Finding creativity within standardization

As long as I have been practicing process optimization - and that has been many years- I have always struggled with staying true to my creative side while standardizing the processes I use. The two seem to be at odds with each other and I know many others struggle with it too. In fact, this perception can be one of the critical barriers to buy-in for many.

Once I started to look at standardization differently, I felt a tremendous release, as suddenly I was able to balance both aspects of my own personality. How did I do that? Well, I started to look at standardization as a backbone and I also realized it was a great communication tool.

As a backbone:
When standardizing, you need to find the happy medium where enough detail is given to reduce error and waste but enough lee way is there to allow adaptation to individual physical needs and situations.
Consider the human skeleton and internal organs. Each of us is built the same way, under the same guiding principles, but we are all different. We all have to do the same basic functions but over time, we have used our creativity and improved on those processes and have shared these learnings.

For example - eating:
We have hands, arms, mouths, teeth, tongue etc to help us get food, put it in our mouths, digest it and send the right nutrients to our organs and the rest of our body. That is our standardized process. We have learned that tools can make eating much easier. So now, most people use forks, spoons and knives to get the food to us faster, with less dirt and contamination and less waste, as well as to make the portions easier for our teeth to masticate and our body to digest. The process of eating was standardized, creativity improved it.

As a communication tool:

If the person who invented the knife had never shared their idea with someone, where would we be today? We knew the requirements of process and the basics steps to it - grab food, try and make it small enough to fit in the mouth and chew. Someone found out that you can use a sharp tool to make the pieces smaller and it was easier to chew, you choked less and you could even spear the piece with the same tool. The person shared the tool, others standardized the use of it and then others used their creativity to improve the knife and innovate, using the knife for different processes.

So, standardizing a process allows the brain space and time to free itself to think about ways to improve the process, do things differently, find links and connections between disparate acts and in general, allow more creativity and more innovation.