Just as effective innovation requires a partnership with companywide performance analysis, it also requires cultural support for creative thinking. Innovation cannot be decreed. It can exist only in a corporate culture where creativity is valued and nurtured. When a problem or opportunity comes out of the E-DMAIC system, the enterprise process management function must meet with the owners of the metrics in question, and their staff, to discuss innovative approaches to solving the problem or pursuing the opportunity.

During brainstorming sessions, enterprise process managers should make sure that no barriers to innovation exist. If they do, the company must consider whether prospective innovations are attractive enough to make the business set aside the obstacle. At the same time, meeting attendees should assume that all ideas are good ideas, and managers should keep in mind that the best fuel for creativity is encouragement. By capturing and documenting all ideas, managers ensure that all are considered and that nothing is forgotten. After a brainstorming session, the group should disperse for a time to let ideas grow.

Team members can conduct a self-evaluation to determine whether they cling to dogmatic ideas, and whether E-DMAIC is effective in their function. They can consider questions such as: Are my business goals being met? Do I have all the right tools, but still find myself wasting time on the same problems over and over again? Are organizational metrics leading to the wrong behaviors? Does our organization simply tell stories when reporting metrics, or do reactions to metrics actually lead to performance improvements? Are we creating and executing the most beneficial organizational strategies? Are projects getting completed? And when completed, do they impact the bottom line as expected? When individuals answer these questions, their attitudes toward innovation and E-DMAIC may improve. In addition, discussions about answers from different people can highlight areas for improving the company's E-DMAIC system.

Gary Hamel, professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School and a widely recognized expert on corporate strategy, states in “The Future of Management” that innovation can yield a competitive advantage when one or more of three conditions are met: when the innovation is based on a novel management principle that challenges a long-standing orthodoxy; when the innovation is systemic, encompassing a range of processes and methods; or when the innovation is part of an ongoing program of rapid-fire invention in which progress compounds over time. E-DMAIC helps create all three conditions.

In E-DMAIC, the customer voice plays a key role. Satellite-level metrics are primarily financial, but they must agree with an enterprise view of customer thinking. Gaining this insight into the voice of the customer (VOC) requires a system for honestly assessing what the company should do differently and where it should go in the future. Internal and external VOC assessments need to have an owner who is responsible for the process. The alternative, setting customer-satisfaction targets as gauged by a metric in a scorecard, often leads to surveys designed to result in a favorable response, where questions are written to help the function creating the survey meet its predetermined customer-satisfaction targets.

Forrest W. Breyfogle III is the founder and CEO of Smarter Solutions Inc. and developer of the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) business management system.You can reach him at forrest@smartersolutions.com.