Category Archives: Innovation
Innovation: respect the process
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Master the instrument, master the music, then forget all that shit and play. – Charlie Parker
Some say innovation is predictable, I agree. But to a larger degree it is not because you can’t really tell where it’s going to come from and who will be holding all the cards. Right now you’re probably in the ‘innovate or die’ mindset, you’re also probably feeling frustrated because you’re reading blogs, following innovation consultants on Twitter to try and do innovation but you are not getting anywhere.
Let me help clear things up for you, innovation takes time. It needs to be nourished, it needs to be practiced, it needs to be mastered. (more…)
Weekend innovation tip: Outthink opponents like Peyton Manning
Ah yes the Super Bowl is here and we have one of the greatest quarterbacks in the game playing in it: Peyton Manning.
Peyton Manning is unlike any quarterback, he operates a no huddle offense that relies on reading the defense and making adjustments before the snap. This helps create confusion for the defense so they don’t really know what’s coming at them. What makes all this possible is his great use of the OODA loop, which stands for observe, orient, decide, and act.
This happens so fast that opposing defenses have a hard time making a play on him because the ball leaves his hands so fast, that they’re left guessing where he might throw the ball. This enabled him to be sacked only 10 times this season!
What this means is that he had more opportunities to throw the ball to his receivers for plays. (more…)
INNOVATION: Change your internal chip
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” – Einstein
Yesterday I was with a client proposing some new initiatives and as always there’s a bottleneck to new ideas. Someone’s ego prevents them from seeing other alternatives to how things can be done and is so set in their traditional views that anything new is irrelevant. In thinking about this fact with some of the people there I said: Like computer chips that evolve and get better all the time, so must we.
Voila!
Do you remember how in the movie Terminator 2 Sarah and John Connor take out and modify the Terminator’s internal cpu so it can can learn and not be following preset rules? Well that’s exactly what we have to do with ourselves and people who are impervious to ‘there’s always a better way’ speak. (more…)
What are your needs? Ask Twitter
Twitter is vast repository of information, conversations and individual thoughts. It’s hard to keep up and make sense of all of it but sometimes you get some concrete insights from people like Tom Peters telling you he’s underserved:
What’s your creative thinking style?
Have you ever noticed how you come up with your ideas? Have you noticed how others come up with theirs? I’ve been thinking about this lately and seeing how on Twitter there’s no shortage of people tweeting ‘x ways to innovate’ back and forth (myself included!) it makes me think non-innovation people will get confused with so many ‘techniques’.
So how many ways are there really? infinite. This is a problem because most techniques are just designed to stimulate your brain to get it thinking in all sorts of ways but they don’t naturally come to you.
We must also remember that most people are put off by all of this ‘innovation’ talk, they just don’t care about the latest and greatest technique, they just care about the outcome and our job is to help them get there. So where do people like us who are trying to spread the religion of ‘innovation’ around start teaching the non-innovators? With what comes natural to us. (more…)
Innovation is a habit
Accepting reality has it’s advantages as it makes you focus intensely but it also has it’s disadvantages because it puts imagination in the backseat!
Act different to think different. Easier said than done right? The truth is we’ve already been-there-done-that when we were kids, we just forget we did it. How is this possible? How is it that we lost that inquisitive mind? We just lost our imagination, threw the crayons away and got caught up in the reality of the adult world that’s what happened.
Most innovations come out of some insight (aha! moment) someone had and it was all because this person was looking deeper and questioning the ‘believed’ truth of how something works. Just like kids, inquisitive people have a habit of questioning everything, looking for deeper insight by questioning the truth. Yet most people accept things for what they are, why is this? Because it’s safe, it’s that simple. We get trapped in automatic, mechanical thinking with no interest in asking why we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
When you look at things and believe that that’s the way they’re going to stay then you’re making a huge mistake because as you well know nothing stays the same, everything changes. Our job as innovators is to not accept reality for what it is, it’s to imagine what could be and that means thinking differently.
If you wish to change your reality I challenge you to regain your inner child. I challenge you to ‘be a kid’ again.
But before you start thinking differently (being a kid) you have to create the habit of ‘acting’ differently. This means that you’ll have to piss people off, it means challenging established rules, it means breaking tradition, it means putting away the tried and true, it means breaking away from reality.
Are you ready? Here it goes:
The single biggest thing you can do right now to start ‘acting’ differently is to ask ‘WHY?’ Do it everyday, do it 5 times for everything you come across. Ask yourself why you do things the way you do them, this will get your mind moving in all sorts of directions you forgot existed.
Once you get the Jello in your brain moving, ask ‘WHAT IF?’ to shake it up some more and get your imagination going. At this point your imagination is going to run wild and you’ll come up with some crazy ideas and start feeling like a kid again. The final piece to get you acting differently is to ask ‘WHY NOT?’ When you get here, you’ll think than anything is possible and that my friend is the whole point.
Asking questions is part of an innovators skill set, but the truly imaginative one’s don’t just ask them all time, they ask them because they imagine a better way of doing things. If you want to create a better reality for yourself and for others, imagine what could be. Repeat after me: Why? What if? Why not? Repeat.
Disrupt yourself to change the game you play in
If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules. – Paul Arden
All a disruptor really does is change something from one state to another by breaking patterns. Google is a typical disruptor, they seek ways to ‘disrupt’ a familiar flow in how things get done to another and then change the rules by creating new ones that play in the new state.
Disrupt or be disrupted.
Like Google we must learn ‘to be disruptive’ starting with ourselves. We have to disrupt our own flow of how we do things, changing how we do them not just for the hell of it but because it’s the only way to stay relevant. This isn’t just for product development, marketing or sales, it’s looking at your business from 30000 FT and asking yourself: what can I change to be better and what can someone else change that could put me in a disadvantage?
A game-changer is a disruptor.
Where do you start.
- Be aware of governing schemas (mental models)
- Be aware of the patterns that shape behavior
- Be aware of the rules
- Be aware of trends
- Be aware of things that haven’t changed in awhile (rigid)
What do you do?
> Do the opposite
> See how you can change things from one state to another (ice to water)
> Blend it
> Find the in congruencies and make them congruent.
> Do the unfamiliar by making the common uncommon.
> Ask why?
> Ask what if?
A disruptor moves at a different pace than others, it constantly probes the system to get an insight because the faster this happens the more it learns and the faster it moves. Learn to fail fast and break away from everybody!
How are you disrupting yourself? How about your business? Who’s disrupting you?
