| OPERATIONS
ORIGINAL CONCEPT / Time Restricted Production
How to Get Unstuck When It Really Matters
A startup was struggling to bring clarity and action to their ideas. With limited runway, a new system for how to break through creative blocks was created so that the value within the leadership team could be quickly leveraged.
By strategically creating limitations, individuals learned how to achieve enhanced productivity and concentrate on high-value efforts. This innovative approach revolutionized traditional workflows for the company, ensuring that every minute counted – leading to remarkable results.
Learn how Time Restricted Production was developed to help growing companies and how it is leveraged in the workplace to allow professionals break through mental interference and hit urgent deadlines.
+ Forecasting, Data & Analytics, Strategy
OBSERVED CHALLENGE
AT A GLANCE
THE CONCEPT | Time Restricted Production is a new tool developed to break stagnation by limiting mental interference, time and decision overwhelm to transform core foundational ideas into coherent actionable plans.
THE OPPORTUNITY | The ability to communicate value is just as important as developing the value itself. With a system that helps get ideas from being internal and underdeveloped to thoroughly constructed quickly allows for review and implementation to happen faster with better results.
THE APPLICATION | Teams that implement Time Restricted Production enjoy faster iteration times, less mental stagnation and more robust discussions. Creating brainstorming sessions that are thoughtful makes better use of everyone’s time and leads to better decisions and conversations.
A national healthcare startup faced the challenge of how to make progress in an environment with limited runway and competing ideas. As with most startups, everyone had an idea of how to move forward to meet the urgency of the situation. The issue was how to get those ideas to be actionable and useful so that they could be tested and leveraged for the future success of the company.
The company’s Executive Leadership Team(ELT) needed a system to ensure that ideas didn’t go to waste and were brought forward quickly and with meaningful clarity.
With so many interruptions and information overload, it is difficult to gain clarity on your ideas easily. This leads to frustration as we grapple with a jumbled mind which hurts our ability to clearly express ourselves and make our ideas tangible.
Deadlines make this challenge even harder. The pressure to meet time constraints can amplify the struggle to focus and articulate thoughts, leading to rushed and subpar work. The frustration of not being able to truly convey our intended message becomes even greater when you’re under the gun to get things done.
In order to achieve fast clarity of thought and make progress in a pressure environment I created a new system: Time Restricted Production.
Time Restriction Production is modeled in the same vein of thinking as the Lean Methodology and Design Thinking. Whereas in the Lean Methodology, a Minimally Viable Product(MVP) is developed and tested and in Design Thinking a prototype is iterated in a group environment, TRP takes the unpolished idea of an individual and forces consecutive limited time periods of creation to gain focus and clarity.
This purposeful time limitation stirs creativity while forcing out the core concepts of what your idea or thought truly is. By constricting your time, your mind does not have a chance to “blank” or become overloaded with thought and you are able to get to your point quickly and efficiently.
In Smartwork, the goal is always to understand where you are and how you can be better. In this case, there was a clear inability to get progress out of the very smart people that worked in the startup. There was too much time being spent on ideas which were not fully fleshed out which made them unable to be actioned on. There needed to be a way to get individuals to clarify what they really believed prior to bringing those ideas to the larger group so that the time spent together would be more effective.
There was no shortage of brainpower in the team — there was a shortage of a system which harnessed all of that brain power so that it could be leveraged effectively toward meeting our objectives.
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SMARTWORK SOLUTION
Visual Snapshot
STRATEGY
Clarity gained for qualitative workflows
Summary point here
RESULTS