Post 1 of the Creating a Culture of Innovation Series
By Kim Burky, V3iT Business Transformation
December 18, 2018
Understanding an organization’s culture is key to finding the best way to engage your audience and communicate in a way that is meaningful to them. In my role in business transformation, I perform user-centric design sessions and one of my favorite phrases is “diversity of perspective”. It is so important to understand your audience and the best way to do that is to ensure you have empathy and listen to the collective audience to account for the variations in roles, perspectives, backgrounds and communication styles. Recognizing the power of diversity of perspective helps to create and grow the biggest and best ideas. This inclusive communication is important in every stage of innovation.
- Where are you now?
It is surprising the number of times I have seen organizations try to come up with new ways of doing things without taking the time to get the perspectives of users in different roles and levels of the organization to assess what is working and what is not with the current process. If you don’t understand how things work currently, you run the risk of “reinventing” existing problems or coming up with solutions that really aren’t that different from what a user already has—thus losing the “WOW!” factor of innovation.
2. What is your desired outcome?
Just as it is important to know how various users perceive the current state, embracing a variety of inputs on the desired outcome can create a more detailed vision of the future state that considers all the various business areas and levels of the organization—creating a community plan. Not only does this increase the likelihood of adoption but improves integration. Too often, users provide ideas/requirements individually or in single business groups. Working as a larger team allows those in the group to build ideas, to challenge constraints and to learn from each other.
3. How do you get there?
Ideation. Often the answers to some of the biggest innovation challenges are available in the COLLECTIVE wisdom of the organization. One of the exercises to grow ideas is called “yes, and…”. A team member contributes their perspective or idea and the team grows that idea by adding “yes, and…” and their perspective. As stated by David Kelley from IDEO, expansive thinking “allows you to get to a place that you just can’t get to in one mind.”
I see a diverse team like a greenhouse ecosystem where our ideas can cross-pollinate and grow from each other to produce new and inventive ways to benefit the whole organization. Think how powerful we can be when we focus on building on diverse perspectives and growing together rather than rejecting ideas that may seem different from our own or challenge the status quo.
Consider four key “greenhouse” rules to growing ideas:
- Create an environment where ideas are nurtured, and cross-pollination of ideas is encouraged.
- Give time for the seeds to grow rather than stomping them out or giving up before they can take root. It takes time for people to learn to think beyond “the way things have always been done”.
- Don’t be afraid of a few “wildflower” creative ideas—they may end up not being feasible to grow further but often push the boundaries on constraints and get the group to innovative ideas that are feasible.
- Create a community of gardeners (leaders) so that the entire greenhouse grows together.
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