Thinking and acting creatively…

courtesy of Monsanto

I would have a hard time imagining how a company or an individual would go about achieving anything without implementing something aimed at producing or delivering the desired outcome… whether this would be a tangible thing like bringing a new idea/product to market, or intangible like fostering a company’s culture to be innovation driven.

Some organizations will be more comfortable and effective at idea generation, others at implementing them… few will do well integrating both into a creative/productive loop.

The later is where I think the ‘new focus’ for organizational opportunity lives especially in organizations that want to innovate… by establishing and fostering loops of continual learning and improvement like; generating ideas, implementing them, observing, enhancing or generating newer ideas.

An integrated approach will make the ‘what comes first’ question irrelevant… it is much more powerful because; by its corkscrew-like cycle, it allows the introduction of bits of learning (new ideas) and implementation improvements at any point in the loop thus, short-cutting the cycle and speeding improvement and hopefully innovation.

This is much easier to ‘conceive’ than to effectively ‘do’ or ‘instill’ in most complex organizations as it does require all stakeholder’s to have a healthy comfort with a “change management” mentally as a way of organizational life… How many companies talk about supporting an environment where experimentation is encouraged and failure is permitted… but how many boards will support this ‘stress’ to the bottom-line beyond giving it lip service?

This is what must be considered and ultimately changed if a company is truly committed to innovate me thinks.