Work Hard, Play Hard

I attended a talk from Hans Siggaard Jensen of Learning Lab Denmark yesterday, given at the Rotman School of Management as part of its Design Thinking speaker series. The talk focused on the necessary differences in approaching different types of management. Here’s the highlight as I see it:

For traditional project management to be successful, you start with an end-point (the objective) and work your way back to today (through milestones). But what happens when you apply this basic framework to research and innovation? Well, you have no end-point, no clear objective (other than a vague notion of what you want to develop), and so nowhere to begin managing. Herein lies the challenge of managing ambiguity — something that is necessary for a research- or innovation-driven organization to succeed.

What does Mr. Jensen suggest? Learn to play — develop a structure in which people are not driven by specific goals, where a “project” is not ruled by meetings in which staff talk about what to do. Get in there and do things, try things out — the fun stuff — and, more often than not, you will stumble across a great solution that satisfies the ultimate objective. Lots of other innovative ideas will fall out for future projects, not to mention the necessary improvement in staff morale when work becomes focused and productive play-time, rather than hard goals that don’t necessarily capture the true objective.

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