[MUSIC] Now I'd like to talk about time constraints. Time constraints are going to help us answer one of the basic questions of this week, which is, you know, why are some things just hard. So time constraints has to do with like the amount of time that we have available to accomplish something. And we're going to talk a little bit about lag times, about Windows of opportunity, about those kinds of, of it's sort of a law of nature, but really, time is sort of it's own thing, and let me just talk about why that is. Time constraints, you know this idea of clock time. Clock time is, is, we think of it as an immutable force of nature, like time just goes on, everyone has 24 hours in a day and we, we think about we talk about it in that way, but that's not always the case. Sometimes in organizations people say we don't have time for that. They just use it as a way of shutting down an argument not really because they haven't really thought about how much time there is but because they're trying to shut down an argument end of discussion. But, in relationship to time it's wha, it's we, it's worth talking about, we really should think about how it is we talk about time in our organizations. Do we talk about it as something that is, is that we can learn through, that we can control, or is it something that controls us? Do we think of time as something as, as ex, exogenous, outside that effects us or as something that's inside that we can actually use as a resource for other things? And so our understanding of time actually really does matter a great deal. One aspect of time we want to think about is sequencing, is, is Inter, interdependence law let's call it. Like what has to happen, before something else happens, before something else happens. What is the order in which things have to happen. Well if you have the car you can't put the in a car assembly you can't put the hubcaps on the wheels, before you put the wheels on the axel, right? These are the kind of things, that happen on this case you can have hire a caterer before you decide what kind of food you want to serve. And, so, there are certain things that have to happen in a certain order. Some other kinds of tasks may not be interdependent that is, that we can perform these tasks in parallel. So we're digging a ditch, and you start at one end and I start at the other end, and we meet in the middle, that can actually happen very quickly. And so, in this case, time does not become as much of a constraint if you can put more people to the task. think of this idea of, of when we don't put first things first. And so, I'll tell a story. I was visited once in my office by a woman who said, I'd like to get a if you could put me in touch with a company that develops prototypes, because she did know I worked in product development and she thought that I would be able to help here with this. I said, yeah sure, I could, you know, get put you in touch with a number of companies like that. and she said well, is it going to cost any money, I said yeah, sure it's going to cost money because that's what they do for their job. I mean, that's what they do. They make prototypes and they charge money for that and that's how they live. And she said well, I don't have any money left. And so, turns out, the story was that she had invented a device for use in a hair salon. Actually, right, this is not her patent, but a patent like that. she developed a, a, a device for hair washing in a, in a, in a salon. And so she wanted to make this product sell this product. And, and, so I said, well, you know, you have to invest in it. You have to put some money towards this prototype that you want to have developed. She said, well I don't have any money, because I spent $20,000 on the patent. And so you spend $20,000 on a patent for a device that she doesn't even know if there's a market for. And so, this is this kind of problem with the sequencing of things, that if getting a patent, a patent is actually a commercial tool. A patent stops competitors from coming into your market and exploiting the market. If you don't have commercial ends, that is, if you don't know who's going to buy your product, having a patent doesn't do a whole lot of good. And so, in this case, so she'd use all of her resources for the patent and then not have any money left to develop the device that would actually be able to be tested in the market or afterwards. And so, this is a problem where, sometimes we get things out of order, out of ignorance or because we don't know or because we get bad advice or because we have wrong ideas. But nonetheless, putting these things in order actually does matter. Another problem with time is these long lags. That is, we may do something and the feedback for what we did takes a long time to get back to us. There's a great book "Why Things Bite Back" by Edward Tenner, who talks about the Kudzu. And Kudzus in Japan was an ornamental plant. it was was used to, to graze animals. And in the US they've actually brought some over in the 30s and started planting it to stop erosion, to feed animals, even for or, ornamental purposes. What happened was in the south of the US, it actually were ideal conditions for this stuff to grow. And this stuff started growing out of control and to this day, it still grows. They believe that the estimates of the amount of crop land lost is about, you know, $500 million worth of crop land is lost annually. Because of the spread of this thing through the Southern United States. So about 150,000 acres a year is lost to kudzu. And so there's this thing that was, they thought it was a good idea, but the time, the lag time for this, to see the adverse effects of it was so long that it was too late to stop it by the time they got the information about the problems that they were causing with this. Another constraint is leaving time for learning. And so think of it, look at it this way we've talked about the learning curve before, but basically you start out in a project or in a innovation or in a domain of, of, of thinking where you don't know much. We call this exploration. This is the beginning of the learning curve, where we know very little. but over, through time, we spend some time, we work up, we get up to a desired level of mastery and we call it exploitation phase. And so, we could think of this as George Eastman, you know, fooling around with film and, and emulsions and plastic, starting out in the 18, late 1800s in the exploration phase. And then by the 1980s when we checked in with Kodak, they were at the exploitation phase, at least as far as film goes. And so this requires time actually to get from the one stage up to the other stage so you get to move from the one to the other. And sometimes we fail to consider this. We fail to acknowledge that there's some time requried in there. One thing that happens is organizations may try to jump the learning curve is what I call it, but as we say. We, we're at this, we, we we're at the expiration phase, we don't know very much and we really want to get to that desired level. Well how can we do that? And so we may hire someone, an expert from another company, to try to jump, to try to shorten that time. we may try to suboptimize, that is, we may make our project a little bit less aggressive or less innovative in order to, to reduce that time. All these behaviors towards this learning, this time spent learning, really suggests that, that learning is waste. Right? Because the time from where you start to the time where you want to be, any time that you spend there is really wasted time in know where your goal is to minimize that time to the extent possible. So again, it is to say, spend as little time as learning as possible and get to the exploitation phase. The problem is, we know that that takes time. This the kind of attitude towards time can be caused by you know we have forgetfulness. Yeah we've worked with parts before, there were all these things that came up that we didn't realize were going to come up and then well it really didn't take us a long time to get to the place where we were trying to be and so we don't leave learning because of that just because we forgot and in some organizations the time spent learning is considered waste time. When we talked about the group innovation process constraints. We talked about that really early stage, where you're still trying to figure out, and you're exploring lots of different ideas. A lot of organizations would consider that wasted time. And they say, oh, you're brainstorming now, but when are you going to get back to work as if work is this thing, making things happen. So if we don't plan for that learning time, that's problematic. And that's, we, will form a kind of constraint because we're not going to be able to get to the level of expertise, the level of performance, the level of desirability that we set out to do with our innovation.
