Proactive Problem Solving: How Everyone Can Fix Problems & Find Ideas for Working Smarter! - Tapa dura

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Doug Hall graduated with a degree in chemical engineering at the University of Maine. Doug’s work from a mechanical, electrical, and chemical perspective, plus his innovation experiences, landed him a job at Procter & Gamble, first as an engineer at their Mehoopany Paper Mill, then in brand management at the company headquarters on 6th Street in Cincinnati. Over 10 years he was promoted up through the ranks as Brand Manager, Associate Advertising Manager, and eventually as leader of the P&G Invention Team. Working together with Eric Schulz, a kindred spirit, they invented and shipped a record nine innovations for P&G brands in a 12-month period. His success wasn’t because they were smarter. Rather, it was because they focused on creating systems that enabled them to work faster and smarter.

After 10 years, Doug retired as an “employee” and founded what is known today as the Eureka! Ranch, an innovation consulting and training company. Multiple television appearances and several books later, he found himself wondering why some Eureka! Inventing sessions were more productive than others. Working with three statisticians, he embarked on two research projects.

The first study focused on the creation of ideas. It included surveys every 45 minutes as teams from Nike, Walt Disney, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi-Cola, and others came to Eureka! Ranch to invent big ideas. A team measured them before, during, and after each project. From this analysis they discovered how Stimulus, Diversity, and Driving Out Fear impacted project success.

The second study focused on what made ideas successful in the marketplace. Here he studied quantitative data on more than 20,000 ideas from the Eureka! Ranch archives and the database of AcuPOLL, a market research company Doug founded and eventually sold. From this analysis, he discovered how to quantify Meaningful Uniqueness as well as how to improve how ideas are communicated.

The studies were supplemented with real-world research on more than $20 billion in active improvement projects in our Innovation Engineering portal and a literature review of more than 2,000 academic articles. This research led to more books and articles. It also resulted in Doug receiving honorary doctorates from the University of Maine and the University of Prince Edward Island.

The research gave birth to a new field of academic study, management science, and business leadership known as Innovation Engineering. The core Innovation Engineering curriculum involves nine college courses of content and leads to associate degrees, graduate certificates, and Blue and Black Belt certifications by the Innovation Engineering Institute.

A few years ago, Doug started doing experiments on how wood interacts with whiskey. This work led to the creation of Brain Brew Custom Whiskey and WoodCraft Bourbon Blender franchising with co-founder Joe Girgash. Leading the whiskey business through rapid growth caused him to rethink the importance of Proactive Problem Solving. And thus, early one winter morning, the idea for this book was born. Doug’s goal is to use what he’s learned from more than 50 years of innovation to help everyone fix problems and find ideas for working smarter.

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Introduction

An Antidote to the Multitude of Problems You Face

We are living in a time of unprecedented change. The consequence is a never-ending stream of problems in our work, our community, and in our personal lives. The aim of this book is to offer an antidote to the chaos. It accomplishes this by teaching the latest learnings, methods, and tools for thinking faster, smarter, and more creatively. Stated simply, the complexity of today’s world makes it nearly impossible for leaders to command and control their organizations. Rather, they need to engage and embrace the ideas, insights, and thinking of all their team members. On June 24, 1980, a documentary broadcast by NBC told the story of how Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, helped change the Japanese economy after World War II from a focus on low cost to high quality and reliability. Host Lloyd Dobyns had this to say about the need for broad scale worker engagement: “In almost all the solutions to the problem of productivity there is a common thread. Each of them includes, in some way, worker participation. Every expert to whom we talked agreed that no solution can succeed fully unless it includes the active participation of the people who actually do the work, union or nonunion. All humans think, and nowhere is it chiseled in stone, that those in management think best.” —NBC White Paper: “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”

My previous books, most recently Driving Eureka!, teach how to create and execute ideas for growing sales and profits through disruptive strategies, offerings, and business models. This book is different. It’s about helping you and those around you become Proactive Problem Solvers. It’s about teaching you how to move your mindset from “reactive” to embracing a more optimistic and proactive way of life. The need for this book became real to me over the past few years as I experienced the thrills and challenges of leading a fast-growing manufacturing company, the Brain Brew Bourbon Distillery. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Brain Brew grew from shipping a few thousand cases to shipping over 100,000 cases a year. Leading the distillery has taught me that, while disruptive ideas for innovative products, services, and business models are critical, having a team of proactive problem solvers is just as important. If I were to break down relative importance, I would estimate that when it comes to sustained success, 25% is due to having a disruptive product/service, 25% is a result of a disruptive business model, and fully 50% is because of never-ending continuous improvements by employees. At Brain Brew, innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day is not optional. It is the job of every team member. From operations, to finance, to procurement, to marketing and sales, our culture is on a never-ending quest to find smarter ways of working. The distillery has the quirky name “Brain Brew” to remind team members that our collective mission is to continuously find ways to work smarter than our competitors. Or said in the irreverent language of the Brain Brew Crew, our focus is to Stop Stupid. Start Smart. By “stupid” we mean the stupid processes, work systems, and bureaucratic junk that develops within all organizations. When Brain Brew was created, I had the preconception that we could create our production system once and be done with it. I was wrong. What I didn’t understand was the need to reinvent our work systems as production grew from 600 to 10,000 to 24,000 to 48,000 to 70,000 to 100,000 cases. With each step, change, and leap in production, work processes that had been “smart” suddenly became “stupid.” Dramatic growth impacted everything from raw material flow to work systems to production rhythm. Joe Girgash, co-founder and president, quickly learned to think proactively about not just the current production increase but the ones that will follow. He also engaged the team in the creation, testing, and implementation of system improvements. Just as the Walt Disney Company teaches employees to take immediate action to help frustrated guests, Joe taught the team to take action when they see something that is wrong. The impact of this cultural mindset is immense. In retrospect, committing to employee engagement is one of the most important decisions we’ve made as a company. Competing in the bourbon whiskey marketplace we learned quickly that we would fail if we tried to follow the playbook of the multi-national conglomerates that control 80 to 90% of bourbon whiskey sales. To win we had to innovate our offerings, business models, and work systems to enable our “David” of a distillery to survive and thrive versus the “Goliaths” that dominate bourbon whiskey. For the Brain Brew crew, “stop stupid” means not accepting poor work methods, poor tools, or flawed work systems as being “just the way it is.” When our team members see something that is a problem, they are enabled to try something to solve it. The result: their work is more meaningful, and our distillery is more successful. To be totally clear, “stop stupid” is about stupid work systems, not stupid people! People of all ages and education levels have insights and ideas. There are no stupid people. There are, however, many people who have not been taught how to problem solve, validate, and communicate their ideas.