Breakthrough Team Dynamics

An opportunity to apply Simplexity arose at a newly modernized manufacturing plant. It produced a major component of the company’s products. It was setting records for high quality and low cost, but one department was struggling. Only about one-third of its output met the company’s standards, and employees had to work a lot of overtime to keep up with orders. The plant managers had tried several quick-fix solutions to resolve the problems, but none had worked. A cross-functional team of 15 plant managers and supervisors was formed to apply the Simplexity process.

To begin, the team members took the Basadur Innovation Profile which puts personality aside and measures the different ways that individuals think and solve problems. In our innovation process, this is called their style which ranges from generating new problems, conceptualizing how these problems are understood and defined, and optimizing and implementing solutions to these problems. The Profile enabled the team to discover a very revealing insight. Of the 15 members, eight had strong implementer styles, seven had strong optimizer styles, and none had either generator or conceptualizer styles. In a debriefing session, team members identified that they were jumping quickly to optimization and implementation without first finding the real facts and defining the real problem. 

The team agreed to use Simplexity which made them ignore looking for solutions and spend two days only fact finding and problem defining (even though it was against their nature). Three breakthrough problem definitions emerged. By the third day, the group was able to create simple new solutions to each defined problem that they quickly implemented. The team had innovated and soon regained the plant’s cost and quality production standards.