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The Thought in Brief

Ironically, process standardization tin undermine the very functioning it'due south meant to optimize. Many processes work best when treated like artistic work, rather than rigidly controlled.

To decide if a process should be more creative than scientific, expect for these atmospheric condition:

  • Inputs to the procedure are variable (for example, no 2 pieces of wood used to make a Steinway piano soundboard are alike)
  • Customers value variations in the process's output (pianists appreciate the distinctive sound quality of their ain pianos)

If your process is artistic, railroad train employees in the judgment required to respond creatively to variable conditions. Ritz-Carlton recaptured its reputation for unrivaled service when it empowered employees to improvise their responses to individual guests' needs.

The Idea in Practice

Hall and Johnson recommend these steps for managing your processes once you've adamant which ones should be creative:

Develop an infrastructure to support art

These practices tin assistance:

  • Create appropriate metrics. Artistic processes must rely on external measures of success. So continually expose artists to client feedback.

Case:

At Steinway, pianoforte voicers (who adjust completed pianos to perfect each instrument'south feel and sound) interact directly with professional person pianists.

  • Manage artistic and scientific processes separately. In a surgery middle, repetitive work that can be standardized (such as high-volume hernia repair or Lasik cosmetic eye surgery) is managed separately from more complex inpatient surgery that requires individual judgment.
  • Build constructive training programs. Provide employee "artists" with experiences such as apprenticeship with a master, stories of outstanding customer service, and extended time with a client. These experiences will help them develop an understanding of customers' needs, the judgment required to act without perfect information, and the ability to learn from both expert and bad outcomes.
  • Tolerate failure. The variations characterizing artistic processes brand it impossible to satisfy every customer on the starting time try. So institute extensive quality inspections to forbid failures from affecting customers. And systematically analyze failures to identify which ones could exist prevented or minimized in the future.

Periodically reevaluate the division betwixt fine art and science

Regularly ask yourself:

  • What new technologies can help make a science of art?
  • Do my customers still value variation?
  • How practise the costs of art stack upwards against the benefits?
  • What opportunities does art allow that scientific discipline doesn't?

Instance:

MinuteClinic has hundreds of walk-in medical offices. Information technology has lowered costs and improved quality of basic wellness care past developing decision-back up software that leads nurse practitioners and physician assistants through a step-by-step procedure for diagnosing and treating mutual ailments (strep pharynx, float infection, conjunctivitis). MinuteClinic continually evaluates the line betwixt fine art and science: Though it keeps exploring ways to enhance its software and related processes to treat additional diseases, information technology also gives its clinicians enough freedom in their interactions with patients to evangelize a personal client experience.

Can a successful European sales process exist rolled out worldwide, or should regional teams exist allowed to perform their individual magic? Does it make sense for a manufacturer to invest in developing and documenting a detailed process that complies with the latest ISO standards, or would more employee training and empowerment atomic number 82 to college quality? Can quality be improved by managing surgeons like nurses or auditors like mechanics? Executives in almost every industry face similar questions about how to handle their processes. There are some processes that naturally resist definition and standardization—that are more art than scientific discipline. Helping executives empathize which should not be standardized and how to manage artistic and scientific processes in tandem is the purpose of this article.

The idea that some processes should be allowed to vary flies in the confront of the century-quondam move toward standardization. Process standardization is taught to MBAs, embedded in Six Sigma programs, and practiced by managers and consultants worldwide. Thousands of manufacturing companies have accomplished tremendous improvements in quality and efficiency past copying the Toyota Production System, which combines rigorous work standardization with approaches such as merely-in-fourth dimension delivery of components and the use of visual controls to highlight deviations. Process standardization also has permeated about every service industry, generating impressive gains.

With success, though, has come overuse. Process standardization has been pushed too far, with petty regard for where it does and does not make sense. We aim to rescue creative processes from the tide of scientific standardization by offer a three-pace approach to identifying and successfully integrating them into any business concern. We argue that artistic and scientific approaches need non be at odds simply must exist carefully harmonized.

What Is an Artistic Procedure?

What we call "fine art" is often described as "judgment-based work," "craft work," or "professional piece of work." The common thread in such work is variability in the procedure, its inputs, and its outputs. Art is needed in changeable environments (for instance, when raw materials aren't compatible and therefore require a craftsperson's adjustments) and when customers value distinctive or unique output (in other words, all customers don't want the product or service to perform or be performed the same fashion).

If both of those conditions aren't present, a mass or mass-customization process, not an creative process, is the answer. If a house is operating in a highly variable surroundings and produces variations in products or services that customers do non value, chances are it has nascent or broken processes. In those instances, a firm needs to larn how to bring the environs under control. (See the exhibit "The Process Matrix.")

This simple tool tin help managers categorize processes and consider how they might or should change.

Mass processes are standardized processes that are geared to eliminate variations in output. They're appropriate when the goal is completely consistent output for a narrow range of products or services. In such cases, all creative discretion should be eliminated. Steel, cars, and consumer financial services are examples of industries where mass processes are widely applied.

Mass customization uses a scientific process to produce controlled variations in output. Assemble-to-gild products similar Dell'southward personal computers and cars in BMW's "Build Your Own" plan fall into this category. While the number of possible combinations might be enormous (BMW claims more than 130 one thousand thousand configurations), output variability is express to combinations of predefined components. In many cases, mass customization represents the best of both worlds: control and variation. But when customers demand true customization ("I want a pink figurer with a cloth-covered chassis that complements my office"), information technology will fall short.

Nascent or broken processes can't produce the consequent output that customers demand. Out-of-control processes are mutual when a production or process uses radically new materials, technology, or designs. In these situations, managers should consider whether controlling output variation is feasible or desirable. If variation tin can't be controlled but customers can be persuaded to value it, an creative process is the solution. If customers won't tolerate variation, the focus should be on understanding its causes and creating a standard process. Boeing did this for its new 787 Dreamliner, the first commercial aircraft with a carbon composite airframe: The company conducted test runs to learn how to standardize the process for manufacturing fuselage sections.

Creative processes leverage variability in the surround to create variations of products or services that customers value. They rely on the judgment and direct experience of craftspeople. Building Steinway pianos, serving passengers on flights, and developing radically new software applications are but a few of the processes that see those criteria. Before choosing fine art, it's critical to brand sure that customers really value output variation. Some managers delude themselves into believing they demand artistic output when the vast majority of customers really desire a standard product.

Permit'south wait in more detail at the conditions that favor artistic processes:

Highly variable environs.

Scientific process management calls for blindly reducing variability. But sometimes variability cannot be avoided. Take the inconsistencies in the wood used in the soundboards of pianos. In other cases, the costs of decreasing variability outweigh the benefits—for instance, if doctors practical a cookbook approach to treating complex diseases. The traditional scientific approach to such situations is to try to tame the environment by imposing complex rules that spell out what to exercise in every possible circumstance. Not only does that reduce accountability, only it ofttimes causes workers to switch to autopilot instead of trying to understand the specifics of each job.

Not only does standardization reduce accountability, but it causes workers to switch to autopilot.

That was a conclusion reached in 2006 by executives at Ritz-Carlton, the hotel concatenation renowned for its loftier quality. Later decades of demanding that employees strictly adhere to a 20-point list of client service basics, the company'due south management realized that the specified routines weren't adequately addressing the widely ranging expectations of the luxury chain's customers, who had get younger, more diverse, and more than tech savvy, and often traveled with children and other family members. The visitor'south leaders also saw that expanding the list to accost every possible state of affairs that an employee might run across would exist futile. Every bit a consequence, they shifted to a simpler 12-signal prepare of values that immune employees to use their judgment and improvise. Tightly defined process dictums (similar "always carry a guest'due south luggage," "escort guests rather than bespeak out directions to another area of the hotel," and "apply words similar skilful morning, certainly, I'll be happy to, and information technology's my pleasure") sometimes felt stuffy and out of place. Management replaced them with looser value statements (such equally "I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life" and "I am empowered to create unique, memorable, and personal experiences for our guests"). The modify encouraged employees to sense customers' needs and act accordingly. Customer satisfaction improved.

Output variation that creates customer value.

In highly erratic environments, variation in outcomes is natural—and is often a good thing in customers' eyes. Consider the Steinways played by the majority of the world'due south concert pianists. Steinway & Sons knows that each of its concert one thousand pianos expresses a different "personality," and the company promotes that as a positive—an indication of the richness of the materials and the craftsmanship that go into its products. Likewise, master winemakers know that their task is to make the virtually of the distinctive qualities of each year's harvest.

Artistic processes are oftentimes required where no consistent definition of quality exists. (Run across the exhibit "Many Processes Are an Art.") If customers value—or demand—uniqueness or variation, so it must be created past artists who devote considerable effort to understanding individual customer preferences. Artistic processes can capably and reliably produce innovative products and services that many scientific concern processes cannot mimic. While a scripted greeting and forced smile at the front end desk ensure a minimum level of service, a greeting crafted past an employee at the Ritz will pick upward on verbal and nonverbal cues to fit that particular guest at that item time and place.

A broad range of processes lend themselves to artistic approaches, which produce unique or tailored results. Hither'southward a sampling:

Leadership grooming. Developing determination-making capabilities and self-awareness in individuals takes time and 1-on-one coaching.

Auditing. Applying the wide principles of new international reporting standards requires understanding the implications for each house and using judgment to determine the right response.

Hedge fund management. While computer models tin spit out risk estimates, making final bets often entails personal calls.

Client service. Satisfying private customers might require frontline employees to become "off script" and do what they feel is best.

Software development. Writing code for a new awarding often involves iterating with customers to learn how to refine the plan to address their needs, as well equally decisions on which corners can be cut.

Account relationship management. Keeping valued customers happy often ways calculation a touch on of tailored service to standard offerings.

Business concern evolution. Spotting new opportunities and envisioning how the business organization could exploit them can't be reduced to a formula.

Industrial design. Integrating the customer's needs with a compelling design takes imagination and feel.

A Procedure for Managing Art

Successfully developing and supporting fine art in an organization requires a three-step approach that is at odds with the standardization-focused training of many managers. Each stride addresses a key question that managers must explore: Where will fine art add value? How should art be supported? How should creative processes evolve? Our guidelines for answering these three questions are derived from our research and consulting experience.

Pace 1: Identify what should and shouldn't be art.

Brainstorm by taking a difficult expect at your processes, conspicuously identifying where art or science will add value for customers. Utilize the process matrix to assist you.

If a method or do is nonetheless nascent, you'll demand to make up one's mind whether information technology should evolve toward a mass or an artistic process. Many managers wrongly discount or ignore the possibility that customers can be persuaded to value variations—a trend that leads managers to cull the path to mass processes.

Even when a mass process is the right destination, moving also quickly downward that path can exist disastrous. If yous don't yet have a articulate view of the causes and effects at work, you need artists, who can operate effectively in chaotic environments. Trying to standardize a nascent process before it'south truly understood will alienate key artistic staff—exactly the people you demand to manage it during the interim and help you lot learn how to control information technology. Until you've reduced the process to a science, yous should create an surround where artists can thrive.

That said, managers must baby-sit confronting preserving creative processes that accept outlived their usefulness. If the science has been mastered or if customers no longer value the variations, retaining artistic processes can let competitors that embrace standardization and become more efficient to leap alee of you.

Step two: Develop an infrastructure to support art.

This infrastructure has ii purposes: to ensure that artists have liberty to exercise and refine their fine art and to ensure that they create the maximum client value. You should proceed those goals in mind when figuring out how to measure artistic results, make art and science piece of work together, train artists, and respond to inevitable failures.

Creating appropriate metrics.

The simple, internally focused metrics for a scientific process, designed to make sure everyone executes it the same exact way, will not work for art. An artistic process has to rely on external measures of success. Artists need continual exposure to client feedback, which prevents them from constructing their own idiosyncratic notion of quality.

An artistic process has to rely on external measures of success, like client feedback.

Sometimes this feedback must come from a wide swath of customers. For example, medical professionals obviously have to work closely with all afflicted patients to diagnose and treat circuitous diseases—to obtain a complete moving-picture show of their symptoms and rail their reactions to remedies. With other processes, including those used to produce Steinway's loftier-finish pianos, feedback from a select group of customers can suffice. At Steinway, piano voicers, who arrange completed pianos to perfect the feel and audio of the instrument, regularly interact directly with professional pianists, whom the company'south longtime president Bruce Stevens (now retired) chosen "Steinway'south biggest fans and its harshest critics."

Getting art and scientific discipline to piece of work together.

If businesses utilise both artistic and scientific processes (the rule rather than the exception), managers should work to separate them and so carefully manage the areas where they intersect. To begin, managers must evaluate whether i process is being asked to perform both art and science. If it is, it should be divided. Consider sales. It ofttimes pays to use a standard process for low-chance, low-reward sales efforts but to assign sales artists who thrive in an uncertain environs to tackle high-run a risk, high-advantage efforts. Given the differences in the sales approaches as well as the compensation schemes that each requires, integrating the 2 can exist counterproductive and sometimes disastrous. Similarly, in an convalescent surgery center, separating repetitive work that tin can be standardized, such as a loftier-volume hernia repair or Lasik corrective eye surgery, from variable in-patient surgery that requires more art will lower costs and improve outcomes. If demand for either the artistic or the standardized process isn't high enough to make segregating them economical, information technology's ofttimes best to exit one of the businesses.

Managers should also separate whatsoever artistic procedure from support processes that tin can be standardized. It's crucial that the latter not be treated as art; rather they must exist organized and operated to provide a stable platform for the artist. (See the exhibit "Science as a Platform for Art.")

The creation of many products and services involves both artistic and scientific processes. In such cases, the output of the scientific processes should provide a stable platform on which artists tin can then apply their arts and crafts. The two kinds of processes need to be separated, however, because they have different goals and metrics of success.

Consider how Steinway & Sons produces concert pianos:

Art

Perfecting the sound and feel of the pianos is an fine art that requires the judgment of skilled craftspeople—such as the voicers who customize the instruments for private professional pianists.

Science

Many components of pianos tin can be standardized. Making them uniform—through scientific manufacturing processes—minimizes the complication that the voicers have to contend with.

Top salespeople, for instance, rely on client relationship management systems to provide basic, consistent data to tailor pitches to individual customers. Any missing or incorrect information weakens the salespeople'south ability to execute and clouds the feedback loop that allows them and their managers to guess their performance. Similarly, Steinway's voicers crave consistent strings, hammers, and action assemblies (the mechanisms that connect the keys to the hammers that strike the strings). Without such standard components, the challenge of perfecting the feel and sound of instruments for private professional person pianists would be far more difficult.

Building an effective training program.

Artists, of course, must learn the skills of their trade. They oft accept to undergo a formal apprenticeship or informal mentoring and a probationary period during which their freedom is concise. They might even have to pass a formal exam to be certified.

Simply whether the artists are insurance claims adjusters, civil engineers, or software architects, their training entails more than but mastering new skills. Information technology as well involves developing an understanding of customer needs, the judgment required to deed without perfect information, and the power and willingness to larn from both adept and bad outcomes. Ofttimes organizations with artistic processes accept a strong culture that guides artistic judgment. Steinway wants its voicers to identify with globe-class concert pianists—to empathize the tension they feel onstage when they're playing earlier a breathless crowd and how they depend on their pianos to deliver.

Companies can utilise a diverseness of methods to instill their culture in new artists. One we've already mentioned: an apprenticeship with a master. Some other is storytelling. Ritz-Carlton regularly shares stories of outstanding customer service to inspire its frontline employees. Yet another powerful tool is the "ride-along": having an apprentice spend an extended flow of time with a customer.

All in all, turning a novice into a master may take considerable time. Steinway voicers spend one to three years in training before working independently. At the Ritz, receptionists, bellhops, and restaurant waiters receive four to 5 weeks of formal training during their get-go twelvemonth. Frontline Ritz employees—new hires and veterans—see for fifteen minutes each day to share stories of how they wowed guests and discuss means to meliorate customer service.

Tolerating failure.

The variations that are the hallmark of creative processes make it impossible to satisfy every client on the starting time try. This reality ways that a company may accept to institute all-encompassing quality inspections to forestall failures from affecting customers. It likewise may have to develop approaches to recover quickly when they occur. Ritz-Carlton, for example, empowers frontline employees to spend up to $2,000 to set a customer's problem.

Only considering some corporeality of failure is inevitable doesn't mean that failures should be passively accustomed. To the opposite, they must get learning opportunities—both for the artists and for the managers who shepherd the procedure. Failures should be systematically reviewed with the aim of identifying which ones could be prevented or minimized in the future (for instance, by strengthening a standard back up process, spotting them before, and improving recovery responses).

If yous go to the indicate where failures are rare, it means that the process has become anticipated and tin can be turned into a science.

Footstep three: Periodically reevaluate the division between art and science.

Irresolute client needs and new technologies can alter the landscape in means that brand art more than or less desirable. Managers must regularly ask themselves: What new technologies can help make a science of art? Do my customers value variation? How practise the costs of fine art stack upwardly against the benefits? What opportunities does fine art allow that scientific discipline doesn't?

Diverging customer demands drove Ritz-Carlton to shift toward art, while advances in computer-controlled machine tools for making components prompted Steinway to movement in the opposite direction. In health care, some organizations have flourished past replacing artistic diagnostic processes with technology. At its hundreds of walk-in medical clinics, MinuteClinic employs homegrown decision-support software that leads nurse practitioners and physician assistants through a step-by-step process for diagnosing and treating mutual ailments such as strep throat, bladder infection, and pinkeye. MinuteClinic continually evaluates the line betwixt art and science: While it relentlessly explores how it might enhance the software and related processes to treat additional diseases, it strives to make certain that its clinicians have enough freedom in their interactions with patients to deliver a personal customer experience.

Sometimes the line betwixt art and science shifts merely considering of a realization that art produces better results. This is at present occurring in the U.Southward. accounting profession, where the largely rules-based Generally Accustomed Accounting Principles are making way for the International Financial Reporting Standards, a simpler set of principles that allow managers and auditors to exercise more than judgment. Although a want to harmonize the standards of different countries is one reason for the shift, another is the growing view that promoting judgment and accountability in accountants and legal professionals volition lead to better reporting outcomes than rote adherence to rules does.

When evaluating the division between art and science, managers must exist wary of "art improvidence": unwittingly extending artistic freedom to people who surround and support artists. While the heart surgeon might demand artistic freedom, those involved in preoperative patient grooming should strive for consistency so that the patient reaches the operating room in a known, stable country. If all-time practise can be divers and documented in accelerate, there is little value, and possibly much danger, in allowing the exercise of art. • • •

In spite of the variability-quashing tendencies of modern process management, we believe that both art and scientific discipline accept important roles to play in many business processes. Art allows for a flexibility, creativity, and dynamism that a purely scientific arroyo cannot replicate. Well-implemented and managed artistic approaches can also create differentiation that cannot easily be copied, commoditized, or outsourced. For decades, the process management pendulum has been swinging toward the standardization and control of science. It'due south time to recognize the limits of such processes and consider where artistic freedom should exist restored or preserved.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2009 result of Harvard Business concern Review.