Yes, let them steal them. Crazy? Not so. I’ve written before about how I freely give up ideas with complete disregard for what other people or businesses will do with them. Why? Two reasons:…
Tag Archives: Creativity
How to think
We’re one week away from 2015, people will make their resolutions and try to keep them for a whole year; which usually doesn’t work out as planned. One resolution, an ongoing effort actually, that we should all aim for on a daily basis is that of making better decisions.
That means thinking better, which will have a cumulative effect in all else we do; including executing on our New Year resolutions.
A question I get asked often is something along the lines of , “How can I improve my ability to make better decisions?” To this, I respond with a counter question, “why do you think you make bad decisions in the first place?”
The reframing of the question, is good example of “what to do” to make better decisions. Thus, an easy way to make better decisions is to ask yourself questions, but that usually comes after you’ve done some grunt work to define a better question beforehand. …
How do you know which rules are worth breaking?
Want to spark innovation? Kill some stupid rules.…
How to cultivate the Generalist within
As a rule of thumb, your business needs more generalists than specialists if it wants to innovate. Don’t get me wrong, specialists are valuable. But Generalists are the innovators, the ones who are most capable of dealing with complexity; the ones that connect that dots. For that very reason, as a generalist, I know it’s hard to get us to pay attention to anything uninteresting; much less get inspired. We need to be challenged; constantly. We also need to be unleashed; not managed.
But for an organization that is willing to change, as your own, you can turn yourself into a generalist, create the conditions for great ideas to emerge and spark the innovation mindset in your business.
How?
Simple: broaden yourself.
Here are a few ways how I do it:…
Structured serendipity: How Great Ideas Emerge
in Creativity, Innovation
Almost always great new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before. As a business leader, you can engineer these connections; serendipity.
Serendipity is the type of word that paralyzes most business leaders because it is a loosey-goosey term that means “let’s see what happens”. Seeing what happens is not what traditional businesses aim to do when developing their strategies. Yet, many of the greatest innovations have sprung from serendipity: Happy accidents that sprung from tinkering, chance encounters that happen because you didn’t plan for something in advance; serendipity happens all the time.
So, what is the easiest way to engineer serendipity?
Two ways: varying what you learn and where you learn it.
Detecting seemingly random concepts is an act of creativity, this doesn’t happen if all you do is talk to the same people you always talk to, read (if at all) the same stuff you always read. It also doesn’t happen if you never visit places you’ve never been to.
A few years back I conceived a mechanism to engineer serendipity for a client: The Lunch Club.
Basically, in almost all organizations most employees always go to lunch with the same people. The Lunch Club aims to change this by setting up colleagues from different departments or with people from outside the organization for lunch; it happens once a week.
The result from these random interactions is new perspectives, new ideas; people who are more aware. When business leaders talk about developing their employees strategic thinking skills, this is one way to do it. There are many other ways to engineer serendipity inside an organization, such as moving from one workspace to another to be with different people, job swapping with colleagues with other departments, etc..
As an individual, I’ve benefited from serendipity more times than I can count; and deliberately try to create serendipity. What do I do to engineer serendipity? I’ve already told you about my practice of talking to someone new every week, learning from their trade and then immediately thinking about how I can use some of those ideas in my craft.
Creativity is about thinking new things, that means making uncommon connections between ideas from other domains. When all you do is talk to the same people, read the same thing over and over again you are moving in a straight line along with everyone else. Parallel lines never cross; serendipity requires diversity.
Bottom line: We should each invest a few hours a week, in reading stuff that has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. That kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt.
Another tip is to attend different corporate trainings. Pici & Pici, Inc has a lot of training programs to offer for those looking for career development as well as personal growth.
Interactions, not individuals, drive breakthroughs
in Innovation
A key skill all innovators have is the ability to network with the objective of developing ideas, finding collaborators, bouncing ideas off others and overall just building their ideas. Rather than being individualists, innovators are collaborators. They understand that it takes a diverse community of people working on a single problem to drive breakthroughs; as opposed to a single hardworking individual:…
As our decision making skills decline with age, how does it affect our ability to innovate?
Much like corporations become slow and stagnant, our own skills decline as we age; unless we do something about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in decision making……