not want to admit it, but Aabha is an Engineer through and through. All of the qualities that make her a stellar lawyer—her luminous pragmatism, her methodical approach to problem solving, her penchant for objectivity, and her astonishing persistence—are the characteristics that define anyone with this dominant worldview. That she is a reluctant Engineer makes her all the more perfect as a model. For Engineers are much more complicated than the number-crunching, by-the-book people we might expect them to be. They are thoughtful, sensitive thinkers—as creative as Artists—yet they thrive in environments with procedures and established ways of doing things.

Engineers are systematic, disciplined team members. They embrace reliability as they work to eliminate deviance. They love to take preexisting ideas and products and make them into something bigger—something reproducible, global, universal. What they seek is efficiency. They strive for incremental innovations. They want quality—foolproof systems that can make a lot out of something already proven to be great.

At the organizational level, the Engineer organization is a large-scale company with many rules and structured, hierarchical ways of doing things. Since the organization’s growth is driven by process, it is easily scalable. Think Dell Computer. Think McDonald’s. Think Boeing and Toyota. Think British Petroleum. For these companies, failure is not an option. They are companies that make their money on scale. In these companies, you will always find complexity—there are many parts to manage. This is a slow-moving, low-risk kind of growth. It certainly won’t change the game, but it is most definitely a growth you can count on.

Taken too far, Engineers become control freaks. It’s the sweatshop sensibility that Aabha hated most about her law firm: the unthinking celebration of productivity at all costs. That Aabha could see the dark side of this in her colleagues makes her an especially self-aware Engineer. Indeed, her impulse to bring some creativity into the firm was a great one—for the people that Engineers need most in their lives are the ones most of them have the least in common with: Artists.

Artists and Engineers have a lot to teach each other. While Artists shake up the rules of Engineers, Engineers minimize the chaos of Artists.

What Engineers show everyone is that an innovation doesn’t have to be radical in order to be meaningful or worthwhile. It’s often better to think smaller and look at what’s already out there. Instead of trying to find something no one has seen before, Engineers create extensions of current solutions. They take something that already exists and make it a little different or better. They apply more effective uses of low-cost, low-level systems and technologies to transform an old service into a more efficient one. The key idea is not newer but better, cheaper, and faster.

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