Maple Syrup season at
our Adirondack office inspires us to boil things down to their essence. What
follows is our distillation of what really works to create a sustainable
innovation culture.
In our roles as attendee’s
presenter’s leaders and emcees at various innovation and creativity conferences
over the past 20 years, we have seen a lot of presentations that offer up
suggestions for “how to drive innovation through systems, processes, procedures,
tools, business models, alliances, arrangements and so forth. We’ve enjoyed and
learned from all of them, and reveled in the debates that ensued. (Two
favorites: “Stage–gate doesn’t work,” (George Land) vs. “Stage–gate is the only
way!” (Deloitte & Touché) and “Brainstorming doesn’t work” (Larry Kelley,
Doblin) vs. “We use structured brainstorming all the time for our outstanding
results” (Tom Kelley, IDEO).
We believe the
presenters assertions that their suggestions really do work especially in their
organizations, with their challenges, in their context. However, we believe the
moment someone takes one of these polarized positions, and claims it as The
Truth, they fall into the boiling vat of narrow mindedness missing the point of
what drives innovation. All of these approaches are designed to work around
defects, yet fail to emphasize the fact that the main obstacle to innovation is
the human being.
Yes, it all boils down
to people. People, and their resistance and the obstacles they have that block
them from seeing things in new ways and doing things differently. All of the
innovation methods are, at their essence, ways to get people to work
productively and collaboratively. Yes, the biggest resister of innovation is
people. And yet the most significant driver of innovation is...people, which
bring us to our list. One based on research, curious listening, and the
collective experience in driving innovation in hundreds of organizations.
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