There’s something remarkably powerful about a good story. It can take the driest of facts and breathe life into them, and it can do the same thing with an idea. Skilled innovators take their ideas and turn them into stories, often reshaping their assumptions and beliefs in the process.
The paradox of innovation is that it requires the courage to take risks, yet it’s also grounded in caution, the realization that threats can appear suddenly. Like a squirrel, we need to be constantly scanning for potential threats and opportunities.
Creative people tend to be intrinsically motivated. This is one of the best researched but least appreciated pieces of the whole innovation equation. It requires a total paradigm shift in the way companies think about motivating employees and what behaviors are valued.
So how in the world do you measure, much less develop, someone’s innovation mindset? We’ve found a way to do exactly that, using a unique research-based assessment that calibrates a person’s attitudes, assumptions and beliefs as they relate to the whole range of behaviors that are necessary for successful innovation.
Just as we were all born explorers and experimenters, the same is true of new ventures. The challenge is less about introducing entirely new attitudes than about finding ways to restore those things that created success in the first place. It’s about getting out of our own way.
Successful innovation is remarkably like reverse engineering. But instead of applying that strategy to an existing product or technology, it’s applied to an imagined future state.
Many of us are not well positioned to gain fresh insights and make new discoveries. We’re not in the right mindset and as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” So even when we’ve made all the other choices that set us up to innovate, we still have a gap.
The ability to make accurate observations may be the most overlooked aspect of innovation and adaptability. It's a crucial but often misunderstood piece.
Many of us resist exercising our imagination, and even more of us don’t trust our imagination enough to act on it. Yet it’s by exploring our ideas and gathering feedback that we’re able to improve them…and it’s not just our imagination that needs frequent testing.
Accomplished innovators routinely choose their imagination over their knowledge. They recognize, as Einstein did, that knowledge is limited—and limiting—and they don’t want to be caught unprepared for the inevitable changes and surprises they know they will encounter. They exercise their imagination like an athlete exercises muscles, not because it’s always needed, but because without exercise it won’t be ready to perform at those crucial times when it is needed.