In science, there’s always another question. No matter how many questions a good researcher answers, or how much data is gathered, there are always more things to ask. In fact, there seems to be a geometric relationship between answers and questions, with each answer prompting multiple new questions. Richer, more subtle, more complex questions. Sometimes [...]
What would it do to your company to have to ask permission from the government before anything could change? Yet isn’t that what large corporations routinely require of business units and employees? Do you think maybe it has the same effect?
Life is not a multiple-choice test and neither is business. The insights we need are not found in brief lists of options. Knowing what worked last time isn’t the same as knowing how to face a new challenge or find a new solution. It doesn’t give someone the courage to experiment, or the confidence to chart a new path. Indeed, the surest way to short circuit innovative thinking is to conclude that you already have the answer.
Are you creating the sort of innovation-friendly environment that generates and implements attractive ideas? You need to be, because the ability to become a source of great new ideas is your most critical business asset—in the insight economy.
Even after years of breaking down silos and decentralizing decision-making, most organizations still cling to the organizational chart. It’s perhaps flatter but it’s still there. So maybe we still need it. If that’s true, let me humbly suggest that at the very least it’s time to turn it upside down.
There is no shortage of research on creativity, what it is, how to cultivate it, and how to integrate it into our schools’ curriculum. It certainly needs to entail much more than teaching students to be “artistic.” We probably have some sorting out to do to determine what approaches will be most beneficial, but let’s at least start sorting.
Many verbs have been put in front of the word innovation, words like foster, promote, enhance, generate, cultivate, improve and imbed. They show up frequently in the literature and I’ve used them many times myself. However one word that I rarely see coupled with innovation in this way is one that I’ve come to realize [...]
Unfortunately even a series of creative events, no matter how well executed, is not likely to change the underlying habits and relationships inside an organization. On the contrary, it may reinforce the impression that creativity is to be used occasionally, as just some tool that you pick up when you happen to need it and then put down again. In a true innovation culture, creativity is “always on”.
People who are engaged in their work make appropriate adjustments without being told to. They require less supervision and solve problems more quickly. In other words, engaged employees are easier to manage. Without engagement, the only levers available to managers are command and control, reward and punish. That may keep things afloat, but it’s not a path to innovation and growth.
In a healthy innovation culture, the newcomers and outsiders are welcomed and valued precisely because they’re not burdened by convention and habit, because they bring fresh insights and new questions; because they haven’t yet learned what’s “impossible.”