“Innovation: A difference that makes a difference: imagining, realizing and spreading a new way of understanding, seeing or making things.” – Dr. Carol Strohecker
What is the biggest impediment to achieving breakthrough thinking and innovation? I believe it is our own mental roadblocks erected around the things we already “know.” Most of us know a lot about our business–the industry, customer behaviors, competitor strengths and weaknesses, stakeholder values and so forth. Most of us think of ourselves as “experts” in fact.
The problem is that our knowledge (and associated ways of thinking about things) comes from our accumulated life experiences. By definition, these are backward looking. And while our biases and beliefs may have been formed thoughtfully, they don’t always hold in highly dynamic world. (If the future is different enough from the past, then historical ideas and solutions may not be useful.)
Howard Schultz initially had great difficulty attracting investors to fund his growth plans. After all, most people KNEW that the business model would not work – based on their beliefs about how people felt about buying coffee. (Would you have invested your money on such a bold new concept . . . $2 for a cup of coffee, even more if it had foam on it?)
Yes sir. Once we form opinions about things, they are hard to break for most of us. Our tendency to cling to our deeply held views about the world often blocks us from the kind of breakthrough thinking we would like to see more of in our organizations.
Some people do this naturally
For a small fraction of us, this is not so much of an issue. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs is a case in point, but I believe that some of us are born with a sense of deep restlessness and continual questioning of things. Have you ever had the experience of getting lost in a continual loop of conversation with a precocious five-year old that couldn’t stop asking WHY? These are the kids who always got in trouble at school, were a teacher’s worst nightmare, who were always balancing between being inquisitive and a “smart aleck.” (Perhaps many of us were born this way, but had it driven out of us as we progressed through our early school years.)
In any case, most of us as adults do not have this natural tendency to be able to see things as if for the first time – free from our preconceived notions.
Breaking the Paradigms
Most of us need help to break these paradigms. Here are four ideas to help you break out of established (and limiting) patterns of thought.
1) Educate your team about the power of paradigms. Give your team an intellectual understanding of what paradigms are, how our minds form belief systems, how these are both useful to us, and also what the downsides are. This step on its own will not change anything, but it is one step in modifying behavior – modifying someone’s understanding and knowledge.
2) Put them in an environment where questioning is the norm. We all adapt our behaviors into our environment. We understand the culture around us, and act accordingly. If in your organizational culture, questioning of assumptions and the status quo is not a normal behavior, then people will not naturally go there. For this reason bringing people into a new physical space with a skilled facilitator can help. In an external environment, a temporary set of behavior norms can be established (as in a workshop or seminar). People are generally willing to adapt to any established rules set by the facilitator (because they are not being asked to make a permanent change).
3) Use immersion learning to create a new context. Getting your team members into a new environment can help them to see things through a different lens. Examples of this would be to have them interview customers, stakeholders, do a field trip, or conduct customer observations. With a little coaching and some help (like providing a structured interview guide along with some coaching on empathetic listening), your people will likely gain new insights about all sorts of things when they can make someone else the focus of attention.
4) Challenge them with powerful questions. One way to stimulate creative ideation is to ask unexpected questions that beg a new pattern of thinking. Here is an example of what I mean, taken from a health care client learning event recently conducted by Xavier Leadership Center. In this case we were trying to get the audience to consider different strategic ideas related to their industry and health system. Here are some of these powerful questions:
What are the rules and assumptions my industry operates under? What if the opposite were true?
Such questions can be hugely powerful if they were not ones your team had previously thought about. Being caught “off guard” can be intellectually stimulating.
What powerful questions can you think of relevant to your business? Use them during your next strategy planning session.
Other Resources
My Challenging Life: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
Center for Design Innovation – Interview with Dr. Carol Strohecker, by Deanna Leonard, Innovation Excellence
The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer
What is it like to see something “as if” for the first time?, Namukasa, Immaculate Kizito, Phenomenology Online
