Engineers and Imagineers

Better part of my career was associated with the IT services industry in India. I feel good about this association as the industry placed a premium on learning and development for its employees and made significant investments in process innovation. The industry meticulously adopted ‘best practices’ from other industries, standardized bulk of its processes and made failure almost impossible in its core operations. Most companies in the industry boast of the best and latest global quality standards, compliance and security firewalls and what not. In other words, the need for thinking has been largely removed from the daily work of an engineer. 

Even for seniors who deal with clients and the external world there are strict guidelines and templates for presentations including font types and font sizes to be used in presentations. Deviations were strictly edited, audited and culled. Companies that achieved the latest quality standard be it six sigma, lean or CMMi or any other industry standard, claimed pioneer status. Even for the much paraded ‘global delivery model’ there are many parents among the top IT services firms of India. When other companies quickly copied these standards and models, people forgot who got it first and the advantage is lost. An industry that created many multi-billion dollar organizations, created millions of high paying jobs and made many millionaires and a few billionaires now finds its ‘butter scotch’ services ‘plain vanilla’.

The silver lining is that many leaders in the industry are aware of this ‘massification’ and ‘mathification’ of their service and the need for adding a dash of fresh imagination to the algorithm. For too long, critical decisions were based mostly on IQ and memory power. We get a job for our logical reasoning and possibly for the EQ assessed or perceived some way or other. All these have to do with our perceptive capability- observation, attention, listening and interpreting those perceived data in some logical manner to arrive at an appealing conclusion.

Nobody checked the power of one’s imagination.

The British Dictionary defines imagination as: ‘The faculty or action of producing ideas, especially mental images of what is not present or has not been experienced.’ Imagination gives one the power to create many things from nothing. Steve Jobs gained the power to ‘distort reality’. In some sense much of ‘reality’ as we see is probably less real than the real in terms of potential. Pablo Picasso said ‘everything you can imagine is real.’ If Michelangelo ‘saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’ possibly there is a Michelangelo in every one of us.

Hordes of young entrepreneurs sprang up in the last decade and created start-ups and altogether new industries and challenged or destroyed some prevalent industries. They all used the power of imagination. They all went beyond bench-marking and imagined a new world for them and for millions of others. When the cash rich companies of the industry buy these start-ups they are paying a premium for imagination!

The multiplier effect of imagination is often underestimated. In our society someone with high imagination is in fact ridiculed. Every other person is looking for what is seen in the immediate context, immediate past and immediate future. In other words, only what is practical and what is limited and what is measurable is rewarded.

Should an IT company hire engineers or ‘imagineers’? Of course, companies need both. Companies can decide how many of these two categories they need. Most often these need not be people in two different buckets. A company cannot run its daily operations only with a team of imagineers and dreamers. Yet, it is the dreamers and imagineers who will probably charge the company into an unseen future, an untapped potential and enhance the organization capability to a new orbit.

The other way to look at is that every company has imagineers, but few get spotted. There are company cultures that stifle imagination and there are company cultures that encourage imagination.

Which one do you belong to?