The fast-moving data center industry has limitations everywhere. They form the invisible walls you and your colleagues constantly run into and bump up against. They show up as unclear information, competing priorities and disruptive reactions. Limitations form inefficiencies and create countless new things to do across the board. They are frustrating and they are demanding. Until they are cleared, your teams go through the motions to make things happen, but real progress doesn’t feel like it’s happening. And deep work (the creative, strategic, meaningful work) tends to happen less and less frequently.
Limitations cause the most painful and arduous parts of work. At the root of it all, limitations happen when unclear, inconsistent or disconnected elements anchor interaction and decision points. In these situations, information, actions and deliverables must be perfect. But when they show up as incomplete, confusing or hard to get to, discord always follows. Rapidly evolving needs and constant change in data center infrastructure and operations adds even more complexity to these already limiting conditions.
Teams and organizations regularly give attention to treating widespread symptoms and fixing isolated causes with software tools or additional resources, but this allows the root cause to spread and multiply. These approaches may look helpful on the surface, but they do not solve for the root cause.
To solve for the root cause of limitations, let’s understand the bright side of what happens when they are not in play: focus and creativity. What makes you feel constructive, like you’ve accomplished something? Creativity. Creativity is natural, it makes you feel good. And only people are creative. Creativity is core to your nature, but you need focus in order to be creating. When you are not creating, you are reacting.
Creativity is the process for how you design and build things. Although creativity is natural, it isn’t always automatic. It is fueled and sustained by focus. Creativity thrives when you have the freedom to ‘stay in it,’ to understand, to test, to build, to iterate. When you can focus without being pulled in five different directions, ideas start to connect, momentum gains and work gets more fun.
But creativity cannot thrive in chaos. When people are constantly reacting to issues, chasing answers, or working around missing pieces, that creative energy gets drained. Focus makes creativity possible, and without it teams default to firefighting instead of innovating.
So, how do you focus? Think of focus as the power you create by concentrating your energy. The mechanics of focus function the exact same way as energy from the Sun becomes powerful enough to make fire by concentrating it (into focus) through a magnifying glass. In this correlation, think of yourself as the Sun. Think of the circumstances you’re working in as the magnifying glass. If you try to use a magnifying glass that is dirty and smudged you aren’t going to be able to make fire with it very effectively, right? So it is with you. When limitations are rampant, they blur your concentration, preventing you from being able focus.
So, how do you focus? Think of focus as the power you create by concentrating your energy. The mechanics of focus function the exact same way as energy from the Sun becomes powerful enough to make fire by concentrating it (into focus) through a magnifying glass. In this correlation, think of yourself as the Sun. Think of the circumstances you’re working in as the magnifying glass. If you are to try to use a magnifying glass that is dirty and smudged you aren’t able to make fire with it very effectively, right? When limitations are rampant, they blur your concentration, preventing you from being able effectively focus.
“Sustaining creativity comes down to your ability to stay focused on the challenge…” — MIT Sloan Management Review, Mix Creativity With the Right Mindset to Serve Up Innovation
MIT Sloan Management Review reports “many studies have found that having a sense of psychological safety can enhance creativity.” Would you feel a sense of ‘psychological safety’ if you knew you would always have exactly what you need, when you need it, so that you could always do what you need to do, when you need to do it? This means having clear, consistent, coherent information, actions and deliverables at critical interaction and decision points. Every time. Think about the value of that.
Research published by Harvard Business Review (HBR) finds that “creativity is a social process — employees share ideas, build off of each other’s suggestions, give feedback to improve a concept, and collaborate to come up with novel and innovative solutions to solve a specific problem.” Simple enough, right? You know this. Yet when limitations exist focus gets diluted. When focus is diluted, your team’s attention scatters across all the things that need to be done that aren’t. Yay! Now you know how stress gets made.
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” — Albert Einstein
Making an impactful shift that will elevate day-to-day critical infrastructure and data center operations requires more than a mindset. It requires intentional structure and action. To move toward higher levels, you have to turn focus deficits into focus gains. Doing so significantly shortens the average length of time between knowing something needs to be done and being able to call it ‘complete’ through meaningful actions and decisions. By understanding this difficult-to-measure metric, you will find the source of tremendous hidden costs impacting data center designs and builds.
Teams and organizations that bear the most risk surrounding execution stand to gain the most with the right solution. So, where do you begin? Focus (yes, focus) where cross-organizational collaboration is most critical and interdependencies are most rampant. This cross section often reveals where work is mostly reactive, as opposed to creative.
Interdependencies and cross-organizational collaboration multiply limitations. This is due to the layers upon layers of distinct yet relational conditions, expectations and requirements. Within digital infrastructure, one realm that ideally fits this description is the work that surrounds critical equipment. To achieve immediate and lasting impact on teams that design, deploy and operate critical equipment (aka product), hyperscale owners, developers and vendors are thinking differently.
One way data center leaders are solving for focus deficits is with a new breed of data center consultant, the product lifecycle partner. The embedded service nests in and around teams that own critical equipment execution, acting as the corrective action. They orchestrate end-to-end continuity amid constant change across data center equipment design and operational lifecycles. This steadily removes macro and micro burdens caused by limitations and prevents their recurrence. In partnership with design, engineering and construction, they secure, align, validate and curate information, actions and deliverables, simplifying cross-organizational collaboration and unifying critical interdependencies.
“By combining forces with organizations that have complementary strengths, product managers can optimize costs, while focusing on key competencies, ultimately accelerating time-to-market turnarounds.” — Forbes, Why Product Managers Can't Skimp On Strategic Partnerships (And Where To Focus Your Energy)
Effective partners understand their role as a unifying bridge while honoring stakeholder trust. A commitment from the teams or the organization to want to solve root cause is just as important as the commitment by the partner to deliver on the solve. When teams within organizations make the decision to start solving for removing limitations, concentration comes into focus and creativity happens naturally.
Forbes reports “when partners truly understand each other's goals and objectives — and how creating a win-win proposition impacts both sides positively — they can streamline processes more effectively.” Starting in high impact areas and expanding outward through adjacencies is the most effective strategy for impactful and lasting results. Try boiling the ocean and you won’t get anywhere fast.
However you decide to solve for limitations on your teams or in your organization, an effective solution should act as a dynamic bridge. The bridge needs to constantly evolve and own understanding exactly what each individual, organization and function needs, along with why they need it, how they need it and what ‘done right’ looks like.
Done right, this approach unifies cross-organizational expectations into shared understanding. It also makes teams more flexible and adaptive to constantly changing conditions. To make this knowledge functional and practical, form it into an operating framework and use it to constantly feed back into stakeholders and teams as operational clarity, consistency and unity.
The keys to sustaining focus are just that: clarity, consistency and unity. No matter what you do, understand this simple yet powerful fact. When clarity and consistency scale, focus happens naturally without the noise from uncertainty or confusion. Unity is simply the result.
Remove limitations and you will sustain focus. Sustain focus and you will liberate creativity.
Go forth and conquer.
