Can the Italian genius be enough, in a phase of market crisis, to make up for the cost of the inefficiencies that condition the processes of many of our companies? Do creativity and innovation get along with costs, productivity and standardization of processes?
Why is the mistake we frequently stumble into confusing the rules and procedures, perhaps complete with certification, in a real discipline in the company's operational processes?
To answer these questions, it is worth looking at sport and reflecting that in the absence of rules and above all of the discipline necessary to respect the same rules, an athlete or a team would have no chance of being a winner because, beyond the aspect " regulatory" of the question and therefore of the penalty that would be risked, what would certainly happen would not help in terms of sporting performance, as all the schemes are actually designed to maximize performance in the competition.
This example allows us to transfer the reasoning to the corporate world where, in fact, the deficiencies in the discipline cause variability of the outputs of a process as the time and the people involved change, as well as the unpredictability of the length of the queues waiting at each "work center intellectual” that individuals represent.
But now we come to creativity and the ability to be truly innovative: in my opinion, with the comfort of others' applications and personal Lean Innovation projects, the more the companies and the people who work in them learn to give themselves rules (standards, guidelines , check lists, etc…), making them an integral part of one's own culture, a natural modus operandi that arises from within the organization, plus there is a natural space for that creativity that really adds value to the product or service that we are going to create for the market.
Somehow we need to save energy, which we waste on "standardizable" things and to which we should never return more than once at most, to reserve it for activities with a high strategic and creative content. We think of redundancies, repetitions, useless work, etc. that are done daily and that steal energy from creative activities. Well, we "fix" these things with greater use of discipline and standards, then we manage the new space that is created.
From example to example: the more a football team assimilates the coach's schemes, in a fluid and natural way, the greater the creativity of the playmakers on the pitch and the ability to be victorious over the opponents. In other words, putting discipline and creativity together frees up vital energy, because with the rules of the game you learn to do certain actions almost automatically and "routinely" and at the same time you free up energy for those with high added value, in the appropriately designated spaces purpose.
Having discipline and seeking forms of standardization in certain areas of our professional activity absolutely does not mean losing creativity, on the contrary, it means freeing up space for creativity. And every time we touch on all these wastes, like reducing interruptions and reducing redundant things, we do just that: we increase the space to give more life to creativity, and at the same time we manage to reduce the time of our projects.
I think it is a duty towards ourselves and towards our customers to try to understand how to free up more space for our personal creativity because in this way our value as people and what we give inside and outside the company grow.
