Unlearning
The next time you face a new challenge, don't just ask yourself, "What can I learn from this?" Ask yourself, "What do I need to unlearn?"
Going Forward Backwards
When we stop using our imagination and fail to constantly pursue fresh insights, frankly, we become a road hazard, a danger to both ourselves and our business. Sticking with the status quo may seem safe but in a changing marketplace it’s a strategy that’s almost certain to fail. Are you looking out the windshield or relying on what you see behind you?
Experimentation
Are you taking personal risks? Is your organization willing to take them? Innovation requires experimentation and experimentation requires that we risk failure. It can be scary but it’s necessary. Otherwise, we’re just confirming (or rationalizing) what we already think we know and that only takes us where we’ve already been.
Being an Innovative Team Player
Being a team player in an innovation culture doesn’t mean playing along to get along; it means asking the tough questions and carefully considering the questions raised by others. It means challenging the sacred cows and unwritten assumptions that too often impede progress. It means making connections for the sake of making connections, because that’s the essence of creativity and no one can predict what new insights might result. Sometimes, it even means courageously challenging authority, when there’s a legitimate reason to do so.
Place Your Bets
With innovation, the odds favor the gambler. The longer you play, the more likely you are to win. Each calculated risk that fails, if carefully evaluated and used to learn, brings us closer to a successful solution, by teaching us what won’t work and hinting at what does. It’s those who stop gambling, who fail to experiment long enough and often enough, who give up too soon, who lose.
Hiring Innovation
Anyone can become a successful innovator, but some of us are more predisposed to creative change than others. Ironically, companies tend to stack the deck against their own innovation efforts by predominantly hiring those who are most conformist and most competent at doing what’s already being done, rather than those who embrace new ideas.
Asking Questions
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 [...]
Innovation vs. Education
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.
Creative Education?
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.
Stimulating Creativity
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”.