C. Universal productivity solutions - Orchestrated National Ingenuity

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C. Universal productivity solutions

Our society has developed a growing library of extremely powerful universal solutions to the apparently intractable universal problems we face, but unconscious incognizance makes it hard for people to grasp, never mind adapt and apply these universal solutions to their worlds. Most people don't even know that these solutions exist.

Presenting solutions within a framework provides a way of overcoming this problem, by exposing the missing prerequisites for success and by enabling the solutions to be presented in a format that is easy to understand, adapt and implement.

Universal solutions also serve to illustrate how to use the frameworks, making it easier for people to develop their own solutions by extrapolating them from existing ones. Think: example.

Illustrations and examples are very powerful mechanisms for transferring insight and solutions. It is often only when we see examples that we begin to really understand new concepts and ideas

Here's a sample productivity solution – for improving project performance dramatically:

The universal productivity solution for projects

The universal problem in projects is task-completion unpredictability.
The intuitive solution is to put safety on every task in the project in the hope of increasing predictability. (Experienced people give themselves a 50% safety margin to ensure a minimum 90% chance of success).
The consequences are (un)predictably long, late and expensive projects, because achievable targets become self-fulfilling prophecies (Parkinson’s Law) and late finishes accumulate while early finishes don’t, so when you lose you lose and when you win you don't win.
The counter-intuitive solution is to take the safety off the tasks, put a portion of it on the project instead, and focus on prioritising and synchronising the tasks to follow each other seamlessly.
The prosequence (inevitable good result) is projects finishing faster and more predictably, allowing more projects that are more profitable to be completed within the same period of time, because late and early tasks cancel each other out.

An example of how this applies, within recession conditions, is a Prodsol construction company client, which is currently recruiting additional staff and delivering projects in around half the time, nearly twice as profitably – and we’re only in the early phases of implementation.

This project solution, which is called Critical Chain Project Management, has been used successfully in leading companies around the world and was used to enable Habitat for Humanity New Zealand to break the world house-building record by nearly 20%. (3 hours 45 minutes).

The following pages contain examples of an increasingly comprehensive set of simple, counter-intuitive universal solutions.