An innovation lesson from doing the laundry (wrong).

Household chores tend to feel pretty far from innovation. Take doing laundry for example – it is pretty much the same task every time you do it and the best outcome you can hope for is no more laundry for a few days. Nevertheless, a peek at how we tackle laundry tasks can help us talk about a key behavior that either blocks or unlocks innovation.

At my house, my wife and I each have chores we own individually and others we share. She does 100% of accounting; I do 100% of weeding. For laundry & dishes, we divide work into specialized jobs. I cover putting things away and my wife covers the rest. Long ago, we agreed to each do the part we respectively find least irritating. This division of labor is great for morale, but sometimes leads to unintended consequences.

When our approach to laundry goes awry, it becomes a lesson on delivering innovation.

To help this next part apply to the business world, let’s assume my wife and I divided laundry and dishes sub-tasks not because of preference, but because we each have a unique skill suited to our portion of the work.

Now, let’s imagine an uneventful Saturday afternoon at my house.  Just after 1PM, my wife and I each receive a text on our respective phones with urgent requests. Her text is from our son at college who just landed a last-minute interview in the morning before the recruiter flies home. A dump-and-run of urgent laundry is on the way. My text is from a friend hosting our friend group’s BBQ tonight, telling me a tree fell in his yard and asking if we could change the venue of our house.

My wife and I both reply “I got you” to our text buddies.

For context, you should know we currently have a house afflicted by the aftermath of a messy birthday party last night. Also, we need to wash spare bedding before some loved-but-nitpicky houseguests arrive in the morning. And the backyard is an overgrown mess.

We huddle for a quick plan. My wife will tidy the house, run dishes, and run & fold laundry. I’ll put away clean dishes and laundry and take care of backyard clean-up. Get ready for the hard lesson on resourcing innovation.

My wife and are both cranking at a high speed on our respective to-do lists. But we both have too many tasks to get done before the BBQ. So, we independently prioritize to-dos we each think are most urgent. We each make smart decisions and delay some less critical work. We do not take time inform one another..

My wife elects to leave our bedroom untidied. I decide to delay putting away the laundry until after the party. We pull off a miracle and have the house ready in time for the BBQ and all laundry clean for the next morning. I put the clean laundry on the bed to put away later. We stash our always-anxious Australian Shepherd in the bedroom, away from the crown. I bet you know what happens next. You’ve been on this ride too.

“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”

John Doer, Measure What Matters ↗

The BBQ ends successfully, only for us to discover our dog has “unfolded” all the laundry and frolicked on my son’s dress clothes and our houseguests’ linens. She’s decorated everything with dog hair and a left behind a pungent scent she must have picked up from the alley. We’re pooped and there isn’t time before Sunday morning to rewash, refold, and put away the necessary laundry. One of our key initiatives blew up just before the finish line.

Understandably, my wife wants to know why I didn’t put the laundry away earlier. She also feels compelled to mention she saw me mis-allocating precious time to a non-urgent pruning if our Magnolia tree. I inform my wife that she doesn’t understand my job, how to do it, nor the pressure I was under. I also perplexingly feel compelled to tell her she could have put the laundry away herself after she folded it. Armageddon.

OK, what the heck does this have to do with innovation? Well, it aptly illustrates a huge innovation barrier: failing to put the right resources on the right right initiative at the right time. While my wife and I didn’t know up front what percentage of our Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) each task might require, we had a hunch from the start that we were tackling too much.

And we still ran headfirst into the fire, assuming we’d power through and magically uncover how to get it all done in time. (Sound familiar, business friends?) The results: we delivered admirable amounts of work product, we had some success in the form of a killer BBQ, and we ended up with filthy laundry for a dress-to-impress interview and finicky houseguests.

What could we have done differently?

Well, for starters, I can think of at least one thing I wouldn’t say again. Joking aside, we could have easily told each other when making individual decisions about how to allocate our personal FTEs. Before starting any work, we could have talked about the outcomes that were most important to us – our son looking good for his first interview, avoiding passive-aggressive jabs about accommodations from our houseguests, and having the house passable enough to host a BBQ. In that order. In case of communication blackout during the frenzy of work, we’d have both known to aim our efforts at work that supported our prioritized outcomes.

In the business world, we do a similar thing to ourselves all the time. We set big goals and make big plans. The earth moves beneath us, and we respond with innovative initiatives assigned to smart people. We figure if we aim high enough, getting most of the work done will lead us to victory. But unfinished innovation doesn’t count. (Side note – ten unfinished innovations don’t count either…a CFO friend of mine did the math.)

The results of the laundry debacle were bad enough. And we only had two resources at play with relatively low stakes. Think about the amplitude and number of ripples leaders blast across our businesses when using the Rogers Laundry Resourcing approach. Interdependencies across business resources are a complex, tangled web. With numerous functional teams under separate functional leaders, we proliferate task-based prioritization decisions in siloed teams. Those decisions have real impact on our ability to meet target outcomes. And let’s be honest, we’re all a touch lackluster when it comes to proactively communicating localized resource decisions.

When push comes to shove, we coach our teams to ensure “keep-the-lights-on” work is complete. Consequently, we delay work on cross-functional projects that need us. Another seismic wave ripples through the company. At the end of the day, this leads to insufficient innovation making it to market. The margin of error for hitting our goals closes in from all sides. Making things worse, each newly-assigned project leader is motivated to explode out of the gates as soon as resources are assigned – often at the start of a new quarter.

The result is a shotgun start of discoordinated projects the first week of a quarter.

Leaders everywhere are painfully familiar with the result. Soon after initiatives kickoff, their leaders start airing their resource concerns. “IT has already said they can’t start for another 60 days and I need them now.” Or perhaps, “Finance sent a delegate to the kickoff and they don’t have the right knowledge nor ability to make decisions.” My personal favorite is, “I’m going to need something else to do because I don’t have enough resources for my project.” Perhaps most insidious is the talented-yet-silent initiative leader, too proud to admit they haven’t been able to commandeer the right resources. Not only to those leaders miss delivery, their attempts to stay “green” on progress reports through silence obscures business risk. Eventually, these talented leaders end up disengaged or with an unfinished initiative as a mark on their record.

By the time a new quarter rolls around, some unfinished innovation continues to be resourced. But some initiatives become deprioritized, effectively put in “default” for being late by our internal bank of resources. And we give our teams one more piece of evidence our companies aren’t innovative.

Not because of a lack of ideas. Not because of a lack of talent. Because we rushed past the mundane-yet-essential chore of shared, time-bound resource planning. There is a reason too much work (or too few resources) is a chief complaint from our teams. That reason is us.

Business leaders everywhere tricked ourselves into thinking doing more things at once will get us there faster.

Across 20+ years in the innovation rodeo, I’ve observed poor resource management to be the number one catalyst (or killer) of fresh, promising ideas. I’d love to say I’ve gotten it right more often than not, but I haven’t. But when done well, man does it feel amazing. Unfortunately, once our leadership teams start the dominos of cross-functional finger-pointing, the downward spiral is hard to stop. Innovative work stalls. Creative thinking feels unimportant to our talent. And our “status quo” thought & behavior patterns become more deeply entrenched. No bueno. The solution takes aligned commitment across an entire executive team (and sometimes a lot of ego-checking).

Yes…we need to have a little extra innovation in the pipeline to account for unknowns. Yes…we need to empower functional leaders to manage their own resources. And yes…we should expect talent to find creative ways to work smarter and faster.

But, no. Heroically running into the fire of too many priorities all at once will not work. Not without a simple plan to make sure the right resources are at the right place at the right time. So how do we fix it? It is shockingly easy. So much so, leaders may resist adopting the approach because it sounds too simple.

Focus and finish before starting the next thing.

Here is what I have found works for executive teams:

1. Get crystal clear on the top outcomes you want to achieve. Share the outcomes with everyone.

2. Collaboratively make a ranked initiative list with biggest outcomes on top. Don’t worry about resources yet. (FWIW - Product teams in technology disruptors call a list like this their “stack-ranked backlog.”)

3. Engage functional teams to collaboratively “shirt size” how much effort each initiative might require. No one will get their work requirement exactly right at this point. That’s OK; you can always adjust later.

4. Fully resource the first thing on the list and start executing immediately.

5. Check if any teams are out of bandwidth for special projects based on needs of priority #1 (i.e. they are all tied up with thing 1 and can’t make time to work on thing 2). If so, wait to start any other initiatives that need that team’s support to get started. Greenlight the next project on your list that can be resourced with functions that have available capacity.

Then repeat. Here is how it looks in practice.

In this sample resourcing matrix, initiatives 1, 2, 3, and 7 can be fully resourced at the same time. While the design team is out of resources before staffing initiative 3, they are not a required resource. In initiatives 4 and 5, design and analytics teams are required, but not available. As a result these initiatives will be paused until they can be fully staffed.

It is unlikely your initiative list will serendipitously match resource capacity across all functions at the same time. By only staffing initiatives we can fully resource, we will temporarily leave some teams less than 100% busy on projects. If the business case supports it, go ahead and bring in temporary labor to fill the gaps. If not, resist the temptation to start new initiatives without unavailable teams. Too many decisions get made without a key voice in the room and when they become available, there is no way to avoid rework. Also, resist the fallacy of green lighting project resourcing based on which team has the most capacity overall. It doesn’t matter if your IT department is perfectly at project capacity if the approved work requires 150% of marketing’s project bandwidth and 200% of finance’s. Before you scoff at this sort of scenario, think hard about whether this might be you…I’ve certainly fallen into the trap before.

WHITEBOARD OF SOME FUNCTIONS AT 100%, SOME BELOW.

Let’s say you complete the five step resourcing process and are unable to staff any additional cross-functional initiatives at the moment. As a next step, find functional teams with unused project capacity and steer them toward continuously improving their department’s efficiency. Have them focus especially on improvements that serve the company’s overall target outcomes. For example, imagine the first three initiatives on your backlog fully use all IT’s project bandwidth, but your marketing team still has unused project capacity available. By putting that bandwidth toward continuous improvement of their own department, marketing will create incremental value without introducing new dependencies on another function. This single-function work is comparatively easier to pause when the organization is later ready for marketing to join the next fully-staffed cross-functional initiative.

In parallel, have your entire executive team continually advocate for cross-functional innovation teams to stay laser-focused. All the way through the finish. My experience with this approach? With the proper executive support, you get more innovation completed faster…with the same or fewer resources. Your teams become energized by making progress toward a clear purpose.

Suddenly, appropriately sequenced innovation feeds an upward, virtuous, spiral.

By focusing on only work we can fully staff at the right time, we improve both completion rates and velocity. Completed innovation initiatives drive outcomes, engage employees, and reinforce innovation-capable culture. There will be cases where unique dependencies across initiatives on your backlog force you to juggle the sequencing after ranking value. No problem. Just re-sequence initiatives as needed for execution and follow the same five-step process outlined above.

Many of us have heard the statement, “strategy is as much about what you do NOT do as it is about what you do.” I wholeheartedly agree. And I’m here to tell you it is also about WHEN you resource each of the strategic priorities. So, introduce stack-ranked backlogs and thoughtfully sequence innovation resources. Give your teams the ability to put away the laundry. You may be surprised how much innovation grows.