Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 2

Air National Guard Senior Leadership Conference

Jeff spoke at the Air National Guard Senior Leadership Conference about building a culture of Innovation. Watch the video here.

American Society of Cataract & Refractory Surgery

Jeff spoke about innovation at the annual American Society of Cataract & Refractory Surgery conference. Watch the video here.

Talks at Google

In The Innovation Code, Jeff DeGraff (the “Dean of Innovation”), and Staney DeGraff introduce a simple framework to explain the ways different kinds of thinkers and leaders can create constructive conflict. They show you the four steps to normalize conflict, channel it, and develop something completely new, using tools, methods, examples, exercises, and assessments. Watch the video here.

The Next Idea’s parting words: Believe in your idea. It might just help move Michigan forward.

In late November of 2014, Michigan Radio’s Stateside began a series called The Next Idea. With support from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and a team that included the University of Michigan’s “Dean of Innovation” Jeff DeGraffand Executive Producer Joe Linstroth, the project’s mission was to focus on innovation, creativity and ideas meant to move Michigan forward.

In essays and interviews, we met Michigan inventors and entrepreneurs, teachers, artists, scientists, farmers, business people, experts, and just regular citizens who decided to think outside the box to make their state and their communities better.

Three-plus years later, what have we learned?

Innovation

The Next Idea has considered the nature of innovation, how to tap into our own creativity, and how to transform those ideas into the tangible – a business, an invention, social change.

Once created, these ideas need to be funded in order to grow. Our Next Idea contributors have encouraged us to draw inspiration from past innovators, and those from other cultures. But they’ve also encouraged us to question the idea that innovation is solely the domain of technically-oriented white men. Other voices have contributions of value, and many of our contributors stressed the need for  safe, affordable spaces where they can be heard and share ideas. This not only means recognizing differences, it also means fostering the creative conflict and the diversity that grows innovation, and allows the best new ideas to emerge. That “churn” is essential for new and better ideas to emerge.

Research and design

Perhaps because of Michigan’s rich history of design, our residents still have a passion for the creation of useful and beautiful things, from kids to moms to guys working in their home shops. But we’re also designing ways to help people learn — across disciplines, and using technology in ways previously unimagined. Michigan will need to bring that innovative spirit into redesigning our crucial systems to be environmentally and economically sustainable, particularly in the spheres of businessand infrastructure. Many of our most innovative minds believe that good design practices of many kinds can help us avoid the calamities of our boom-and bust past.

Manufacturing

So, what about producing the things we’ve created? There’s no question that manufacturing in Michigan is undergoing enormous change. The necessity of bringing the linked technologies of Industry 4.0 to our factories seems to be one of the biggest requirements to keep us competitive. We may also need to rethink some of our beliefs about what constitutes a good job and how we value “the making of things.” And our greatest unknown will be one we’ve faced for centuries – what effects changing technology will have in the future, the extent to which that will displace human workers, and the potentially societal changes that result.

Entrepreneurship and investment

Michigan’s business and political communities are working to better support budding entrepreneurs, but we still have a long way to go. Many of our contributors have stressed the importance of educating aspiring business owners to avoid common pitfalls and overstretch themselves financially. One way to do that is to offer free or low-cost community programs that allow people to start small with their business dreams, then assess whether they want to enlarge their operations.

Investment in growing startups seems to be slowly improving, but capital of many kinds needs to flow more freely to nurture the business ecosystem. Michigan also shares in the nationwide talent shortage, lacking qualified technical professionals and experienced business managers who can take small companies to the next level. The state has often been considered “fly over” territory for investors, but people from Michigan, and even outside of it, are encouraging a focus away from the coasts and onto the strengths of places like our state. Capital and mentoring are still scarce for women, Latinx, and people of color, but innovations like microlending, hands-on learning, and better support systems are bolstering gains in those areas.

Education

On a national and state level, education is under considerable scrutiny, from how we train and treat our teachers, to the health of our public schools, to the importance of a college degree and how to fund it. Our contributors stressed the importance of interactive learning, mentorship, and opportunities for kids to see adult professionalswho “look like them.” In a relatively short time, programs encouraging girls and women (especially those of color) to pursue STEM careers have taken off. College students seem to be taking a more active mentoring/messaging role. And libraries are rising to the challenge of helping a stretched educational system by offering expanded lending materials, and bringing services to people where they are.

Despite ample evidence that the arts facilitate learning and foster the creative skills that germinate innovation, arts programs in schools are often the first programs to get cut. But many in the arts community continue to find ways to enrich lives and empower people from many backgrounds, whether or not the money is there to do it.

Mobility

Yes, we know – the innovation of the future is autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles. But how will such a massive change take place when we can’t even address the sorry state of the roads and bridges those vehicles must travel? And while our corporate and governmental institutions tout this futuristic vision, we are still disappointingly poor at providing basic, functional mobility for working class people who rely on public transportation, walking, and bikes to get where they need to be.

Medicine

Big data and small screens are helping to revolutionize how we prevent and treat disease, recover from addiction, and reduce pain and distress. Again, what we can do with technology is often worlds away from what is available to disadvantaged residents in terms of treatment and cost.

Environment and agriculture

Michiganders have embraced alternative energy with enthusiasm and seem eager to move it forward. Whether it’s the importance of tourism, our desire to protect our Great Lakes from pollution, or a combination of influences, it seems the state will continue to pursue clean energy regardless of national policies and opinions. The diversity of innovative energy solutions is impressive, including ideas for reduction, renewable power, new generating systems, and using existing systems in practicaland unusual ways.

We are also actively pursuing better technology and systems to bring us our food and water. The Flint crisis has forced us to start working on how we provide water in largeand small ways. We’re also trying to improve our food systems — to waste less, to be better for the environment, to use produce that’s grown closer to home, and to reach the “food deserts” in our cities. At the same time, Michigan’s beer and wine culture has become wildly successful — illustrating the truism that “fun” innovations often seem to get more public buy-in than those that attempt to solve thorny, sober problems.

Diversity

Nationally and in Michigan, diversity seems to be an increasingly fraught concept. Despite old and new evidence that highly diverse communities are more innovative and productive, there are still social, legal, and technological barriers for immigrants, women, people of color, Native Americans, disabled persons, those in the LGBTQcommunity, Muslims, and even veterans. Some Michiganders are trying to face questions around race head-on, while some look to past eras of social strife for clues. Universities are encouraging collaboration between people of diverse disciplines and trying to make sure community voices are heard in the academic world.

Leadership 

Many of our contributors agreed that government is in sore need of innovation – structurally, philosophically, and financially. Partisanship and incivility feeds the dysfunction and sometimes leads to weak citizen involvement because people feel irrelevant to the process – especially young people.

As government safety net services are reduced, picking up the slack increasingly rests on the philanthropic community. They are assessing what the potential effects will be of an enormous transfer of generational wealth in the coming years, and wondering what growing income inequality will mean, both for charities and the services they will be asked to provide.

Detroit

The future of Michigan is very much wrapped up in the future of Detroit, even though Grand Rapids is increasingly a strong economic player in the state. Everyone seems to have an idea about how Detroit should be revitalized. Some see the city as an exciting “clean slate” for experimentation, and some point to cultural values gleaned from its rich history as providing the foundation from which Detroit moves into the future. It’s only natural that sometimes the city will compare itself to other places, but that’s not always a constructive thing. What seems to be a strong takeaway from many of our contributors is that Detroit’s renewal must be about its people and its neighborhoods, and about small businesses as well as large ones.

Community 

At the end of the day (literally), what have we been working for? Our place in the world: our homes, our friends, our families. We want to come home to our neighborhoods and be sheltered, fed, warmed, and nurtured. We want our houses to be functional. We want to not live in fear of what goes on in abandoned buildings and empty lots. We want to be able to raise children away from poverty. We fear being homeless and without a livelihood. We want to invest in our neighborhoods.

The Next Idea shared so many stories of people working informally and within organizations to make their neighborhoods better in a myriad of ways, donating time, volunteering, or just meeting over a meal to talk about what matters to them. But often it seems that outside forces shape our neighborhoods more than the people who live there, despite efforts like this one. Time after time in our interviews and essays, people said the same thing – if you want an effort to be successful, ask the community members what they need before you decide what that is and drop it on them.

The other consistent trend is the problem of housing — a severe lack of reasonably-priced, functional dwellings. We desperately need innovation in providing affordablehousing. Our leaders seem more inclined to pay businesses to locate in a place than to help the residents there stay in their homes. Perhaps because of so many advances in computer technology, we forget that each human being requires a requisite amount of food, water, shelter, oxygen and energy. We may find community online, but our human animal can’t live inside our screens.

So, what’s the last Next Idea?

There is no limit to innovation, but we all need a starting point. The Next Idea may be winding down, but Michigan will still need “next ideas” from innovators to face the challenges that lie ahead. That’s where you come in. Click on a link in this essay. Listen to some of the people we’ve talked to —maybe join them in their efforts, or build on their ideas. Think big, but also think about how we bring these ideas all of Michigan’s citizens, not just the fortunate few. We hope The Next Idea will inspire you to begin your own innovation journey, for the good of your community and your state.

Melissa Ingells Benmark is a contributing producer to The Next Idea.

This article originally appeared here.

Issues & Ale: Competition and collaboration in Michigan’s regional economy

For more than three years, The Next Idea has been talking to people who took their creative ideas and turned them into something tangible — a business, an invention, social change.

Those out of the box ideas are essential to keep moving Michigan’s economy forward. But creative ideas often get stuck in their own regional bubbles.

As a send-off for The Next Idea, Michigan Radio got together to discuss how that regional isolation affects the state’s economic growth, why it matters, and what can be done about it.

Michigan Radio’s Joe Linstroth and University of Michigan Ross School of Business professor and “Dean of Innovation”Jeff DeGraff were joined by a panel of business leaders and thinkers from across the state.

Lauren Bigelow, CEO of Growth Capital Network in Ann Arbor
Eric Thomas, founder and senior partner at Saga MKTG in Detroit
Nate Lutz, senior counsel at Meijer in Grand Rapids

Listen above to hear the panelists talk about how stereotypes of Michigan’s three largest cities get in the way of collaboration, why Michigan has a tough time retaining homegrown talent, and what the state would look like if we could pool our resources and innovation.

This article was originally published here.

Michigan has the parts to build a powerful economic engine. They just need to be connected.

Well, it’s been three years since we started The Next Idea. The aim of the project was to showcase the wide array of amazing people and communities here in Michigan, and how they make innovation happen every day, everywhere, and in every way.

Looking back, we have heard the diverse voices and perspectives of artists, educators, community leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, and inventors; the young and old and everyone in between from all the regions of the Great Lakes State.

Anyone looking for creative ideas, domain expertise, or best practices for innovation need only search the hundreds of essays and interviews on The Next Idea page. Collectively, they contain a blueprint for moving our state forward.

I would like to leave you with a few thoughts on the challenges that still lay before us.

Education, or our lack of it to be specific, continues to be our biggest obstacle. Our primary and secondary school test scores in key STEM areas continue to fall below the national average. More so, the achievement gap continues to be unacceptably wide.

To compound matters, falling teacher wages and school conditions in the state have driven many of our most promising prospects out of the profession, creating a shortage of qualified applicants. We need to recommit ourselves to supporting our teachers, not only though competitive pay, but also better working conditions. The future of this state starts with our children.

The relatively low number of Michigan residents with college degrees can be seen as an extension of our challenges with K through 12 education. While there are many career options that do not require an advanced degree, well-paying professions — particularly in an increasingly technology and data driven economy — typically do. The cost of a quality college education continues to escalate well beyond the rate of inflation, putting a college degree out of reach for many Michigan students. If we are to keep our best and brightest young adults here at home, we need to find imaginative ways to help them finance their education, such as the Kalamazoo Promise.

Perhaps the most self-inflicted impediment to innovation in our state is regionalism. Simply look at the voting record of our legislature, and the east-side, west-side schism becomes obvious. We are one state, but for all practical purposes operate as two, diminishing prospects all around.

To a native son like myself, raised in Kalamazoo and living in Ann Arbor, the value of building economic bridges between the two sides is obvious. We have all the parts to build a powerful economic engine, but they need to be connected and synchronized.

Ann Arbor has more venture capital per person than any city in the United States. It is a dynamic technology incubator and entrepreneurial hub. Grand Rapids has a strong community of mid-cap companies, many family owned, with plenty of good paying jobs. The Detroit comeback has been astonishing. Many of the largest companies in America are in headquartered in the greater Metro area. They are experiencing a revitalization as autonomous vehicles and alternative forms of power generation are rapidly creating new markets.

While it’s promising to see business leaders from both sides of the state beginning to rebuild Michigan’s economic engine, linking small to medium to large companies, it’s discouraging to see what can only be described as useless political infighting. Maybe it’s better to just move forward without the support of our legislature. They can’t even fix the roads in a state best known for its automobiles.

Let’s get behind transportation 2.0. There is a huge shortage of truck drivers in U.S., so the current market for viable, commercial autonomous vehicles is enormous. As car ownership dwindles, ride sharing will expand. New forms of mass transit are needed in our largest urban corridors and our most distant rural areas. Think hybrid buses, light rail, and regional jets.

“Focus” should be our slogan for the new year, and for the foreseeable future. Let’s focus on what is unique to Michigan. We are a world leader in power generation, including clean tech. We are surrounded by 84 percent of North America’s surface freshwater — an increasingly scarce commodity. Let’s reinvest in our water treatment plants, and new methods of water reclamation and conditioning. Let’s improve and increase trade with America’s largest trading partner, Canada, by building that bridge.

Finally, let’s get into a new state of mind so that we may create a new state of Michigan. Sure, we were once the Arsenal of Democracy, or the Motor City, and even the Water Winter Wonderland. But that was long ago and far away. It’s time we tell ourselves a different story. The story about how we are overcoming our challenges, constructing hybrid solutions, and driving innovation ever onward. What happens next is full of promise. We are optimistic, brave, and resourceful. We have to be, given the weather.

This Next Idea was originally published here.

 

Efficiency Can Kill You

Often, I’ve noticed, when I talk to someone about the need to innovate, that person will respond by telling me how much he or she is doing already.  

These days we make productivity something like a religion.  We believe that if we are productive enough, organized enough, task-focused enough, that this will save us from the fact that our lives are overcommitted.

I think of Jon, a manager who worked for a corporate client of mine.  I was helping his company develop new approaches to efficiency, but he wasn’t using any of them.  He wasn’t even giving them a try.  In fact, he was running his team exactly the way he had run it three years earlier.

When I asked Jon if he had considered trying some of the company’s new efficiencies with his team, he turned his computer screen around so I could see it and brought up his work schedule.  “Look at this calendar!” he cried.  “I’m working seventy hour weeks.  You won’t find a more efficient employee in this entire company!”

I didn’t disagree.  He was working very long hours and his scheduling was highly efficient.  I admired his drive and his focus, and I told him so.  But I also told him that from the point of view of innovation, his efficiency was not a plus.  It was evident that he was getting it wrong.  

Perhaps the most important of these rules is the 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle.  It states that 80% of the results we’re trying to achieve come from only 20% of the causes.  It was first inspired by the observation that 80% of the peas in someone’s garden came from twenty percent of the pods, and it’s been found to hold for many other examples of productivity: 80% of a company’s income tends to come from twenty percent of the customers.  Most of the distractions and wasted time in your life tend to be created by a small number of distracting, wasteful people.  So today, many of us focus on trying to do more for the most important clients or customers and to avoid whoever is wasteful or doesn’t show results.

In our personal lives as well, many of us try to use our time where it’s more productive, where we can see immediate results.  Now we carry portable electronics so we can fit ten more computer activities into our day while we’re carpooling kids to activities; we carry smartphones so that even when we’re walking the dog, and even sleeping, we can be “on call” and available to move projects forward for those extra-valuable twenty percent of the clients, or those extra-important people in our lives.  That can be a good thing, but the trouble is, if you constantly optimize your life for productivity, it doesn’t give you more time.  It uses up more of your time.  You become like Jon the manager, with an ever-longer, ever-more-tightly-packed schedule.  As useful as these approaches can be, our quest for productivity can cost us our capacity to innovate.

Like Jon, we complete many tasks but we wind up too busy to try anything new.  Instead of improving our lives, we just do more and more of the same old tasks in the same old ways.  Even if your goal is short-term results, you may not have time to notice that conditions have changed, and the parts of your life or your work that used to pay off the best no longer do – there is still a most valuable twenty percent, but it’s a different twenty percent than it was before, and you don’t have time to learn how it’s changed.

FORGET THE RULES

To make time for improvements, we need to forget the 80/20 rule.  Innovation requires us to experiment, to follow new paths even though some – many – will be wrong turns or dead ends.   But that doesn’t mean you need to stop your life and do nothing but experiment and explore.  That would be very difficult, and it often backfires: I’ve known too many people who have quit a job to get to work on their dream, only to run out of funds and retreat to another job no better than the first.

Instead of trying to innovate one hundred percent of your life at once, pick a narrow part of your life and concentrate on innovating on that twenty percent.  It’s much easier to make big changes in a small area of life than it is to make even moderate changes all across your life.  If you want to become a musician and you’ve never played before, which would you rather do: commit to practice for an hour every day, or to practice all day every Saturday?

I call this the 20/80 rule.  It is easier to change twenty percent of a company or a life by eighty percent than it is to change eighty percent of that company or that life by even twenty percent.  Innovation requires us to break off and protect a relatively small piece of time and then, in that protected area, forget efficiency and short-term gains in favor of experimentation and the long-term improvements.  

Mastering the 20/80 rule in three steps:

 Set aside scheduled time to be creative
Protect that creative time as if it was as valuable to you as your most productive hours.
Accept that you won’t see short-term results.  Your goal in that narrow, protected piece of time is to work toward the innovations that will improve your life for the future, not for today.  Over time, like plants, these small growths that don’t seem good for anything will mature and bear fruit.

Unleash your creativity

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

 

Cultivating Innovation to Stand Out: Jeff DeGraff with Innovation Instigator, Stephen Shapiro

It is important to find value in being different. In this episode, I interview Stephen Shapiro, innovation instigator, business consultant, Hall of Fame speaker and author of Best Practices Are Stupid.  Together, we discuss how innovation can help people stand out. According to Shapiro, it is key to find out what makes you unique.

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various backgrounds but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

Unleash your creativity

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

The Secret to Innovation? Ride What Moves

Successful innovation requires us to notice what is moving and growing around us, and to find ways to harness its energy to get us where we want to go.  Newton’s First Law states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion, while an object at rest tends to stay at rest.

If you can climb onto something that is already in motion, it will save you a great deal of energy, compared to pushing that thing yourself.  Along the same lines, there is an economic principle called “value migration,” which states as conditions change, the first to recognize them and to invest or capitalize on these shifts stand to make the greatest amount of profit.

Some of the “accidental billionaires” who rode Facebook to their fortunes, as portrayed in the movie The Social Network, provided only a small amount of cash or some early networking, but because they were the first to ride this new phenomenon that was moving, they saw huge benefits.

The choice to ride what moves can make the difference between innovation and slow decay for an individual, an organization, even a city or country.  Consider Kalamazoo, Michigan. Located, halfway between Chicago and Detroit, Kalamazoo was crowned the “All-American City” by Life Magazine in the 1960’s.  It was home to post-war corporate giants like Fisher Body, Checker Motors, the Upjohn Company and that symbol of the generation in motion, Gibson Guitars.  

Frank Lloyd Wright created some of his greatest architectural marvels here and nestled them in-between the painted ladies that housed the local gentry.  The city even closed its main thoroughfare to create a little European flair downtown – the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the country. Kalamazoo was an emblem of forward thinking and self-reliant success.

But slowly things unraveled. Manufacturing left the Snow Belt for warmer lands, as did the city’s creative and enterprising youth.  Roads cracked, factories failed.  For three decades the city was mentioned as yet another example of Northern Blight, if it was mentioned as anything besides a town with a funny name.

And then it happened.  A group of anonymous donors got together and raised an enormous trust to fund the college education of every child that graduated from a Kalamazoo public school. They called it the Kalamazoo Promise. Families that owned homes in the school district began sending their children to State of Michigan universities and community colleges for free. People began to move to Kalamazoo for the sake of their children.  Neighborhoods were rehabilitated.  The momentum that had shifted from good to bad now shifted back towards good again. Like the unexpected hit in a baseball game that starts a rally and wins the game, which starts a winning streak that ends with a pennant, Kalamazoo was moving again, and innovators came to ride.  Beauty shops and coffee joints popped up alongside internet developers and art studios.  Businesses began to give the old town a fresh look as biotech and material science firms started springing up.

That’s why I say: no matter what in your life you are trying to innovate, look to ride what moves.  I encourage you to make time to notice the areas of growth and fresh opportunity.  Get to know them.  Talk to people making use of them. They may not have any obvious connection to what you want to do.  They may be as different as oil painting and online marketplaces.  Still, find chances to experiment with them.  The transition to the area that moves won’t be seamless – you can’t expect to notice an area of growth and then immediately see how it can take you where you want to go.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict.

By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

The Cavalry Isn’t Coming – Why You Should Take Your Destiny Into Your Own Hands

I fly a hundred thousand miles or more each year, and usually when I get off my plane I’m met by the driver of a black car. I’ve probably talked with hundreds of drivers doing the same job, chauffeuring people like me around and hustling for tips. In St. Louis, my client regularly hired the same young guy to meet my plane. He liked to talk to me about his work. No one told him to do that, he just started talking. In one conversation I asked him: Who do you work for? He said all his business was with two companies. I asked, do they know you? What’s your specialty? He said other car services required a half day’s notice, but he would come if they called at the last minute. Also, he was willing to drive long-distance: if they needed a ride from St. Louis to Chicago, he’d get on the highway.

I said, if you’re valuable to them, if you’ve got a special niche, one of those companies might be willing to commit to a long-term arrangement with you, so they know they can always get a ride from you when they want it. And if they’re willing to make a formal arrangement, you could probably find a business partner who would put up some money to buy some cars.

This advice wasn’t special. I’ve given it to other drivers and equivalent advice to lots of other solo practitioners in different businesses over the years. But the next time I saw this young man, he said, “I want to tell you something. I’m no longer just a driver. I got a partner and we bought two Lincolns. I own the company.” He wasn’t rich, but the whole way he talked about his life had changed: I own the company.

Psychologists call this self-authorizing behavior. This young man changed his behavior and made himself the author of his own life. No one had told him to talk to me while he drove me to my conference. No one had told him to act on what I said. No one told him how to seek out someone in his community who could put up money to buy two cars. But he saw that his life – and almost everyone’s life – is like that moment in the old Western movies when a townsperson rides back into town with the bad news: “We’re on our own. The cavalry isn’t coming.” To me, that moment in the movie, when a man rides in, dusty, exhausted, and grim, shows the key existential moment in creativizing. It’s the moment that you realize no one else is going to save you. You’re bankrupt and no one is going to bail you out; your marriage is broken and it’s not going to get fixed; you’ve got an illness and it can’t be wished away; you have the same unrealized dream you’ve always had, and no one but you can make it come true. The feeling at the moment is hard to take, but it clears your vision. Now you see what the townspeople in the Western see: if we’re going to get rescued, we’ll have to rescue ourselves.

 

 

Of course, we all try to put that moment off. We deny. We criticize. We blame. Everyone does it– people come to me all the time with stories of the outrageous bad luck they’ve had, the unfairness and stupidity of the people they had to work with, the outrages committed by the evildoers who’ve done them wrong. Some martial vast evidence to prove the thesis that life sucks. It’s like what you hear on political talk shows, at either end of the spectrum: the other side is not just wrong, they are crazy, immoral and evil – probably all three. Even if these views are sometimes correct, they aren’t any help if what you want is to creativize. Because that kind of thinking comes from a position of reaction, of criticism. People talking that way are not self-authorizing; they’re just criticizing, saying everything that’s wrong with what others do but nothing about what would work better. But innovation can’t be done by critics. It takes authors.

When I hear people stuck in the reactionary mode, people who are too busy critiquing and explaining and blaming to self-authorize and start building something new, I ask them: okay, well, what would you do? Let’s say you’re right and people around you are crazy. What would a sane person do? Let’s say this or that member of Congress is an idiot. How would you solve the problem? Forget your vicious boss for a moment, your undermining parents. What would a good boss say? What would good parents do? These questions shift your thinking because they stop you from endlessly moving away from something, and start you moving toward something new – that is, they start you innovating.

As you think through your innovation goals, notice your feelings. Are you feeling helpless or impatient? Are you waiting for the cavalry to come charging to the rescue? Well, I’m sorry. The cavalry isn’t coming. Do you feel stagnant or stuck? Is there always a critique on the tip of your tongue? These are signs that you aren’t self-authorizing. Instead, try this:

Picture what you want.
See it clearly.
Now picture someone who could advise you about taking a possible next step. Someone who could help you answer the question: “What could I do to make this work?”
Find that person. Have a conversation. Don’t criticize their ideas, just collect possibilities, imagine how the story could go if it had a happy ending. Be an author, not a critic.
Then try one of that person’s suggestions or one of your own ideas.

Without anyone telling you to, do an experiment in your own life. Start a new chapter. Move your story forward.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict.

By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More