What if we started from nothing
What if you started work tomorrow morning with no outcomes or goals, no design process or project plan, and was told, “Do some good”.
Where would you start? What would you do?
With complete freedom to start from scratch you could be open minded, pick any problem to solve, any goal to achieve, design a completely new way of working, create something free from the constraints of existing mindsets.
What would I do..?
What teams need to work together
There’s lots research that supports a cognitive foundation to teamwork.
Team cognition is critical to effective teamwork and team performance. The current working definition of team cognition encompasses the organised structures that support team members to acquire, distribute, store, and retrieve critical knowledge. An ability to share crucial information, and know where in the team unique knowledge resides, allows members to anticipate and execute actions as a unit rather than as individuals.
The research indicates that three of the most important contributors to high-performing teams are:
- social category heterogeneity – team members are different from one another in a number of significant respects.
- high external interdependence – team members interacting with each other influence one another’s experiences.
- low authority differentiation – team members have the same status, influence and power within the team.
Team cognition emerges through team learning and team member interaction.
Theory of constraints and continuous improvement
Continuous improvement offers a structured approach to achieving product goals.
It’s based on Godratt’s Theory of constraints which says that every goal has one biggest barrier. It probably has other barriers too, but it only has one biggest barrier. Identifying and removing that barrier has the biggest impact on achieving the goal. Once the biggest barrier has been removed, then the second biggest barrier becomes the biggest, and so on until the goal is as close to being achieved as it can be.
Often there comes a point where the gains from removing progressively smaller barriers are no longer worth the effort, and the product has reached maximum optimisation.
This approach to the continuous improvement of a product focuses on solving the biggest problems first.