FireFly Facilitation

Myth #3:  The Lone Creative Genius. 

For example let’s take this fellow here – all alone it would appear in his lab.  Want want to take a guess as to who this inventor is?  (If you give up, look at the big lightbulb over his head for inspiration!)

 That’s right…Thomas Edison!

Many people think of him as a lone creative genius, but even he said “Genius is 1 % inspiration and 99%….(you fill in the blank)….perspiration.” 

Let’s just stop and think about that a moment.  Although in cartoons we might see something like a light bulb showing up over someone’s head or a bolt of lightning out of the blue – and boom a brilliant idea is born.  But that’s not how it works in real life.  You have to nurture a brand new idea.

He also said another great quote – that I absolutely love and think can be instructive for all of us… “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

You might have thought that Edison worked alone —- developing all those patents, but that’s not the case. 

In fact he worked with a broad creative team.   Here they are in 1876 on the site of their industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, Pennsylvania.   He called it “the invention factory” – because they were always working on several different inventions at any one time.  Together they were more creative than Edison could have possibly been on his own. Together they found success – and over 400 patents.

Just like on your team – each one of you have a critical role to play to bring out the best in your team. 

Because all of us are smarter than any of us.

There is a new focus for innovation – and it is called design thinking.  It is all about breaking down the organizational silos and making everyone in the company responsible for innovation.  One of the chief proponents is Tim Brown -  CEO and president of IDEO and author of  Change by Design 

Tim Brown is an industrial designer by training, and has won numerous design awards.  His team even appeared on a news show, demonstrating how to create a new and improved shopping cart in just 4 days.  His passion is finding ways design can be used to promote the well being of people living in emerging economies. [In fact, many innovative ideas are being created by focusing on these emerging economies].

 He says one of the keys to great ideation is great preparation.  And great preparation begins with a design brief.  Here he captures the power in his own words:

“The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.”

And I have found this to be true in my work facilitating innovation sessions, though it may seem counter-intuitive.  Often, the clients I work with say they want the brainstorming session to be very broad because they want to “empower” the participants.  In fact the opposite tends to happen.   When the “creativity canvas” is too wide, it actually either leads to too many ideas that are off the mark and not actionable or too many ideas that do not address the most critical challenges. 

As Brown says above, with just the right ending to the sentence – “How might we…” – you too can catch your team on fire with creativty aimed in the right direction!

In a recent Accenture survey, 89% of executives agreed that innovation is as important as cost management for high performance.  This indicates a big shift from 2009.  The emphasis for most companies last year was on how to cut expenses.  This year, there is the realization that you can’t cut your way to business growth.  And this survey bears that out.

Okay, from the Accenture survey we know execs think innovation is important.  Below is the Daily Stat email I receive from Harvard Business Review (a very valuable resource that I strongly encourage you to check out).  From this Ernst and Young survey, we can see that only half of the senior executives see their companies as more innovative than their competition – and 17% even say their less innovative than peers.   

There are several reasons cited for this.  For example, while many companies are investing more in innovation, only a few have a rigorous approach for managing the process.  As a result even innovative companies often fail to realize the benefits that their new ideas could produce.

Interestingly, almost half of them blame the lack of appropriate personnel as a major contributor to their lack of innovation.  You know as well as I do that you can’t just go getting rid of everyone you don’t think is creative – and in fact you don’t have to.  There are ways – which I will share with you in later blog posts – for discovering and tapping into the creativity in each of us. 

And this is where you come in.  Strategic, progressive leaders have an incredible role to play in boosting the innovation occurring within their companies – and it all begins with employee engagement.   Next post – some proven ideas for how to engage your top talent.