Top Down-Bottom Up-Innovation All In One Box

 

John Kao, author of Innovation Nation and allround innovation guru, opened the PMI EMEA congress in Milan on Monday with an inspriring talk about innovation and what this can mean for Project Managers. After some introduction about how creativity is not the same as innovation, but just one of many essential components, he got me sitting right up my seat, taking notes.

Innovation from a management perspective is about mixing top-down approaches with bottom up. It's about ensuring value from a business perspective, but allowing creativity to emerge freely. It is not either or.

This is discussed frequently on my blog, with heated debates. I think the debates originate mostly from the perspective someone has of current PM practice.

Commonly used is the perspective of Taylorism. People in a factory. Management plans the process in detail and hands over instructions. Efficiency and maximum alignment are assured. This top-down in its purest form. During the keynote yesterday, this was picture also used shortly for illustration.

This is where most of the time the debate starts. "This is NOT what we are doing!" And they are right. We have strong leaders, we have highly social competent managers out in the field. Heck, we have an agile movement among the discipline.

So why still use this image of pure top-down?

First of all, for effect. If you have an hour to bring over a message, you have to make the message short and using strong opposites intensifies a message. Black-white, good-bad, right-wrong. I used this all time time. Yes reality has more shades of color, but reality doesn't fit in a blog post.

And secondly, it is an image still hold by many people outside the profession. Yes we have moved on, but does the rest of the world know?

A great session I attended later yesterday was by Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager. In his humorous talk he made a case for Project Managers to get "out of our box". He said that we are unknown outside our profession. How do you explain to your kids what you do? "Uhm. I manage projects." His argument was that if we are unable to explain to the outside world what we do, how do we expect that everyone outside of our box is aware of what it is we do.

Going over my notes  I wondered how much of our own internal debates is about conflict of "the representation of you", as The Lazy PM called it.

So, we still have to mix top-down with bottom-up. But, we already know, and we already do. Right? And if we need (additional?) ideas on how to do this, we might have a look at "innovation". That is what I took away from the keynote.

Now we just have tell the world about it.