The Keyport Life Insurance Company did this with astounding results. They doubled their business without hiring any new people and by cutting IT costs by $1 million a year — all at the same time. And they are not alone. Numerous companies have discovered this secret to success.
Who has the clearest vision of your company's future? Is it IT? No, it's your CEO and his/her management team. IT just talks about bits and bytes. Your CEO talks about your company, all the time. The CEO and senior management have the vision. Your CEO knows exactly where to take your company for success. As in all creative endeavors, if you can see it, you can build it. It's no different with software. The vision is the key. Capture that vision and improve on it.
Your CEO doesn't know what IT can do for him, and you don't know what the CEO needs. But I guarantee that if you can get him to articulate his vision, it can be built. So have him ask for everything he can possibly imagine would help your company, even if he thinks it can't be done. Get him in the "Rubber Room".
It all begins in the "Rubber Room". My first customer, way back in 1970, was Pilot Life Insurance Company in Greensborough, NC. They needed a life insurance illustration system. So, we locked ourselves in a boardroom for a couple of days. They were paying for an illustration system, and whatever they wanted was what I wanted to deliver.
My first job was to help them envision their perfect solution without limitation. I didn't want to just get requirements; I wanted them to imagine a solution that would make a real difference for them. They would make a suggestion and I would say, "Great idea, but how can we make it even better? Don't limit yourself to just what you think is possible."
Sometime during the second day, the actuary Bob Willett spoke up in his big Southern drawl and said, "Art, I feel like I'm in a rubber room. Everything we ask for, you say we can do." That's such a great description of the environment I wanted to create; I've been calling it that ever since.
Gather your CEO and senior management in the Rubber Room to play make believe. Get them out of reality and into an imaginary world where anything is possible. The business plans call for results. What if they had to deliver triple those results? They would probably need some magic. Great, what magic?
What about the customers? What will make them love doing business with you? When they buy your product, what problem do they solve? How could you solve it better? How can you make your customer's life easier? How can you make it easy and painless for them to do business with you? It doesn't matter if the suggestion is difficult or even impossible. This is the "Rubber Room"; anything is possible.
What if you don't have the budget? What if you need a mountain of new software? Forget about it! Anything is possible. All you have to do is snap your fingers.
You will learn a lot. Amazing ideas plop out on the table. One idea will lead to another. There will be a crescendo of creativity that will captivate the team — electricity in the room. It will be very productive to imagine a perfect world where anything can be done. It's just a matter of saying, "I need it."
There is no way to predict the discoveries. It is predictable that you will make many. You will discover things about your information flow; jobs that exist only to relay information that can be eliminated, ways to alter products for increased sales, markets you didn't even know existed. And you will discover the power of information, information that when delivered at the right time to the right person will make your bottom line go up in a big way.
The most difficult part of creating an innovative solution is the vision. This exercise makes the vision crystal-clear. If you can see it, you can build it! This is the solution that the competition will not have, but will wish they did.
Document this vision. But unlike traditional documentation, it should read like a story, your CEO's story, in language that anyone can understand — no technical jargon — a word story that paints the vision. No explanation of how anything is to be done; only what the solution will do. Be sure to include every desire, even if you think it is impossible.
Now you have the story — the perfect solution to accelerate corporate results and triple profits. Design is not finished, though; it continues all the way through the development process.
Software design has been strangled for 40 years. We act like a bunch of engineers and architects, documenting every detail to the fraction of an inch before any work begins.
For a window in a building, such design is required; there is only one right way. And it must be precisely documented before any work begins. But we're not designing buildings. A software window doesn't even have to be a window. It can take any form we can imagine that is helpful. It can even work differently depending on who is using it. In software design, imagination is our only limitation. We must maximize imagination throughout the entire process.
When software is done right, it's more like decorating a room than building one. When decorating, we try different combinations, colors and placements. Some we like; some we don't. It evolves. Eventually it's perfect; further change would just detract. That's how we know we're done. That's precisely how software should be done. It's not a construction job; it's a decorating job.
With the vision story, the development team knows what the software will do. They just need to figure out how to make it.
The development team collaborates and tries alternatives. Some work, some don't. Software is developed in small steps called prototypes for all to see and try including your CEO and senior management team. One prototype will generate even better ideas for the next prototype.
The solution is an accumulation of good ideas that the CEO, management team, and your development team decide to keep, ideas that have all improved upon the original vision until everyone likes the way the room is decorated.
That's how you design and create a solution and know up front it's a financial home run.
About the Author
Art Pennington is President of the Profit Research Institute, creator of the Profit Method of transforming business, keynote speaker and author of the newly released book "PROFIT, Discover the Goldmine in Your IT Department."
