Recently Blair Enns of Win Without Pitching fame posted an article describing his concept “the Innoficiency Problem”. The Innoficiency Principle is the idea that efficiency and innovation are opposable ends of a spectrum. You can lean toward one or the other but you can't optimise for both.
It's interesting to compare how advertising creative teams operate vs consulting teams. The creative teams will generate a vast quantity of ideas that they will never use. But these are not viewed as "waste", simply natural by-products of that process - much as respiration produces carbon dioxide and water vapour. Most of us don't seek to breathe less to reduce this "waste".
Part of the issue is that our models of work are based on industrial factories - e.g. Lean originates in Toyota, Six Sigma in Motorola. Factories are deeply unnatural places - and expecting the rest of the world to behave like them gets things backwards.
It's interesting to compare how advertising creative teams operate vs consulting teams. The creative teams will generate a vast quantity of ideas that they will never use. But these are not viewed as "waste", simply natural by-products of that process - much as respiration produces carbon dioxide and water vapour. Most of us don't seek to breathe less to reduce this "waste".
Part of the issue is that our models of work are based on industrial factories - e.g. Lean originates in Toyota, Six Sigma in Motorola. Factories are deeply unnatural places - and expecting the rest of the world to behave like them gets things backwards.
Also: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/06/why-agile-lean-and-six-sigma-must-die.html