I decided it was high time I got on the LinkedIn boat. I had a vague memory of opening an account, once upon a time. (Alright, I’ll admit it. Maybe I was trying to spy on someone. But we all do that. Isn’t that the point?) So, just to be sure, I went on to the website and searched for myself. I did not appear. Not terribly surprising news so far. Fresh out of maternity leave, I’m well aware of my memory not being as sharp as it once was.
No worries though. I filled out the form, clicked “join now”, and waited to become one of the 60 million professionals. LinkedIn was quick to inform me in bold writing “Unable to add robyn@sitsite.com. Email address is associated with another LinkedIn account.” Voila! I exist!
While it’s quite possible that when searching for myself I misspelled my own name, I chose to ignore this option and instead, found it humorous that there were parallel worlds in which one of them I existed, while in the other I did not. It got me thinking - why should LinkedIn do this? What’s in it for them?
The first thing that came to mind was “Limit Rather than Delete”, a possible spinoff of the SIT principle “Limit Rather than Dilute” in which we implement ideas in a limited version rather than diluting them due to constraints. But more on that another time.
Giving it some more thought, the LinkedIn episode can be compared to the Parking Lot Concept that we at SIT advise our clients to employ. Through SIT sessions, organizations come up with a robust list of potential ideas. However, when it’s time for implementation, ideas are chosen based on a pre-determined set of criteria – time to market, level of investment, technology required, and so on. While the more feasible ideas get pushed forward, ideas that spark our interest initially often don’t make the cut for not meeting one criterion or another.
This is where the Parking Lot Concept comes in to play. We tell our clients – don’t throw out those ideas you felt so passionate about, but don’t spend time on them either. Make a note of what prevents them from making it to the project’s idea list, and then - park them on the side. With the right conditions, those ideas might turn out to be a clandestine pipeline just waiting to emerge. So for now, leave them be. Set a date to go back and review them. Six months from now, your technology may have changed. That budget could come in. You want to have those ideas within arm’s reach, but you don’t want them obstructing your vision.
It appears that LinkedIn has a Parking Lot of its own. They may have looked at me and said: “She’s not that interesting, certainly not as active as our other users. But there’s something about her that in the future might just work out. Let’s park her on the side, invisible to the naked eye. But we know she’s there. And when she’s ready to step up to the plate, we’ll gladly let her swing”.
Robyn Taragin-Stern is the Knowledge Manager at SIT. She is now available on LinkedIn.
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hi Robyn,
In my experience your parking lot concept can be pretty useful. In addition to the benefit you mention, it also - funnily enough - can save lots of time in the convergence process. Why? I saw the same effect when I used to work as an editor of texts. Say you have a 20-page long text and you need to cut it down to an 8-page article. It is horribly hard to delete bits (especially if you have written them yourself(:, so what you do is, instead of deleting, you cut and paste them to the bottom of the document, and promise yourself to review them later. Of course, by the time you pare the whole thing down to the required 8 pages, the last thing you want to do is review what you have below, so you either delete all of it, or keep it in a separate document for future reference.
Same thing in a convergence session - deleting an idea from the list can be terribly difficult, and often implies lengthy discussions that take up precious time. Moving ideas to a Parking Lot, on the other hand, is much easier psychologically, and thus quicker and more efficient.
Amnon, you are right on the mark.
I’d like to expand on what you wrote and add that apart from the lengthy discussions involved when choosing (or rather not choosing) ideas, there is also a human factor. Behind each idea is a person who thought of it. People take ownership on their ideas, and sometimes take it personally when their ideas are not pushed forward, especially when they’ve worked hard on them and feel that they are valuable. By putting ideas in the Parking Lot we can still give room to their ideas which often are just ahead of their time.
Just wanted to share that a couple of weeks ago, while helping a company design their new innovation process, we came up together with the (Multiplication) concept of having actually two “parking lots” for ides: one short term and the other a Long Term Parking (aka Cemetery)
great share