Roni’s story in his latest post reminded me of what was probably the most dramatic moment in my 15+ years of facilitating innovation. I’ve told this to people a few times (not many, because I am pretty ashamed of my role in the event), and they often don’t believe me, but I swear that this happened exactly as it is told here.
It was a pro-bono session in a city in the US MidWest, and the objective was to find innovative ways to improve communications and understanding in the local community, which had been stressed to the point of intermittent violence. The organizers had attempted to statistically represent, within the 16 participants, all segments of the local population according to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and what not, and had done an excellent job. It was the heterogeneous-est group you could imagine, all of them good intentioned active citizens.
The first day went well, and on the morning of the second day, we opened with an exercise: the group sat on chairs in a circle, except for one person who stood in the middle. This person was asked by me to mention something he remembered from the first day, then pick another participant, ask them to stand up, and sit in their place, and so on.
Browsing thru Posterous, the brainchild of Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan, included in Creativity-online’s annual list of the most influential and inspiring creative personalities of the last year, aka The 2010 Creativity 50, I came across a quotation by Jim Jarmusch, one that enjoys being an eternal carry-over between blogs and sites.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, painting, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and your theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery-celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to’.”
A recommendation often heard in advertising classes and or seen in books on advertising creativity: Read the old annuals, study the old ads, dismount the award-winners, look at tourism catalogs, and read everything in sight. And so on.
I decided it was high time I got on the LinkedIn boat. I had a vague memory of opening an account, once upon a time. (Alright, I’ll admit it. Maybe I was trying to spy on someone. But we all do that. Isn’t that the point?) So, just to be sure, I went on to the website and searched for myself. I did not appear. Not terribly surprising news so far. Fresh out of maternity leave, I’m well aware of my memory not being as sharp as it once was.
No worries though. I filled out the form, clicked “join now”, and waited to become one of the 60 million professionals. LinkedIn was quick to inform me in bold writing “Unable to add robyn@sitsite.com. Email address is associated with another LinkedIn account.” Voila! I exist!
While it’s quite possible that when searching for myself I misspelled my own name, I chose to ignore this option and instead, found it humorous that there were parallel worlds in which one of them I existed, while in the other I did not. It got me thinking - why should LinkedIn do this? What’s in it for them?
The first thing that came to mind was “Limit Rather than Delete”, a possible spinoff of the SIT principle “Limit Rather than Dilute” in which we implement ideas in a limited version rather than diluting them due to constraints. But more on that another time.
If we try to list the barriers to innovation, cognitive fixednesses will be very close to the top of the list. One of our main challenges as facilitators is to help our clients break their fixednesses as part of the attempt to promote innovation. One interesting aspect of these fixednesses, and particularly structural fixedness, is their relationship with language.
Let’s consider the word “order” for example. WordNet defines order as “logical or comprehensible arrangement of separate elements” and “a condition of regular or proper arrangement”. These definitions, coupled with another meaning of the word – “a command given by a superior that must be obeyed” – can help us understand the power of structural fixedness. It highlights our tendency to embrace order and structure as positive attributes that are not only valuable, but also natural.
In the last decade, it seems that if there is any agreement about anything, it is that we need to save the planet, and take responsibility for the environment and our influence on it. Never before has the color “green” received such significance and value.
Considering the great resources governments and companies dedicate to the purpose of sustainable innovation, we should ask ourselves – how should we manage our innovation? Can we go “too far”?
Let’s try and answer this question, using one of Boeing’s latest and most innovative projects as a case study: the new 787 Dreamliner.
In our previous post we wrote about how talking about innovation is not enough: you also have to act on it. In this post we will give you our insights on how to translate the innovation and creativity talk into real action.
If you are the kind of leader with the insight that innovation is important, and you also do not accept that relying on chance or unpredictable events are valid leadership qualities; if you are the proactive, hard worker who wants to create innovation, what can you do?
Here’s a suggestion for a good start:
* Acquire knowledge – Learn about how you can implement effective innovation through systematic and focused efforts. There are many good training programs and tons of literature for this. Start with a simple test, by asking your associates how they define innovation. If you can agree on this, you have a base to build on. Then move on to gaining more knowledge about principles and models for systematic innovation.
Many classic, successful products have been invented “by accident” – by an unintended mishap that just happened to turn out to be a brilliant stroke of R&D genius: Penicillin, the microwave, chocolate chip cookies and more.And the stories behind these incidents are always so fun and surprising that they catch our attention and stick in our minds for good.
Here are just a few of the classics. You have no doubt heard them, or similar versions of them, numerous times.
Ivory Soap
In 1878, in a Procter & Gamble soap production factory, one of the employee’s lunch breaks took longer than expected. The whole thing would have gone unnoticed, if not for a malfunction that got out of hand. Continue reading ‘Lucky Engineering Accidents’
This is the second of a series of posts discussing innovation barriers. This series does not intend to encompass all that can be said on the subject. That would take a series of books. It does intend to describe, however, several types of barriers we face when we try to innovate, and some of the innovation methodologies that have been developed to address them.
What is more challenging: coming up with an innovative idea, or sharing it with a group of people that may love it or hate it?Most of us will agree that this is a simple question. We might, however, disagree on the answer… In the previous post in this series I called the group of barriers relating to the act of coming up with innovative idea “Cognitive Barriers.” The complementary group of barriers – those that have to do with sharing innovative ideas with others – were labeled “Psychological Barriers.”
Although people differ in their “susceptibility” to these different barriers, most us will agree that objectively (whatever that means..) the cognitive barriers to innovation are harder to overcome. The importance of the psychological barriers is due, to a great extent, to the fact that some of the best ideas come up during group discussions. The worn-out saying goes: “none of us is as smart as all of us.” While I have several issues with this approach (as, I suspect, you may as well) – there is some truth to it, especially when it comes to ideation sessions.
