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Job Design as Innovation Strategy: How Complex Problem-Solving Creates Automation Champions

Job Design as Innovation Strategy: How Complex Problem-Solving Creates Automation Champions

by | Mar 4, 2025 | Automation & Tech, Leadership

Imagine a manufacturing company.  On the factory floor, machines whirl and grind, torches flare up as welding helmets click closed, and parts and products fall off the line and into waiting hands or boxes, ready to be shipped to customers.  Elsewhere, through several doors and a long hallway, you leave the cacophony of the shop floor for the quiet hum of the office.  Computers ping with new emails while fingers clickety-clack across the keyboard.  Occasionally, a printer whirs to life while forcing someone to raise their voice as they talk to a customer on the other end of the phone.

Now, imagine that you ask each person whether AI and automation will positively or negatively affect their jobs.  Who will champion new technology and who will resist it?

Most people expect automation acceptance to be separated by the long hallway, with the office workers welcoming while the factory workers resist.

Most people are wrong.

The Business Case for Problem-Solving Job Design

Last week, I wrote about findings from an MIT study that indicated that trust, not technology, is the leading indicator of whether workers will adopt new AI and automation tools.

But there’s more to the story than that.  Researchers found that the type of work people do has a bigger influence on automation perception than where they do it. Specifically, people who engage in work requiring high levels of complex problem-solving alongside routine work are more likely to see the benefit of automation than any other group.

Or, to put it more simply

While it’s not surprising that people who perform mostly routine tasks are more resistant than those who engage in complex tasks, it is surprising that this holds true for both office-based and production-floor employees.

Even more notable, this positive perception is significantly higher for complex problem solvers vs. the average across all workers::

  • Safety: 43% and 41% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 32% avg)
  • Pay: 27% and 25% net positive for physical and office workers, respectively (vs. 3.9% avg)
  • Autonomy: 33% net positive for office workers (vs. 18% average)
  • Job security: 25% and 22% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 3.5%)

Or, to put it more simply, blend problem-solving into routine-heavy roles, and you’ll transform potential technology resistors into champions.

 

3 Ways to Build Problem-Solving Into Any Role

The importance of incorporating problem-solving into every job isn’t just a theory – it’s one of the core principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS).  Jidoka, or the union of automation with human intelligence, is best exemplified by the andon cord system, where employees can stop manufacturing if they perceive a quality issue.

But you don’t need to be a Six-Sigma black belt to build human intelligence into each role:

  1. Create troubleshooting teams with decision authority
    Workers who actively diagnose and fix process issues develop a nuanced understanding of where technology helps versus hinders. Cross-functional troubleshooting creates the perfect conditions for technology champions to emerge.
  2. Design financial incentives around problem resolution
    The MIT study’s embedded experiment showed that financial incentives significantly improved workers’ perception of new technologies while opportunities for input alone did not. When workers see personal benefit in solving problems with technology, adoption accelerates.
  3. Establish learning pathways connected to problem complexity
    Workers motivated by career growth (+33.9% positive view on automation’s impact on upward mobility) actively seek out technologies that help them tackle increasingly complex problems. Create visible advancement paths tied to problem-solving mastery.

 

Innovation’s Human Catalyst

The most powerful lever for technology adoption isn’t better technology—it’s better job design. By restructuring roles to include meaningful problem-solving, you transform the innovation equation.

So here’s the million-dollar question every executive should be asking: Are you designing jobs that create automation champions, or are you merely automating jobs as they currently exist?

Innovation is Dead. Now what?

Innovation is Dead. Now what?

by | Jan 29, 2025 | Innovation

Innovation has always had its problems.  It’s a meaningless buzzword that leads to confusion and false hope.  It’s an event or a hobby that allows executives to check the “Be innovative” box on shareholders’ To-do lists.  It’s a massive investment that, if you’re lucky, is break-even.

So, it should be no surprise that interest and investment have dried up to the point that many have declared that innovation is dead.

If you feel an existential crisis coming on, you’re not alone.  Heck, I’m about to publish a book titled Unlocking Innovation, which, if innovation is dead, is like publishing “Lean Speed: How to Make Your Horse Eat Less and Go Faster” in 1917 (the year automobiles became more prevalent than horses).

But is innovation really dead?

 

Yes, innovation is dead.

The word “innovation” is dead, and it’s about time. Despite valiant efforts by academics, consultants, and practitioners to define innovation as something more than a new product, decades of hype have irrevocably reduced it to shiny new objects, fun field trips and events, and wasted time and money.

Good riddance, too.  “Innovation” has been used to justify too many half-hearted efforts, avoidable mistakes, and colossal failures to survive.

 

Except that it is also very much not dead.

While the term “innovation” may have flatlined, the act of innovating – creating something new that creates value – is thriving.  AI continues to evolve and find new roles in our daily lives.  Labs are growing everything from meat to fabric to new organs.  And speaking of organs, three patients in the US received artificial hearts that kept them alive long enough for donor hearts to be found.

The act of innovation isn’t dead because the need for innovation will always exist, and the desire to innovate – to create, evolve, and improve – is fundamentally human.

 

Innovation is metamorphosing (yes, that’s a real word)

Like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, innovation has been inching along, gobbling up money and people, getting bigger, and taking up more space in offices, budgets, and shareholder calls.

Then, as the shock of the pandemic faded, innovation went into a chrysalis and turned to goo.

Just as a caterpillar must break down completely before becoming something new, we’re watching the old systems dissolve:

  • Old terms like innovation and Design Thinking were more likely to elicit a No than a Yes
  • Old structures like dedicated internal teams and “labs” were shut down
  • Old beliefs that innovation is an end rather than a means to an end faded

This is all good news.  Except for one tiny thing…

 

We don’t know what’s next

Humans hate uncertainty, so we’re responding to the goo-phase in different ways:

  1. Collapse in defeat, lament the end of human creativity and innovation, and ignore the fact that cutting all investment in creativity and innovation is hastening the end you find so devastating
  2. Take a deep breath, put our heads down, and keep going because this, too, shall pass.
  3. Put on our big kid pants, muster some courage, ask questions, and start experimenting

I’ve been in #2 for a while (with brief and frequent visits to #1), but it’s time to move into #3.

I’ll start where I start everything – a question about a word – because, before we can move forward, we need a way to communicate.

If innovation (the term) is dead, what do we use instead?

We’ll explore answers in the next post, so drop your words and definitions in the comments.