|
Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
I've worked for nearly 20 years helping a wide range of industries develop innovative strategies, both from the inside of the organization and from outside as a consultant. In my work, one thing I've heard over an over again when I provide examples of innovation to spur thinking is 'that's fine for them, but we're different'.
Yesterday I wrote about innovative leadership from restaurants in the face of the current economic challenges, and I suspect they will garner a similar reaction from some. 'That's fine, but we're different', and that, to be blunt, is a cop-out.
Having worked with and in so many industries, what I see is that the industry itself has very little relevance. What is important are the people and their perspective, and they all deal with people and have a perspective.
Do you engage your people? Do you look for new opportunities? Do you create leader-ful communities? Do you believe that you can learn from other industries and organizations, even if they have nothing to do with what you do? These actions and perspectives are common to all successful strategic innovation. If you believe you can engage your people and innovate, you're right. If you believe you can't, you're right. It has nothing to do with what business you're in.
And time and again, when we work with our various clients, they also come to realize this, and that is why they succeed. Yes, they are 'special' as all individuals are special in their own unique way. But they are not 'special' in that the principles of effective leadership and innovation will not work for them. That is simply an excuse to take no action and to stay in helplessness. And that is an excuse you have to abandon if you really want to take the lead, especially today.
That's my 2 cents. What do you think?
Tags: economic challenges, effective leadership, industry, Innovation, innovative leadership, restaurants
Posted in Leadership | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Your
‘blue-sky’/dreaming/brainstorming/divergent thinking sessions should generate a number of way
out there ideas. Remember that the sign
for success of that type of thinking is the number and the craziness of the
ideas, not their practicality.
Once you have a
list of ideas, you need to pick the ones to develop into action plan.
Approaching a problem with traditional, linear, left-brain thinking would start
by looking at what was practical right away.
The key to creative thinking is combining this logical, left-brain
thinking, with your intuitive, emotional, right-brain thinking to develop a truly creative solution.
Since all your
ideas from the first stage should all be impractical, crazy ideas, you can’t
really decide on the basis of practicality – that would defeat the whole cause
of creative thinking. What you need to
use to select those ideas you want to develop is energy. Do they annoy you? Do they make you laugh with their
silliness? Do they push or pull
you in some emotional way? What
you’re looking for is those ideas that you react to emotionally, whether that
emotion is laughter about the stupidity, or being annoyed and irritated at how
impractical the idea is.
The emotion that
you feel is your intuitive, emotional right-brain and your unconscious mind
communicating with you. These two
aspects of you see patterns and connections that a logical, linear approach
would not see. It’s like the Sony engineer
who saw kids on roller skates and skateboards and saw kids listening to music,
and thought ‘music on wheels’ to come up with the Walkman. It seems obvious now, but back then, it was a
revolutionary breakthrough.
We’re very good in
our society at thinking logically and rationally with our left-brain. Many of us have to learn to communicate with our right brains, and this emotional
reaction is a first step. What it’s
telling you is that, at some level, you’ve seen a pattern or the essence of a
solution that your logical, rational brain simply can’t see. Those are the ideas you need to grab on to
and work with to create the truly breakthrough ideas to take you a quantum leap
beyond where you are now.
What you have to do
to move from the crazy idea to the solution is find out what the essence
of the idea is and find a way to make that workable. You’re not going to literally make the dreams
happen, but how could it be ‘as if’ you did?
How could you make the essence of the dream workable? That
is the breakthrough that creative thinking allows you develop – it takes you to
a place you could never otherwise have reached because you allowed yourself to
dream first.
Tags: brainstorming, dream, Innovation, left brain, practical, right brain
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Saturday, December 20th, 2008
In his book, Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn, the
father of modern creativity, proposes the idea of using a checklist of verbs to
change the way you look at a situation.
These verbs can include ‘magnify’, ‘reduce’, and ‘backwards’. If, for example, you’re looking for a new way
to produce a certain type of report, start with ‘magnify’ and think of what
you’d do if you had to write every report in the organization. How would you make that work? Or, if you were to apply ‘reduce’, think of
how you could give the essence of the report in one sentence, or even one word,
or one number. Applying ‘backwards’, how
would the process work if you had the people for whom you’re preparing the
report do the actual writing, so that they submitted it to you?
By ‘stretching’ the
problem in these improbably ways, you’re forced to look at it in new ways, and
in so doing, you can come up with ideas you may not otherwise have
generated. That’s the key to creativity
– seeing things in new ways.
Tags: alex osborn, applied imagination, creativity, Innovation
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
Ever since Alex Osborn launched the modern wave of creative
thinking in business with his 1942 book, How
to Think Up, we've known that effective creative problem-solving techniques need divergent,
impractical thinking before
developing a practical solution. The problem with accepting ideas that make sense
right away is that the reason they
make sense up front is that they are based on what you are already familiar
with and what you already know from the past.
At best, you’ll improve your productivity or effectiveness a few percent
with the ‘innovation’, and that’s just not good enough for the rate of change
that we’re living in today. To create
the tens or hundreds of percent improvement in results we need in today’s
world, we need those ideas that seem absolutely ridiculous or unachievable at
first. That is where the breakthroughs come from.
Critical to this process is deferring judgement and
allowing ideas to come forth freely, no matter how ludicrous or impractical
they may seem. Often we are embarrassed
to come out and state these outrageous ideas simply because they are outrageous, and yet that’s where
real innovation comes from. Take a look
at the history of innovation and invention and you’ll see that it’s true. Being practical first has never generated any
real breakthroughs.
Tags: alex osborn, creative problem solving, deferring judgement, how to think up, Innovation
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
|
|
