Southwest Airlines(LUV) is always inspiring, thought provoking and plain fun to read about. Recently they developed an initiative Southwest recently gathered people from its in-flight, ground, maintenance, and dispatch operations. For six months they met for 10 hours a week, brainstorming ideas to address a broad issue: What are the highest-impact changes we can make to our aircraft operations?
At the end of that period of time, the group offered up to management 109 ideas, out of those, 3 were huge, broad operational changes.
Tom Nealon, Southwests Chief Information Officer said that making sure that the team was made of a wide diversity of individuals. He mentions one man in particular:
"He had almost a naive perspective, his questions were so fundamental they challenged the premises the maintenance and dispatch guys had worked on for the last 30 years."
Now that's one of those little truths of successful management that I love and I hope that you embrace: when it comes to innovation and change, it's just to important to leave up to the so-called professionals. They will always work from the same premise over and over again and go round in circles.
This is why diversity of people from all parts of a company are needed to be able to break out of "same" thinking and move on into solutions to things that the company didn't even know existed.
Great ideas can come from anywhere. Look for them all over the company, you'll be surprised at the results.
Have you ever discovered unique solutions and innovations from unexpected sources? Tell us about it.
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