Tag Archives: innovation skills
Are You Indispensable at Work?
This is a guest post by Robert B. Tucker
In a time of economic disruption, unprecedented downsizings, budgetary cutbacks and the constant pressure to outsource more and more routine functions (and the employees who perform them), advice on professional survival always seems to convey the same tired message: Be visible. Don’t make enemies. Brown nose the boss. And work even harder.
In reality, you are already working hard. Simply working harder will not be enough, and may lead to a burnout. Relying solely on your functional skills and expertise will not be enough to make you difficult to replace. And your years of experience on the job may not have the cachet they once did either.
The good news is there is something you can do to take charge of your career if you’re willing to consider it. Based on research and interviews with 43 standout employees whom peers, bosses and colleagues identified as indispensable, I believe the only way to become more valuable to your organization – and have incredible job satisfaction in the process – is to focus on mastering a new set of strategic skills. (more…)
Remove the associative barriers that hinder new ideas
Image via Wikipedia
Last week I mentioned that the number one creative skill you need to master is the ability to free associate, to make connections between dissimilar things. I just stumbled into Ellen Di Resta’s post on the innovator’s perception where she probes further into the concept to which I left a comment:
Hello Ellen,
You’re right. I think it comes down to people’s ‘associative barriers’, or the ability to make new connection between dissimilar things.
For example if I say ‘car’ someone might say ‘tire’ because our minds make that connection automatically because we know it exists. But how about if I say ‘granola’ and someone else says ‘water’, which makes no sense to some of us but if you put the two together that person might see ‘river’.
So in other words when someone sees something different out of the unknown it’s because that person has very low associative barriers.
One of the reasons why most of us can’t make insightful new connections between dissimilar things is because we have ‘high associative barriers’. A person with high associative barriers will quickly arrive at conclusions when confronted with a problem since their thinking is more focused. He or she will recall how the problem has been handled in the past or how others in similar situations solved it. A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically.
The question then is how do we remove these barriers?
Understand why
If you’re on the ‘high barrier’ side, it has nothing to do with your parent’s genes, it has to do with with how our brains evolve. Our brains evolve to find order in things, grouping concepts together and finding structure in the environment surrounding it.
Be aware and destroy
I think they key is to be aware of this and then systematically break down those barriers by exposing yourself to new stuff like traveling to new places, talking to people whom you have nothing in common with, reading about stuff outside of your interests and then questioning your own assumptions as to how you think the world works.
The internet provides us with all this and more, and right at the center of it is other people (social media ring a bell?). If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one right now. You’re going to want to follow some people so go to Listorious and instead of looking for people that fit your interests do the opposite and follow dissimilar people (Ex. if you’re into art, follow people in science!) and see what they’re sharing and engage them.
Combine both
If you take two people — one with high barriers, the other with low barriers — and you give them the same information about a problem, they’ll approach the problem in a completely different way. So the objective is to be able to achieve ‘whole brain thinking’, where we can shift from divergent to convergent thinking in the flip of a switch. The more fluid our thinking is the better we’ll be equipped to adapt and make sense of things that look like a puzzle with no shape of form.
What would you add?
The no. 1 innovation skill you need to master
A friend of mine who recently visited this blog made the observation that I make a lot of reference to sports, I though this was kind of cool because he noticed it and understood what I was trying to convey. This is an important observation because as we’ve mentioned before, one of the key skills that distinguishes innovators is the ability to ‘associate’, to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas.
For me it’s very easy to see connections between sports and other areas because I’ve been watching, playing and studying sports since the day I was born. The way I see it is sports is the highest form of competition because it requires both physical and mental prowess which are also required in everything else. We can learn a lot about the connection between sports and business because athletes push themselves to the limits, they try to get better everyday, they find ways to motivate themselves, they make their teammates better and therefore their team better.
See the connection with business?
For you reader it might not be sports, it can be cooking, quilting, hiking, reading, writing, riding or anything that you’re deeply passionate about. The real challenge is to see connections between what you’re highly interested in and something you’re not, but once you break that barrier you’ll find almost everything interesting.
If this seems strange, it isn’t. The key is to introduce randomness into your routines and your thinking by exposing yourself to new stuff and then relating that to whatever it is you need an idea for.
Whether we like it or not, the process of innovation is dictated by random combinations of different concepts. Ideas are everywhere and it’s up to us to see the connections between one field and another that might yield a new insight, a new perspective or a new angle on things. Overall the ability to associate is the most important skill we should master because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven’t been connected before.
If there’s one book that can help you understand this concept it’s the Medici Effect by Frans Johansson which you can download here.
How the Innovators DNA works
What are the personal characteristics of successful innovators?
According to some new research by Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen which included a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews they found five ‘discovery skills’ that distinguish them:
Associating
Most successful innovators tend to be very good at seeing connections between seemingly disparate ideas.
Questioning
The ability to ask “what if”, “why”, and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture.
Observation
Attention to details, most notably in other people’s behavior.
Experiment
Always try new things by constantly exploring new worlds.
Networking
Ability to talk and learn from people they have nothing in common with.
Let’s call this the innovators code.
