Why Do We Underutilize Human Potential?

Large and small corporations, both in high-tech and traditional industries, now owe most of their value to investments in knowledge. These investments, creating value from the intangible assets of intellectual capital, have a better return on investment (ROI) than physical assets.  In our knowledge-based economy, effectively developing and applying intellectual capital is the key to creating value. Intellectual capital is defined by businessdictionary.com as the "Collective knowledge (whether or not documented) of the individuals in an organization or society. This knowledge can be used to produce wealth, multiply output of physical assets, gain competitive advantage, and/or to enhance value of other types of capital. Intellectual capital is now beginning to be classified as a true capital cost because (1) investment in (and replacement of) people tantamount to investment in machines and plants, and (2) expenses incurred in education and training (to maintain the shelf life of intellectual assets) are equivalent to depreciation costs of physical assets. Intellectual capital includes customer capital, human capital, intellectual property, and structural capital." 

One of the fundamental tenets of lean is the reduction of underutilized human potential. What exactly does this mean? Systems2win defines the underutilization of human potential elegantly:

Restricting employee's authority and responsibility to make routine decisions. Having highly paid staff do routine tasks that don't require their unique expertise. Not providing the business tools needed to perform and continuously improve each employee's assigned work. Not trusting your people to stop production to stop and fix a problem (jidoka). Not trusting your people to be responsible for the cleanliness, maintenance, and organization of their own work area. Not trusting people with a flat organization structure of largely self-directed teams. Not expecting (and measuring) every person to contribute to continuous improvement.

The intriguing concept in this statement is the inability to trust. This lack of trust speaks to the ecosystem of current organizational structures. Peter F. Drucker stated that the organization hierarchy in most organizations today developed as a result of World War II and the attempt to create efficiencies by structuring the firm like the military. While this organizational structure may have made sense 50 years ago, the command and control model is one which does not support the facilitation of human capital to better your organization. Through my research I would argue the military type structures in place today are ineffective in developing and applying intellectual capital and need to change.

Turf wars, politics, red tape, budget nepotism, envy, ego, greed, cronyism, short-term thinking, and rapid changes in strategic direction for no apparent reason must be removed from the culture and replaced with the fuel, the tools, the resources, and the attitudes that drive the innovative process. Any organization, whether a for-profit business, a nonprofit organization, a government agency, or an academic institution, that has a culture where there is a direct or indirect, explicit or implicit, stated or whispered vested interest in keeping things exactly the same to produce continuity and to win the elusive prize of job security will surely die a slow death and will never be a place where creativity is cherished or innovation is harvested. Cultures of innovation are places where creativity is celebrated, rewarded, and cherished at all levels in the organization. When teams are truly inspired and passionate about their work, they are much more likely to discover and to dream without the fear of “extra effort” or discretionary time (e.g., time and effort expended in the workplace beyond what is typically expected) that innovation can flourish and valuable crops can grow.

Leveraging Knowledge

In my experience, about 80% of a company's knowledge is undocumented or unshared and thus lives in the tacit knowledge world while the remaining 20% of explicit knowledge lives in documents or procedures which in that are often ignored. Think about that ratio in terms of your organization. If you are only utilizing 20% of the knowledge of your employees, what is the opportunity cost to your firm for what you miss out of your intellectual capital? If 80% of your organization's capital resides in the knowledge of your workers, managers are hobbled in their ability to make decisions regarding how those assets are utilized.

CEO's are frequently asked "What is the most important asset to your organization?" The standard response is, "Our people." While this is often the general response, it is rarely true. When asked to further define why people are an organization’s most important asset, most managers will resort to primitive answers such as, "They make our products," or "Without them we can't do anything." While these responses are certainly correct, they are a subtle gauge of a lack of trust because they only refer to the physical output of the employee.  After all what's one the first items to be cut when cash flow goes red?

This line of thinking is not only broken, it's dangerous for the future of your organization. Regardless of your product or service, your greatest asset is your people; not in what they do but in what they know. Their intellectual capital (tacit knowledge) is something that can move you from being a good company to being a great company. With knowledge empowering people, your organization can develop products your competition simply can't given the same resources.

The failure to leverage employees’ knowledge creates the opposite result. We have seen companies falter when people retire from firms that have failed to create an environment of successful knowledge transfer.

Creating Transformation

This problem is not easy to tackle. How do you transform an organization with a culture that doesn't adequately value intellectual capital into one which lives off it? What components must be in place in order to facilitate this change? It starts with management. Once management truly supports an investment in intellectual capital, significant advances can be made by following a few recommendations. As with all change, these take time and effort but they can turn your organization into a world-class institution:

A culture of innovation begins at the top but must permeate and trickle through all levels and all functions within any organization. The work ethic, transparency, simplicity, humility, integrity, and accountability of most farmers offer insights and leadership lessons for all of us, particularly leaders interested in fostering a culture committed to intellectual capital agrarianism. Norms must be put into place and enforced that foster cooperation, teamwork, candor, a sense of a common purpose, and a commitment to a set of institutional core values that transcends individual agendas and priorities. These shared values must be truly embraced by everyone, not just appear on a page on the company’s website. People are more likely to innovate and truly want to improve their workplace when they identify with and want to be governed by a set of shared institutional and consistent values and when they are confident that the fruit of their innovation labors are aligned with overall companywide strategies and goals.

As executives, dedicate yourselves to supporting substantial efforts to prevent lost knowledge but culturally and physically.  Create a culture of lean which empowers knowledge workers. Empowerment is a book in itself but to create this environment you must create what Forrester calls HERO (highly empowered and resourceful operatives). Creating a process of improvement through value streaming and Kaizen where management recruits intellectual capital accepts the recommendations for change.  Emphasize teamwork over teams. Teams refer to small groups of people working together toward a common purpose. Teamwork refers to an environment in the larger organization that creates and sustains relationships of trust, support, respect, independence and collaboration. Creating highly empowered teams that work without titles can create the shift of culture to one that prizes intellectual capital.  Focus on knowledge capture and allowing knowledge transfer. Several methods can entice team members to transfer knowledge, including mentoring, paired teams, work shadowing and simulations.

Utilizing human potential is a complex topic. Although many organizations view capturing the remaining 80% of tacit knowledge as a lost cause, it is certainly worth the effort. In reality, most firms do little to try to capture and use their human potential. However, doing so can provide exponential returns and will enable your organization to achieve greater success with minimal additional resources. I encourage delving into some of the lean communities for more advice on how to utilize human potential within your organization. 

IT Must Adapt or Die: This Story Brought to You by the Third Party Providers Trying to Make You Irrelevant.

Five years ago, less than 25% of business leaders rated their organization’s IT function effective at delivering the capabilities they needed. Today the number hasn’t changed. IT functions have strived tirelessly to understand demand, set priorities, deliver effectively, and capture value, yet the results still disappoint. Business and IT leaders alike feel they should be getting more—more efficiency, more innovation, more value—from technology. Unasked QuestionsAmong all the talk of engagement, alignment, and “being part of the business,” one assumption is never challenged—that for information technology to grow in strategic importance, so must the IT function. But what if this is not the case? What if a dedicated, standalone IT function is no longer the best option and the function’s resources and responsibilities were better located elsewhere?

Lets face it traditional IT is under assault.  Frankly if you can't compete with these threats then you deserve to lose the battle.  Look at the change in who can provide value to your organization without any involvement from IT.  Today third party providers can create shadow IT footprints all over your organization.  There's little to stop them when they are providing more value to your customer then you are.  There are a tremendous number of consultants out there who will attempt to prepare you to compete against these firms.  In order for anyone to be successful though I have posted the five greatest shifts your IT organization must make in order to stay competitive and continue to provide value to your customer.  

Evolution 1: Data/Information Over Process – The rise of technology delivered as a service, or the cloud, will significantly reduce sources of competitive advantage from information technology. In theory, a start-up could use the cloud to obtain the same functionality, scale, and quality as an industry leader. Thus reducing barriers to entry which will certainly even the playing field.   Differentiation will lie in how IT manages change, integrates its service portfolio, and critically, exploits the information the services generate.The nature of demand for information technology also is changing. Most employees are now knowledge workers. Social media is becoming vital for customer and internal communication, and data volumes continue to rise. As a result, in the business areas that drive growth—innovation, marketing, sales, customer service—up to According to Marty Pine (Marty Pine is a recognized thought leader and an internationally known Global Business Services Professional who has worked as a senior executive in customer, provider and advisor companies.) 80% of IT enablement opportunities relate to business intelligence, collaboration, or the customer interface. At the heart of each of these opportunities is the need to capture, integrate, and interpret information, both structured and unstructured.

Evolution 2: Eliminate the IT Silo and Embed in the Business – Traditional corporate structure is on its last leg. All corporate functions have the same problems: their capabilities overlap; they do not control the outcomes they enable; and after many cuts, they are struggling to find the next big efficiency. And for organizations growing in emerging markets, no corporate function has the scale or expertise to provide sufficient local support.The IT function shares these problems. It has skills in strategy, program management, business process design, and sourcing. All are valuable, but none are needed solely for delivering technology, and so they can all exist elsewhere.  I have discussed this before when defining organizations as vertically managed.  There is no visibility across the value stream because firms are not set up to execute that way.  Creating an IT organization which can 

Second, no amount of alignment and partnership changes the fact that the IT function enables business outcomes that someone else controls. Much value has disappeared down the hole that this situation creates. Finally, cost pressures mean many CIOs face the unwelcome choice of cutting delivery resources needed to “build things right,” or management resources that ensure IT “builds the right things.”

The need for efficiency and joint accountability for execution and outcome will change the IT function’s delivery model and organizational location. Technology will be consumed as part of business services as the IT function merges into a business shared services group alongside other corporate functions.

Evolution 3: Rogue IT – Externalization of applications development, infrastructure operations, and back-office processes continues, gradually eroding the “factory” side of the IT function. The pace will accelerate as the cloud enables the externalization of up to 80% of application lifetime spend. As this occurs, internal roles will shift from being technology providers to technology brokers.

Evolution 4: Greater Business Partner Responsibility – Technologies for collaboration, business intelligence, and customer interface all require experimentation and iteration, use non-linear, user-driven workflows, and offer value from diversity across the organization. None of this is easy for a central function to fulfill.A generation of business leaders and end users is emerging with greater technology knowledge and confidence. They see advanced, user-friendly technology as an everyday occurrence, and can recite stories of companies gaining industry leadership through technology. At the same time that business leaders’ expectations, and their ability to articulate those expectations, are quickly rising, the cloud gives them access to unprecedented technology scale and expertise. The fact that cloud services cannot be extensively customized levels the playing field; business units cannot customize cloud applications but neither can the IT function.Together, these trends point to a greater role for business partners in areas where the value of differentiation outweighs the need integration. This is not a return to local control of IT resources, rather it is a shift in responsibility for technology decision making.

Evolution 5: Diminished Standalone IT Role – As IT roles migrate to business services, evolve into business roles, or are externalized, the scope of the IT function will diminish and its headcount fall by 75% or more. Strategy, architecture, risk, program management, user support, and relationship management will exist at the business services level, not within the IT function. The CIO position will expand to lead this broader group or shrink to manage technology procurement and integration. Roles remaining in the IT function will organize around build and run, and adoptan agile operating model to allow rapid value delivery and resource mobility.Organizations that do not make these shifts will be left behind as they struggle to effectively exploit technology and manage an inefficient IT function and an underperforming corporate center. For IT leaders too,the shifts present risk and opportunity. Those who do not adapt face a much diminished role in a group with little strategic impact. But the opportunityis also significant. Leading a business shared services organization offersnew levels of resource and accountability for business outcomes. Another option is a leadership role in a newly empowered business unit that thriveson exploiting technology for competitive advantage.

These five shifts should move your group to one which can compete with third party providers. Research consistently shows that in most companies strategic intent is not clearly articulated, and this leads to a disconnect between strategic goals and daily activities. The better an organization communicates strategy in clear, actionable, and measurable terms, the more successfully the Lean transformation can focus on driving change where it matters most. There are many perspectives and approaches to strategy, but it all comes down to a few simple questions. How does an organization define and differentiate itself in such a way that customers prefer it over their competitors? What are the activities the organization must engage in to achieve this status? And how do they sustain competitive advantage over time, as their competitors constantly try to capture market share? More important, in our opinion, than the details of an organization’s strategy at any point in time is how well everyone in the organization understands the strategic intent, and how this understanding guides their daily thoughts, behaviors, and decisions.