Earlier this month, more than 400 creative people gathered in New York to tackle the issue of making ideas happen. Fast Company reported its favorite insights from the 2011 99% Conference (article available here):

One-third of our movies have taken about 7 years to make. Rigorous persistence and uncompromising creative standards are perhaps the most notable features of Pixar’s creative process. As one of the company’s founders put it: “Quality is the best business plan.”

If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.

Be a sprinter, not a marathon runner. The key to productivity is to recognize the power of renewal and have a finish line. According to Stephen Schwartz, president and CEI of The Energy Project, “We’ve lost our finish lines.”

If you’re not creating waves, then you’re not pushing enough. Pursuing ideas with obvious conclusions won’t create the change we need to see in the world, said Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas.

Make heroes out of failures. Pay attention to the learnings. Reframing key failures as discoveries will help foster an environment of risk taking.

The “OK Plateau” is the point when we turn on autopilot and stop getting better at a certain thing. It is possible to continue to improve at most tasks, but not if we expect it to happen automatically, said Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein. Always be engaged in what you’re doing and push yourself to improve.

What gets project done for me is not inspiration. It’s curiosity and rigor. Andrew Zuckerman, photographer and filmmaker, added that being thorough and exhaustive isn’t the most glamorous part of a project, but it’s necessary.

From a Baldrige perspective, these creative folks could benefit from the rigor and standards gained by integrating the Baldrige model. Baldrige Award winners have shown that creativity and innovation can flourish in an environment where processes are systematically identified, managed, and improved, where performance is measured and analyzed, and where employees are engaged.

They demonstrate that creativity and innovation blossom, not wither, when you manage the whole organization, and its components, to achieve success.

To read more about relentless implementation, click on these articles:

• 30 Principles of Effective Leadership
• How Do You Implement Your Strategy?
• Keys to Successful Process Improvement

Before you can write a Baldrige or state award application, you must gather the information you need to answer the Criteria questions. That means interviewing internal subject matter experts about the six process categories and one results category in the Criteria. One way to prepare subject matter experts for these interviews is to reassure them that you will be discussing how they do what they do. A Baldrige assessment is, after all, a snapshot of how your organization operates.

Another step in the preparation is to describe the scope of the information you will be looking for by sharing 10 process questions that we should all be able to answer about the work we do:

1. What is your approach to _(the area you are focusing on)_?
2. How do you determine customer and stakeholder requirements for it?
3. How systematic is your process?
4. How do you deploy it to all units that should be using it?
5. How is it aligned with your organization’s mission, vision, and goals?
6. How is it innovative, transformational, or a role model for similar processes?
7. How do you use data and information to evaluate and improve the process?
8. How do you compare your performance on key process measures to that of other organizations?
9. How do you review performance and use these reviews to improve your processes?
10. How do you share refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization?

Every organization, business unit, work unit, division, department, team, and individual can improve performance by asking and answering these questions about everything they do. The answers will reveal opportunities for improvement that can help you build a world-class management system.

To learn more about using Baldrige to improve your organization, read:

• Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization?
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
• 10 Tips for Answering Criteria Questions
• Applying for the 2010 Baldrige Award

The 90-day action plan is a systematic tool for deploying a strategic plan. Before it came along, organizations often had trouble reviewing performance to plan during the year with the result that initiatives were not completed and goals were not met.

Organizations use the 90-day action plan to break annual goals and objectives into the quarterly actions necessary to achieve them. By reviewing performance on the 90-day plans, senior leaders ensure that actions are on track or they can more quickly intervene to get them on track.

Baptist Hospital, Inc., which received the Baldrige Award in 2003, was one of the first to popularize 90-day action plans. Its award application summary describes the process:

Leader annual goals…are translated into 90-day action plans to facilitate goal accomplishment. 90-day action plans for BHI leaders are formulated or updated each quarter. This process for updating or reevaluating action plans on a quarterly basis enables the organization to be flexible and agile in accomplishing or reassessing longer-term goals and objectives. The 90-day action plan process is the fundamental and fully deployed method used to evaluate progress toward accomplishment of goals and address other strategic issues. Senior officers also maintain 90-day action plans, which are called senior management priorities. At quarterly retreats, the senior officers evaluate progress toward accomplishment of their own goals and formulate changes as appropriate.

The Baptist Leadership Group has identified the following benefits of the 90-day action plan:

• “Harnesses” the energy of the organization
• Focuses the organization’s resources on well-thought-out activities
• Aligns departmental activities with the overall goals of the organization
• Forces upward communication and negotiation
• Forces clarity of expectations
• Reduces work by establishing agreed-upon objectives

In the Strategic Planning Category, the Baldrige Criteria ask how “you develop and deploy action plans throughout the organization.” The 90-day action plan has proven to be a good response to that question.

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