Your creative team is a volcano of fantastic ideas, but, despite their creativity, innovation really just isn’t happening. There’s something in the way, but you’re not sure what.
This is a common scenario and one I encounter often in my work. Given the right encouragement and circumstances, teams are more than capable of generating plenty of fantastic new ideas. They look at the problem from every side, flip the script, invert the process… you name it. No shortage of fearless thinking. But it just never seems to get outside the door.
The main reason for this dilemma is that you are going about it backwards.
If we want ideas that innovate and change things, we first need to let go of the current ideas about how things must look and function NOW.
By letting go of our attachment to the current crop of ideas, we create a vacuum. An empty space that cries out to be filled. Letting go brings us into contact with the ambiguity of the outside world and all of its complexity.
It’s not that our current ideas remove that ambiguity or complexity, but that, by holding on to them as THE answer, we can enjoy the illusion of certainty
Let go of your opinion, let go of certainty and discover novelty.
It is next to impossible to let go of your current answers if your organization’s KPIs and KPA’s are directly linked to enacting the old ideas. This rigid adherence in effect makes it impossible to try anything new in the long term.
This is why brilliant ideas generated during brainstorms tend to last about 2 weeks before the status quo reasserts itself… The organisation will not/can not let go of the old idea.
Company culture is best defined as How we do What we do everyday. If you want innovation, then it needs to be part of the everyday activity of every person in your organisation.
To facilitate something as radical as that, your guiding principles and your metrics need to include change and experimentation. If they do not, if they only measure outcomes, the needle will swing back to the old ways very fast… Your management processes and style guarantee it.
The art of discovering new ideas AND making sure they are implemented is supported and expanded by the Foursight Creative Problem Solving framework. Foursight enables you to first clarify your problem, before creating relevant ideas that you can then plan and implement. By thinking carefully about each step of the process, you anticipate resistance and remove barriers to the adoption of your new ideas.
If you’re wondering how Foursight could help your team or organisation get better at implementing innovation and change, book a discovery call here.
And if you want to get more bite-sized problem-solving tips in your inbox, subscribe to my newsletter here.
Plenty of inspiration, stories, facts and research in the articles I publish. I write about creative events, thinking and research… anything that has creativity hidden in it. Read the articles…
Sign up for my fortnightly newsletter and receive FREE creativity tips and help with the challenges you currently face. A simple way to keep up to date with the world of creativity.
Creativity will save the world. I share tips, tools and techniques for creative thinking based on scientific research and personal experience. Problem solving is creativity. More about speaking…
Like follow, donate: