It has been a delight to work through the concept of "Innovation" at the GALA Leadership Symposium this weekend in Denver, Colorado. GALA is meeting in Denver as they prepare for a national festival there next year. These are some thoughts I shared at the GALA Symposium:
Referencing my definition of innovation last week ….”an act of sustained creativity”… the following are five steps I use in search of innovation. While ramping up to innovation is not as clearly definable as, say, changing a tire on a car, innovation does having something in common with a tire change–it takes work. I have observed and participated in a number of creative ideas developed to the point of sustainability I can rightly call innovative. The following five steps can be identified as part of the process I followed:
- Read in as many areas of interest as you have, and read deeply. Be particularly keen to read and study outside of your immediate field of inquiry. Cross-applications, metaphors, and analogies often lead to breakthroughs in ideas and applications. What is needed is not only expertise in an area, but also the ability to make connections between areas of inquiry. My rule of thumb….I set a goal of reading 400 pages each week;
- If you don’t already read poetry, start reading it. (Triple your acquired page count above if you are reading poetry!) For those that deal with words and ideas in our creative tasks, poetry provides a helpful and beautiful window to the world that scientific description misses. A perfect example of this is the poetry of the Bible, which advances our understanding far better than a mere operational manual would do (I have always viewed the Bible as “poetry-plus, not science-minus”);
- Ask “Why” a lot, and look for the simple, transforming answer. This is the lesson we learn over and over again from the great innovator, Leonardo da Vinci. Lenny would ask “perchè” over and over when approaching a challenge or a problem. We find the word in his writings and notebooks. He was not afraid to ask the strange questions and the questions that others were apparently not asking;
- Look at other boxes and find out how they operate. I find that innovation happens, more often than not, by looking at a situation through another box, not just “outside the box”. While the new path or idea may indeed be outside of your operational box, it might be a common path if viewed through another box;
- Look to collaborative cerebration as a way to generate new facts, ideas, and approaches to challenge. As we look to the work of collaboration, we have to keep in mind we want diversity of thinking, that diversity brings tension, and that new ways are discovered as a result of working through tension, not as some theory that is known up front and worked through during the collaborative process. In other words, collaboration “stumbles upon” a path to innovation.
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