Category: Psychology
I had an interesting discussion recently with a company vice-president that asked me what he could do in terms of facilities design to make the work environment more conducive to innovation. Anyone familiar with my Theory of Constraints (TOC) based approach to innovation improvement will know that my response was to ask him if the facility was his innovation bottleneck. After getting an unsure look, I continued and asked what one thing was most constraining his organization’s new product throughput. He pondered my question for a second or two and replied, “I guess I’d have to say that it’s finding more impactful new product ideas.” That made my response simple. “Then if you want to create a better environment for innovation, get out of yours and into theirs.” He stared at me with a puzzled look for a moment then smiled. “So the internal stuff isn’t where I should focus.”Bingo … Continue reading
Sometimes in life – boardroom, living room or classroom – we get so scared of failure that we make it impossible for ourselves to succeed. In an economy in reset mode, the unreasonable power of creativity is what will set smart people and companies apart. But the thing about creativity is that it breeds failure as well as success.That’s the paradox. In a jittery economy, people suppress creativity to minimize the risk of failure, and companies often encourage that kind of insular thinking. But it’s exactly the wrong approach – if allowed to set in, fear of failure will set an organization on auto-pilot, nose down.Jonah Lehrer wrote on his blog in December about how psychologists are learning more about how the creative brain functions. He used the example of a simple but powerful experiment among college students. Two groups were told to list as many modes of transport as … Continue reading
This is the third of my “Innovation Distinctions” entries.In the first part of this series, I wrote why you should focus on “Challenges, not Ideas.” Next, I addressed the distinction of “Process, not Events.”In this final entry, I discuss why innovation requires “Diversity not Homogeneity.” Be sure to read the previous two articles before reading this one.As mentioned in the other blog entries, I first shared these distinctions with a group of speakers and authors who were brainstorming ways to improve the learning experience for other speakers and authors who attend their conferences. Here’s the Catch 22: Having only speakers and authors speaking to other speakers and authors does not lead to much creativity. Most of the “ideas” presented are well-worn and don’t address the “real world” outside of the industry.Therefore, my last suggestion to the group was to increase the level of diversity at these learning experiences. This would … Continue reading
Brilliant thinkers and innovators are very comfortable with ambiguity – they welcome it. Routine thinkers like clarity and simplicity; they dislike ambiguity. There is a tendency in our society to reduce complex issues down to simple issues with obviously clear solutions. We see evidence of this in the tabloid press. There have been some terrible crimes committed in our cities. A violent offender received what is seen to be a lenient sentence. This shows that judges are out of touch with what is needed and that heavy punishment will stop the crime wave. The brilliant thinker is wary of simple nostrums like these. He or she knows that complex issues usually involve many causes and these may need many different and even conflicting solutions.Routine thinkers are often dogmatic. They see a clear route forward and they want to follow it. The advantage of this is that they can make decisive … Continue reading
As always, we’d like to make our readers and clients happy. In that vein, I’d like to introduce how to spot people who are likely innovators. In this way, you can identify them more quickly, and choose to hire them if you want to be more innovative, or you can ignore and avoid them if the status quo is more your scene. Good luck with that strategy, by the way.Identifying people who are innovators is actually relatively easy. They are the ones who don’t actually seem to belong the organization in the first place.Innovators tend to:Reject the standard framing of a problem and restate the problem or opportunity. Rather than work within the given constructs or framing, many innovators want to toss out the framing and start anew. Just like Galileo, this may require working against an orthodoxy, yet nonetheless, it moves and so must we. Those folks who are … Continue reading
Amazon and Netflix might be great together, but not for the reasons you might think.The way I see this, it’s a little bit like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes you might not expect to go well together. People are talking about the possible acquisition of video company Netflix by Amazon, and they are speculating that it has to do with movies and streaming media. Maybe, but I don’t think that’s why this acquisition would be so powerful, and I am frankly surprised I haven’t heard more people talking about this.Here’s why.One of the biggest mistakes I think Amazon has been making all along is ignoring the buying history of customers. They never recommend anything to me based on my buying history. They tell me what other people have bought when I buy a certain book or a tent or a squash racket, but they don’t seem to really … Continue reading
