Each day when I come to work, I’m surrounded by a large group of very smart, extremely analytical engineers, physicists….and others of the same ilk. You can easily spot them when you enter the office, because they carry the tell-tale signs of their brotherhood – they delight to gather in small groups and chat about OMAP’s, Androids and ultrasounds. They enjoy sharing interesting snippets of news related to chips, bits and bites. They love fleece.
Yes, there are others in the office as well. Scattered among the ‘Lefties’ are a few ‘Right Brainers’. Those who dare to dwell in the strange and foreign land of ‘Science’. Those who have attended design schools, marketing programs and other institutions of lower learning. Those who love ambiguity and colour.
Some may find this disconcerting, but to me, the interesting and delightful part about working in a product development company is the variety and diversity of people you get to work with. The idea that people with very different backgrounds and ways of working can somehow align and do meaningful work is positively inspiring. Each group looks at the same problem from different angles and the opportunities are greater when they do so.
The big question in all of this is: How do you bring these two groups together, inspire them, and encourage them to do great things? From what I’ve seen, both right and left brained people need different types of fuel in order to inspire them to do their best work.
Left Brainers need well laid out analytical processes to help them identify problems and make decisions. They cannot draw upon, nor do they trust, their intuition or ‘gut’. Instead, they need ‘objective’ data gathered from complex processes, organized in sophisticated patterns in order to draw a conclusion and make a decision.
The Right Brainer on the other hand looks for verbal clues, emotions, nuances, inconsistencies, patterns, all in their search for an answer to a fuzzy question. To this group, cold hard facts are just that – cold, hard and inhuman. They have little place in a world of flesh and blood. Instead of processing numbers like their brethren in the other hemisphere, they take the input they’ve absorbed and mix it into a complex soup of information, taste the flavour, and draw conclusions. Crazy stuff.
So the question is, how do you get these wonderful groups of very different, highly intelligent people to work together? How does an organization encourage and harness the best of both methodologies and focus their collective efforts on solving the same challenge….all with the hope of gaining a holistic, comprehensive solution to a very real problem?
The answer seems to lie in defining early a shared understanding of the end goal, and the end goal needs to be decided at the beginning of a product development program. The so called ‘fuzzy front end’ needs to have some order imposed upon it so that a well-defined end goal is identified early. I hate to use the term ‘process’, but this is what is needed at the beginning of a program in order to harness and focus the collective creativity of a diverse team. Good processes need not stifle the input and output of contributors, rather, they provide a positive framework that frees and enables both Left and Right Brainers to do their best work, and at the same time meet the very real demands of business partners who value innovation and profitability.