Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 12

A Map for Engineering Your Next Innovation [Infographic]

Innovation is about bringing together individuals with diverse strengths who can push against each other and build something collaboratively that they never would’ve come up with on their own. Innovation happens when there is constructive conflict, or positive tension, within an organization-not total agreement.

In my own work strategizing innovation practices for some of the worlds biggest and best companies, I use the Innovation Genome to find this place of positive tension. The Innovation Genome is a creative map of organizational dynamics that tells us how competing talents and seemingly opposing worldviews can come together to promote growth. While innovation is often thought of as the domain of exceptional individuals only The Innovation Genome shows how anyone can engineer innovation.

I made this infographic in hopes that you will have a better understanding of how the Innovation Genomeworks and how anyone can apply its functionality to their own work. No matter the size of the organization, the Innovation Genomeis the proven integral map for innovation that anyone can use.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. You can learn more about his groundbreaking University of Michigan Certified Professional Innovator Certificate Program and Innovatrium Institute for Innovation at www.jeffdegraff.com/cpi and keynote speeches through BigSpeak Speakers Bureau.

When Nobody Wants Your Innovation

What happens when the comfort of the old is preferable to the risk of the new? This is the situation all innovators face when presenting their ideas or inventions to a hesitant public: we’re dissatisfied with the way things are now, but we’re not yet willing to embrace the future.

Everywhere you look, you’ll see this wildly contradictory set of desires and feelings toward change. We hate traffic jams, but we refuse to try self-driving cars. We dream of improving the quality and length of our lives, but we’re reluctant to tamper with the genetic triggers of a disease. We want to eliminate global hunger, but we have a bias against genetically modified drought-resistant food.

Why are we so frustrated with our present-day reality yet unwilling to accept the alternatives of the better and the new? Radical innovation comes with a high cost–a price many won’t pay. Innovation goes beyond merely eliminating and replacing old ways of doing things–it also eliminates and replaces traditional ways of seeing the world. It shakes the very foundation of our beliefs.

This is why it’s much easier for innovators to develop an idea or come up with an invention than it is to sell it: people are resistant to any kind of change in their belief systems. So when it comes to gaining support for your innovation, it’s not enough to prove that this development will make things faster and easier. You need to synch up your initiative with the worldviews of those whom it will affect. Here are three strategies for turning innovation skeptics into believers.

Connect cause to effect. We’re all naturally short-term thinkers: paying next month’s rent or meeting this quarter’s numbers is more important to us than what will happen ten years in the future. Appeal to this sense of immediacy when presenting your innovation. Show the world why your idea or invention is necessary today. Consider, for example, the way we value our freedom to drive cars. The results of global warming feel far-off, out-of-sight, and unrelated to our driving habits right now. The cost of switching our lives around to take more environmentally friendly forms of transportation feels too high for most people. But when we connect these issues to things that are more recent, dramatic–even traumatic–in our minds, like the brutal winters on the East Coast and the deadly drought on the West Coast, then suddenly the case for change is a compelling one. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that as these present-day weather extremes persist, the rates of adopting new technologies like hybrid cars are increasing. Relate your innovation to real experiences with concrete effects in the current moment.

Appeal to a higher cause. Small advancements can feel like earth-shattering violations of our norms. While it seems perfectly acceptable to give patients pills in order to get better, the idea of artificially growing a new organ and transplanting it into a person may sound like an outrageous disruption of what it means to administer care. In reality, both of these advancements are innovation interventions. What many don’t see is that what seems normal today–administering medication–was once itself a major challenge to prevailing conventions. Since we’re always bound by our own place in history and the perspective that limits us to, it’s crucial to communicate the greater purpose of an innovation. Instead of giving the standard technical account of a new device or service, highlight how it advances our noble aspirations. Identify the larger mission of your individual innovation.

Provide alternatives in small steps. Radical change is best served in incremental doses. Keep the concept of your innovation revolutionary, but implement it in an evolutionary way. Only a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable to suggest that we would have a globally connected super-computer in our pockets–and that’s basically what smartphones are. Traditional universities are still thriving, but even the most prestigious schools in the country offer online programs. Stadiums and athletic venues remain the center of all professional sporting events, though physical attendance continues to decrease as more and more fans consume games through emerging digital venues. These are all major innovations that many people would be otherwise reluctant to accept. In essence, though, these changes have already happened without much resistance, because they’re happening gradually. Pace your innovations to bring the adopters along in steps.

The goal is to change the minds of people who will actually benefit from your innovation. Be honest and transparent in gaining the consent and acceptance of your non-believers. All of our worldviews could benefit from reflection and reconsideration. That is the power of a truly radical innovation.

We live in a world that favors tradition. The public will always support the old, the established, the conventional. It’s your job as an innovator to be an advocate for the new. Remember that the future is already here even if not everyone is aware of it. The next time any innovation skeptics doubt the possibility of your invention or idea, ask them who flew the last airplane they traveled on. Chances are it was on autopilot.

The Three Realities of Innovators

How do you build a bridge to a place that doesn’t yet exist? This is the paradoxical challenge that every innovator faces: to envision and reach for the future before it happens. This requires the gift of foresight-a skill that involves seeing emerging opportunities and taking action on those opportunities.

There are two ways that innovators navigate the unknown. The first is by seeing the future first and then constructing a bridge toward it. This is what Copernicus and Einstein did: they made game-changing observations and provided pathways for practitioners to make use of that knowledge.

The other way is to build a bridge and see the future as you cross over it. Consider all the important experimenters who discovered things and then worked backwards to build theories around them. This is what the Wright Brothers did for avionics and what Marie and Pierre Curie did for radiology. They all noticed phenomena that didn’t correlate to accepted theories and then created new models based on these observations.

What all these great thinkers have in common is the ability to make sense of changing worlds. Crucial to the initial steps of any innovation project is sense-making: understanding the inner workings of your surroundings and knowing how to apply and re-apply your deep insights. That is how innovators make their visions come to life.

So how can you take the abstract musings of early-stage brainstorming and turn them into real projects with real results? Here are the three realities that we must see, integrate, and act on in order to make innovation happen.

Imagination. This is a vision in its most powerful (and least concrete) form. There are three forms of imagination. The first is fantasy: something that you create in your mind, not unlike the way a novelist dreams up another world. The second is vision, which is less about creation and more about discovery. A vision is something that you’ve gone out and found or stumbled upon yourself. Think of yourself as Magellan or da Gama, on your own exploration voyage. The last kind of imaginative reality is a revelation-something that is given to us. In his journal, Tesla writes of angels that showed him what went on to become Tesla coils, oscillators that create high-frequency, high-voltage electricity. Inspiration may come from unlikely-even unbelievable-places.

Speculation. Once you see something noteworthy, it’s time to make a hypothesis about it: come up with a cause-and-effect explanation for it. Then, once you have many little hypotheses, bring those together in a larger theory. This entails filling in the gaps between hypotheses and coming up with a more complex account of the trend. The final part of speculation is creating a complete worldview-connecting the dots in the largest way possible. There are tons of examples of this process in scientific discoveries. A classic is the Broad Street Pump Incident of 1854, when physician and skeptic John Snow linked a London-wide cholera epidemic to a single water pump. Once he removed the handle from the pump, the epidemic stopped. This breakthrough observation and action went from hypothesis to theory to an entire worldview, changing the way people think about communicable disease. A personal speculation has the potential to shift paradigms.

Realization. It’s no coincidence that this form of reality has the word “real” in it: this stage of sense-making is about making your ideas tangible and bringing them down to everyday life. Be flexible and run lots of experiments. Take your observations and break them down into their individual parts. Be a reverse-engineer-deconstruct to reconstruct. After you’ve done your experiments, interpret the results. See what works and what doesn’t work.

Innovators do not work alone. They may start with a vision, but it takes a team of people to turn that vision into something bigger. Einstein first published his theory of relativity in 1904, yet it wasn’t until validated until 1922, when a man named W. W. Campbell took photographs of the total eclipse of the sun in Australia at different times of the day and found that the stars were slightly out of position. In fact, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for general contributions to work in electromagnetism, before his theory of relativity had even been accepted as reality.

If Einstein needed help, so will you. Visionaries don’t have to make everything work themselves. Some innovators see the vision and pass it on to the next thinkers, while others build on the work of people who have come before them. Innovation is an ensemble performance. The best kinds of visions are collective visions. Who will help you move through the three realities of innovation?

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. You can learn more about his groundbreaking University of Michigan Certified Professional Innovator Certificate Program and Innovatrium Institute for Innovation at www.jeffdegraff.com/cpi.

Before There Were TED Talks, There Were Chautauquas

Before there were TED talks, there were Chautauquas. In the late-nineteenth century, Americans looking for cultural stimulation and intellectual inspiration gathered for weeklong retreats of lectures, performances, and conversations. These outdoor fairs started at Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York and quickly became a national movement.

Under the big tents of a Chautauqua, attendees might listen to a talk on spiritual awakening, see a Shakespeare play for the first time, and learn about strategies for improving health–all in the same day. Chautauquas emphasized the development of the self, and in doing so, sparked the adult education and self-help revolution in the U.S. Teddy Roosevelt called Chautauquas the most American thing in America because they celebrated life-long learning and self-actualization.

Innovators can learn a lot from the turn-of-the-century Chautauqua movement. These getaways allowed people to take a break from their normal routines and experiment with new ideas. In our own moment, we desperately need this free time–this space to reflect and create. We live in a post-modern workplace, where we multi-task everything and respond to professional e-mails at all hours of the night. Radical innovation entails deep and patient introspection–slow processes that won’t fit into an already-packed day-to-day schedule.

Those of us with the money and time can attend modern-day Chautauquas: TED, the Omega Institute, the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Santa Fe Institute, the Esalen Institute–even Comic-Con or Burning Man. There are hundreds of these events, conferences, and seminars, but they’re very much oriented toward the leisure class.

What about the rest of us? What about those of us without the means or time to take ourselves out of our daily routines? What can we do to re-engage our imaginations and re-invigorate our spirits? Here are three strategies for hosting your own innovation Chautauquas in your everyday world:

Make room. Innovation requires slack resources and time. It’s a point people often miss: innovation is not an efficient thing. Creative thinkers have to doodle around and test out ideas before they see what works. So make room in your schedule and carve out the space and resources for creativity and flexibility. Look for an off-site near your own site. Coffee shops, churches, museums, and schools after-hours: these are all places usually available for use at a low-cost. Find topics and guests that will give you energy–people who will stir you to action.

Mix it up. Innovation is less like a salon, where everyone talks at once, and more like a variety show, where featured acts share their gifts for a short period of time and then open up the floor for a Q&A. The beauty of Chautauquas is that they’re not transactional–they’re interactive. They depend on a communal dynamic. With our ability to synch things up through social media, we can bring people together at a moment’s notice. Actively seek out new communities. See who’s in town and reach out to them. Pick topics and questions that challenge you. Stretch your thinking to its farthest, unlikeliest reaches. Cross boundaries and consult with experts in fields other than your own. Remember that innovation happens in the white spaces between traditional disciplinary divides.

Act out. It’s easy to talk, but much harder to do something. The show-and-tell phase of brainstorming is crucial, yet the next phase is even more important: enlist-and-act. This means actually running all of the experiments you talk about. The more experiments you run, the better chance you’ll have at creating something new. Experiments don’t have to be big to be effective. What’s important is that they’re diverse. A wide array of small experiments will build the momentum you need to drive your innovation initiative.

By hosting our own Chautauquas, we do the creative work that the organization can’t do for itself. Once we bring our Chautauqua into the organization, it loses that disruptive, flexible energy. So keep it out of the hierarchy of your workplace. Instead of moving the tent into the office, see who you can get under the tent. Invite key stakeholders one-by-one into your creative space.

Chautauquas are not about changing the world–they’re about changing ourselves. The idea is that if we innovate ourselves, then the people around us will be inspired to do the same. What will your lakeside retreat look like?

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. You can learn more about his groundbreaking University of Michigan Certified Professional Innovator Certificate Program and Innovatrium Institute for Innovation at www.jeffdegraff.com/cpi.

The Unlikely Source of Your Next Big Breakthrough

The middleman just might be the vanguard of your next innovation strategy. It’s time to reimagine the role of supply chains in our creative thinking. The truth is that the suppliers we all depend on are greater than the parts they provide. Supply chains are more than places where orders are fulfilled or materials are assembled. They are untapped sources of innovative potential and growth.

The fundamental nature of supply chains has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years. In the early 2000s, optimization was the goal of supply-chain management as we raced to make things better, cheaper, and faster.

Today, supply-chain management is about adaptability, flexibility, and collaboration. That’s because suppliers themselves have become active components of the organizations they provide for. Consider, for example, the making of the iPhone. A complex array of large and small firms, product developers, and service providers come together to build this do-all device.

The people who were once in the supply chain are now actually selling the products themselves. Chinese companies that used to provide parts for large American car companies are now in the business of making their own cars in Asia. Tesla has eliminated car dealerships altogether. The middleman has officially become the front man.

Many of the things that make innovation possible come from supply chains. Think of all the breakthroughs in material science that have revolutionized the core mechanisms and infrastructures of so many industries. The beauty of supply chains is that they see horizontally: they look at all aspects of a business, all regions and all units. Supply chains see things that people in the front office can’t see–they see across boundaries.

So how can you bring the back-office insights of supply chains to the front of your organization? Here are three plans of action that will help you use suppliers for your innovation advantage.

Get to know your own backyard. We all have an extensive network of supply-chain support–from our Internet providers to our credit cards, banks, and other financial-service systems to the couriers who send and deliver our packages. Most of us have only a cursory understanding of what these people can actually do for us. We may know the main benefits of these programs, but we remain in the dark when it comes to knowing how they can enhance our innovations. Build relationships with your support teams. Make calls and sight visits to these places. Educate yourself about the capabilities of your supply chain. What you learn will likely surprise you.

Go to show-and-tell events. There are tons of innovation sources in supply-chain sectors of all kinds, but you won’t know about them if you’re not exposed to them. Attend information fairs and showcases hosted by universities, governmental organizations, and trade associations. Meet new people, ask tons of questions that speak to your particular needs. Talk to the people you travel with and listen to the solutions they’ve conjured up for their situations. You may be able to reapply them to your organization. Remember that these forms of communication are not limited to your competitors or the individuals in your industry but open to people in all areas closely and remotely related to your own.

Be vigilant. Watch out for emerging developments and opportunities by establishing listing posts. These are efforts of any kind to gather information about the trends surrounding your innovation initiative. Connect to specialists outside of your field. Read publications and reports that other people don’t pay attention to. The goal is to pick up on things that are commonly overlooked. For example, when the recent tsunami in Japan wiped out major segments of automobile manufacturing, it took a long time for the supply chain to re-source where these missed parts were coming from. Events like natural disasters and political crises happen all the time but are not regularly accounted for, creating huge vulnerabilities. Set up Internet alerts that will you key you into game-changing incidents ahead of everyone else. This way, you can prepare to take advantage of the opportunities and guard against the obstacles before they arise.

Suppliers are no longer outsider manufacturers who work independently of your business. Make them a part of your strategy–bring them into your decision-making process. Think of them as the executives with all the behind-the-scenes knowledge only an insider can have. The key to your innovation whole is in the people who deliver the parts.

The Wisdom of the Rule of Three

For years I trained consultants in the ambiguous and complex art of innovation at a prestigious consulting firm. I was amused at their indoctrination which included an unbending adherence to the rule of three. No, not that bad things happen in threes but rather that a client should always be given three paths to action: most ambitious, most cautious and a middle way. These correlate to best case, worst case and most probable case. The objective of this rule is to provide some perspective as to the range of options available, cover as much of the upside and downside of the issue in question as reasonable and to gauge the client’s level of aspiration. Given that most of us can only really remember three things at a time, this rule is simply a strategy to break habit bound thinking by showing obvious alternatives.

Lately I’m beginning to see the wisdom in the rule of three. Where it used to be that the center of the bell curve marked the gathering place of consensus or at least cooperative collaboration, it is now the right and left edges of the curve that define the places that keep us apart. These segments are defined by their oppositional relationships. Social media has exasperated the situation as it has become a micro-segmenting forum for marketers and provocateurs alike. Spin becomes the opinion of the segment, and in turn, the segment takes opinion as fact. Consider how many postings you have seen in the last week that not only express a contempt for an alternative point of view but support it with a barrage of partisan data, dubious facts and conspicuous omissions. These segments are motivated to act in a unilateral way sometimes with tragic consequences. The old adage “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts” appears to have little gravitas in a world where the two are now indistinguishable.

The most dangerous thing an innovator can do is to believe that they know something that is actually untrue and be unwilling to make adjustments to this belief as their experiences provide information to the contrary. So how do we gain real perspective in an environment designed to coopt our own thinking?

Look in Your Blind Spots: When we drive, we know that our mirrors don’t reveal the entire situation so we glance over our shoulder just in case to see what we may have missed. The same is true when it comes to our thinking. Instead of “unfriending” that person in your social media network who is always rambling about politics or religion take a moment to actually read their posts. Ask yourself why they believe what they believe. Consider what it must be like to be in their shoes. Look for a deeper rational. This will enhance your understanding.
Feed Your Head: Read, watch and listen to sources that you seldom encounter or fully engage. If you are straight read The Advocate, if you are progressive, read The National Review. Keep an open mind. Most importantly, look for information or a point of view where you can see a glimmer of truth even though you don’t necessarily adhere to it personally. Psychologists call this counter-attitudinal advocacy: making a strong argument for the opposition. This will increase your range.
Check Your Facts: To gain perspective, you must move outside your normal sphere of influence. Talk with others who take a higher point of view. Consult experts who are more likely to be objective about the situation. Step away from your opinions for a moment and consider the salient facts these experts may possess. Listen for disconfirming feedback: where your ideas are proven to be wrong and your course of action erroneous. This will improve your accuracy.

Innovation requires us to have deep and wide field of vision and an open mind to see the reality of the situation. The challenge is to overcome our own limited perspective. As the philosopher Schopenhauer put it, “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” The next time you encounter a disagreeable idea count to three and consider how with a little creativity it might present some valuable new options that you may have overlooked.

What Will You Give Up to Make Room For Innovation?

At the heart of every great innovation is a great compromise: in order to start something new, we have to stop something old. Think of it as a deal you make with yourself–the things you’ll give up in order to make room for future growth. Our days are filled with countless small tasks–activities that prevent us from pursuing the bigger, more substantive creative projects on our larger horizon. There will never be enough time to write that novel you’ve been dreaming about or open that business you’ve had in mind for years. That’s why it’s up to you to free up your world and carve out the space for innovation.

We cram our lives with stuff that makes us feel comfortable, objects we irrationally hold onto far too long. They’re in that filing cabinet we put into storage because we couldn’t bring ourselves to purge those files. Or they’re in that garage we should’ve cleaned out years ago–the garage that was so full with old scrap that we couldn’t ever do something new in it.

Occasional reminiscence is good for the mind and soul, but too much backward-looking prevents progress. Excess nostalgia can turn into hoarding–when the past pushes out the future. This is almost always unintentional. There are tons of organizations that inadvertently stifle innovation by fixating on the past, placing too much emphasis on classics and standards.

Consider, for example, the crisis surrounding symphonies around the country. Symphony attendance by those under forty has plummeted over the past decade at an alarming rate. Yet endowments by patrons over forty have remained relatively steadfast over the same period. This support keeps an increasingly aged audience in orchestra hall seats at the expense of developing programming that will attract the next generation of symphony goers. So the very people who hope to perpetuate the love of symphonic music are actually unwittingly creating a barrier to that possibility.

The worst of all innovation strategies is to have an increasing share of a decreasing market. The best newspapers, timeshares, and bowling allies will be the last to go, but they will still go. The entrepreneurs who reimagine their industry, who anticipate and feel their way towards the future will be the ones who survive and thrive in new environments. Here are three things you can do to stop relying on old ways and become a forward-thinker in an ever-changing world.

1. Change some of the guard. Seek out the voices of those who have little to project, who have little stake in tradition–the younger, more vibrant individuals in your organization. Ask them how to update the old, how to make the homogenous a little more heterogeneous. Encourage them to push existing boundaries. Create an innovation advisory board–a group that represents the new. Where a board of directors keeps things on track, an innovation advisory board deliberately disrupts that track to promote innovative thinking.

2. Leave room for the new. Run many experiments to see what works and what doesn’t work. Be patient with your experiments: adjust and tinker with them until they get traction. Actively make available the tools that will stimulate innovation. This requires leaving both time and money open. Set aside a pool of funds solely devoted to the development of creative ideas.

3. Just say no. Have the audacity to turn down clients, customers, and patrons who support your legacy but not your future. There will always be people who want to give you money to be like you used to be. If you turn their support down, you’ll open up the opportunity for new sectors of growth. Substitute a new program, project, or service for a more expensive traditional option. Establish a second brand or a second track that will attract a new audience. For example, mixers with wine and cheese and jazz quartets have brought young people into the symphony community for the first time. By trying something different, symphonies are finally attracting an audience for the future.

Innovation isn’t just a matter of ingenuity and resourcefulness–it’s also a matter of capacity and courage. We’re always going to have too many things to do in a day. We’ll always be too busy to start that novel or open that business. So if we want the room to pursue our innovation project, something’s got to give. It turns out that something is you. The only person with the power to free up your life for creativity is you. What are you willing to give up to make room for innovation?

How to Win the Innovation Race

Innovation is less like a sprint or a marathon than a relay race: a team event where the hand-offs between each phase are the most crucial moments of the competition. Bringing together the fastest people won’t necessarily ensure a first-place finish in the innovation relay. The quickest runner is only useful if he or she can pass the baton smoothly over to the next teammate. As soon as that baton is dropped, the race is lost. The victory is in the exchange.

Managing those tricky hand-off points is key to seeing a creativity initiative through to its final payout. Too many ideas stagnate or die because their originators can’t shift them to the next step of the developmental cycle. The challenge is moving between the critical transitional stages–from concept to product, from local to global distribution. You might have a knockout idea and a brilliant strategy for executing that idea, but if you can’t properly hand the baton over when that item or service is made to scale and commercialized, then you’ll lose the innovation race.

There are three key legs to the innovation race, each with their own difficult hand-off points. The first is the forward position. This is the early, exciting phase of brainstorming, when organizations gather the most creative people and run rapid experiments. This entails diversifying, hedging, seeing what works and what doesn’t work. The radical visionaries in the forward position often drop the baton when they’re handing it off to those in the second leg–the people who will turn this idea into a real thing. That’s because there is too much variation and not enough resource or impact in this initial leg. As a result, forward-position thinkers run the risk of becoming orphans whose ideas fail to go anywhere, instead remaining unrealized possibilities.

The next leg is the middling position, when organizations make an innovation viable or workable. This involves creating the right strategy and enrolling the right people to make and sell the product or service. It requires both hiring and staffing and sales and marketing. The problem is that this is the longest part of the innovation race, so it’s very easy to lose momentum. It’s also the part of the race when two oppositional types of people must come together harmoniously: the focused, enterprising profit-driven individuals and the collaborative, empowering community-minded individuals. If these contending forces cannot learn how to work cooperatively, then the project will get stuck in a stalemate.

The final leg of the innovation relay is the aft position, where organizations operationalize and scale innovations. This is the point where you need to make a million of your new product or you have to bring your service everywhere. At this stage, everything needs to sync up. This may involve process improvements, technology enhancements, or supply-chain coordination. The object is to stabilize the complete system, improve quality, optimize efficiency. The people who run the aft position are analytical and technical. The problem is that they reduce the speed and magnitude of innovation in favor of standards to establish control. So in a sense, they take the innovation out of the innovation. They may slow down the innovation so much that they ultimately get to the end of the relay too late, after competitors have already gotten there.

So how do you run fast and smoothly? How can you make it through and between each leg efficiently? Here are three strategies for managing those intermediate steps in the innovation race.

Previewing: Place members of the next leg of the race on the previous leg so that they understand what needs to happen at the hand-off. Put the radical thinkers and inventors in close communication with the marketing gurus. For example, if you’re writing a new computer program or software application, you’ll want to staff your team with a non-IT specialist who knows the customer base well, so you can make your product accessible to the public. Similarly, keep members of the previous leg on the team after the hand-off to ensure that the innovation isn’t lost. Make sure that the person who designed your innovation continues to influence the project so it retains its original vision.

Translating: Find the emissaries and ambassadors who can translate between different departments. This is especially important in the middling position, when business and financial leaders must join up with human resources and marketing leaders. Enlist the help of mediators who can interlace the two opposing groups and look for ways to balance their perspectives.

Rotating: Provide temporary assignments so that leaders will have experience with running all three legs of the innovation race. Experts in any given department often have no idea what goes in other sectors of an organization. Try assigning Research & Development staff to the manufacturing plant or the service operation so that they actually understand what’s required to make the products they help conceive. And on the other side, bring some of these manufacturing people into the R&D plant so they can understand the level of magnitude required to be competitive. Give runners in all steps of the race a line of sight to the other legs.

You don’t want to run the whole innovation relay only to find that you dropped the baton somewhere along the way. Practice, polish, and perfect those hand-offs. Keep the baton off the ground and you’ll get to the finish line before even the fastest sprinter.

Picture This: Using Visual Aids to Inspire Creativity

Picture it: this is a phrase that so many creative thinkers use when they’re introducing their new project. The best ideas begin with a compelling image. In a single image lies a larger story, a whole series of suggestions, memories from the past, and gestures toward the future. Visual aids are indispensible tools for any innovator that help generate and motivate breakthrough change.

To harness the power of visuality is to tap into one of our mind’s most profound capacities: a large part of our brain is designed to create pictures. We imagine and dream in pictures. In the Middle Ages, when most people were unable to read, visualization was the main source of meaning and comprehension. People read churches and other architectural creations the way we read texts today. The mere sight of a portico or a spire or any spot of a building would trigger another image in the mind, a story, a recollection, a set of associations. Our ability to visualize has been a critical element in the development of our creative capacities throughout history.

We manage a complex array of images on an everyday basis. Consider, for example, an ordinary activity like driving down a highway and all the different kinds of visual cues that we make sense of both actively and unconsciously. There’s information scurried across our dashboard, window, rear window, mirrors. Then there’s the outside images that confront us–traffic lights, street signs, billboards. And this isn’t even to mention the extraneous distractions inside the car: radios, phones, other passengers. Our ability to synthesize this overwhelming amount of visual material without making it seem like anything but a routine act is simply astounding. It’s something that even parallel data-processing computers can’t do.

So how can you mobilize these innate ocular talents and put them to work in your creative endeavors? Here are three kinds of visual aids to use as inspiration for your next innovation initiative.

1. Artifacts of Thought: Try imagining the future as something that’s already happened. Make your project into an object you can see today–before it’s finished. Take a dusty old book cover and put the name of your unwritten novel on it. Now it’s as if the novel is waiting for you to write it. Draw a picture of that little cottage on the glen overlooking the lake that you’ve been saving up all these years to purchase or build. That literal artifact of what’s soon-to-be will push you forward to realize your goal. It may not exist in the real world yet, but once it exists in your mind, you’ve made it past the first step.

2. Manifestos: These are declarations of intent, announcements or proclamations of the things that you will do. The late American mythologist Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” It became a simple statement with immense power. Manifestos give us a sense of destiny. Many people create their own catchphrases or slogans that encapsulate their core values or approaches to life. Others have particular songs–or even soundtracks–that articulate and encourage their ambitions. What’s on your innovation mix tape?

3. Dashboards: Now that you can see your future, you need a way to actually reach it. This is exactly what dashboards do: they are roadmaps that help you get from one place to the next. They may take the form of graphics or mandalas or word clouds or concept maps that put together all the individual pieces to a big project. They may also take the form of lists–lists of guidelines or rules of thumb you might put on a poster. Your dashboard doesn’t have to be linear, but it should tell you how to get from here to there.

It’s no coincidence that the word “visionary” denotes having the ability to see well and possessing a gift of creativity. Gathering the visual aids to accompany your innovation initiative both stimulates and sustains creative energy. What does your future look like today?

The 4 Most Creative Kinds of Leaders

In today’s snappy corporate speak, forms of creative leadership are like statement blazers or ultra low-rise jeans: they’re either in or they’re out. Every year, the most popular business magazines claim that a certain type of person is the most innovative of the moment. This month, it might be the triumph of the technological guru. In the fall, it might be the rise of the artistic genius. Pundits treat innovation strategies as if they were fashion trends, hot during one season only to turn pass the next.

The truth is that creative personality types are more than just catchy buzzwords on a glossy list. There is no single approach to innovation that will always come out on top. There is no over-riding trend you can rely on. Rather, knowing which kinds of leaders to bring to your project is about knowing the specific factors that will shape your initiative–the situational reality of your business.

Recruiting the right innovation talent for the right moment is less like picking out looks for a fashion show and more like strategizing for a football game. This involves anticipating the challenges you’ll face given the unique circumstances of your project. Does your team have a winning or losing record? Is your opponent an offensive or a defensive team? What do you need to do build the best team possible given the situation?

Most people like to surround themselves with people who are like them and run the plays that they’re used to running. But in reality, it’s crucial to work with people who have different skills than you and to run a wide array of plays in order to increase the likelihood that one of them will work. Here are the four main archetypes of creative thinkers and leaders that may appear on your roster if the moment is right.

1. The Sage: These are individuals who create a sense of community and knowledge. They are mentors, facilitators, and teambuilders who work with a set of shared values. Their core competency is empathy as they listen carefully and thoughtfully to others, gaining a deep understanding of their peers’ desires and needs. Oprah Winfrey is an exemplary of the Sage archetype. Her ability to connect with and influence her audience is a testament to her remarkable capacity to empathize with them.

2. The Athlete (or The Competitor): These results-driven workhorses are the polar opposites of the Sage. While the Sage slowly and patiently builds a community and connects with others, the Athlete produces profit and speed. Athlete types set concrete goals for themselves and meet those goals. Their core competency is courage. Warren Buffett is an exemplary Athlete or Competitor. His aggressive, relentless form of investing signifies great courage as he makes bold–often contrarian–financial decisions. For all their apparent differences, Sages and Athletes work well together, combining the long-term focus on values and culture with the short-term emphasis on tangible outcomes.

3. The Artist: These radical experimenters are drawn to breakthrough innovation projects. They create grand visions and are likely to try wildly unexpected solutions. Their core competency is imagination. Richard Branson is the quintessential Artist type as his deeply original, even whimsical or offbeat projects come out of the desire for something totally new.

4. The Engineer: At the opposite end of the creative spectrum from the Artist is the Engineer, who seeks efficiency and quality. These are individuals who depend on processes. They are highly disciplined and see the value of systems and bureaucracy. Alan Mulally, the newly retired CEO of Ford, embodies all the qualities of the Engineer type. He came in and saved the company by streamlining its processes and performing an aggressive overhaul on the quality of its product. Despite–or, really, because of–their contradictory outlooks, Artists and Engineers make a wonderful pair, complementing extreme creativity with the reliability of process.

It may be hard to attribute a single personality type to some contemporary innovators with great versatility, like Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, and Indra Nooyi. But we all do have an underlying dominant logic that determines how we think about growth. What type of creative leader are you? And, more importantly, what kind of creative leader do you need to surround yourself with in order to make your innovation goal a reality?