Are you listening to everyone in your organisation?

Whatever the business - be it an advertising agency, marketing or media company, retailer, manufacturer - it began with an idea when the founder had an idea to start it, and since then it has lived and grown on ideas. Ideas are the seeds that drive innovation.

Most companies are not looking for radical ideas, however - just incremental improvements in the way they operate - but when one sits in on a planning meeting or strategy session, it soon becomes clear why many organisations lack innovation. They don't really listen to each other. Or more accurately, more often than not, not the right people are being listened to.

Stop talking, start listening

The most common problem is that 20% of the people do most of the talking and 80% simply sit and listen. Often junior staff or perhaps people on the shop floor have outstanding ideas, but are simply too shy or intimidated by the vocal 20% to voice their opinion. The 20% rarely are aware of just how dominant they are in meetings or strategy sessions.

Through the use of a professional facilitator, an environment is created where everyone has an equal voice and mechanisms for people to really listen. The result is astonishing.

Ideas come from surprising places

For example, at a recent workshop with an oil company planning to spend millions on the installation of new equipment to fill tanker trucks, a superb idea came from an unexpected source. As part of a discussion one issue discussed was a bottleneck created by large trailers attached to the tankers. The perception from management was that there was excessive time being spent filling these extended transport vehicles, but as the saying goes, “every man with a hammer, sees the problem as a nail.”

An idea was therefore put forward to spend more money to build a new gantry to double the filling capacity. As it turned out, an executive secretary who had sat in to assist with logistics responded to a question in the facilitation session about the source of the bottleneck problem, writing anonymously on a card: “the north wall in the depot”. (Everyone else had produced cards with ideas on how to execute the construction of the new gantry with least disruption to the filling depot.)

When the group was asked to give ideas on what the card could mean, the secretary stood up and stunned everyone: “You people think the problem is the fill-time for each truck. From my office (four stories up) on the corner of the building, I can see the gantry operations. The problem isn't the fill-time. It's the time the drivers take to line up the truck and the trailer to get into the gantry. If you knocked down the north wall, they could drive straight in.

Bottleneck solved.

Instead of millions of wasted rands on constructing another filling area, the sensible solution was to remove a wall. It seems so simple, but the solution was only as simple as listening to the right person and creating the means to do so. (Incidentally, the secretary received a sizeable bonus for her innovative idea.)

Establish processes to listen

Sometimes it pays to listen to more than just an organisation's executives. Insights ‘from the trenches' can be invaluable, and establishing a mechanism to listen is the key. By using collaborative visual thinking where people answer carefully constructed questions to anonymously share their ideas on cards posted on a wall, shared insight soon follows. In such an environment people open up and express their true feelings without being scared to offer seemingly outlandish ideas.

If innovation is what your organisation seeks, the most important thing to do is to create the means to listen, ensuring that the right people are empowered to contribute and discuss ideas.