Overcoming Psychological Inertia to Get Innovation Done.
Posted on Wed, Jun 22, 2011
By: Jim Belfiore, Certified Innovation Master; Senior Director - Client Innovation and Practices
Many people talk about applying innovation methodologies and practices in the pursuit of scientific research, engineering design, and product manufacturing.
My job is to help people actually get it done.
I saw something last week that reminds me what separates the talk from the walk. This month I've been working with multiple research teams that could be from any company or companies in the Fortune 50. Each team has similar characteristics that I see in my clients week after week: They contain some of the best and brightest minds in their industry. They have decades of game-changing experience (and accolades from professional societies and patent offices to match). They are supremely well-versed in the many tomes of business process and procedure which are spoken unwaveringly in pursuit of growth and goals that drive shareholder value.
I help integrate Goldfire, our company's innovation intelligence platform (along with related methodologies), into our customers' minds, experience, and processes. Process integration frequently faces formidable challenges. Often there is psychological inertia to overcome, brought forth in part by corporate culture and a team's devotion to it.
Part of my challenge is to recognize inertia and get a team past it (and themselves), so that integration of our innovation tools and methods becomes an accelerant to their success. It's a challenge I expect to find at every customer engagement. But, on rare occasions, I stumble across an exception.
Last week at a client's manufacturing plant, I was introduced to one of the client's newest Goldfire users - a young co-op student attending a local university and working at the plant for the summer to help scout technology and conduct innovation research. I was expecting to talk with her as a new user. I would be giving her an overview of our innovation software, and describe some of the very basic use cases in lieu of formal training.
Instead, she showed me a detailed and nearly completed research project she had been building in Goldfire which leveraged some of its most advanced analytical and mapping capabilities. She walked me through many screens of her research, thought processes, and correlations to concepts and markets that the larger project team was investigating as part of a collaborative effort. She presented dozens of new concepts that she had individually discovered and explained their key relationships (identified through her use of our Goldfire's more advanced features) to the plant's innovation initiatives.
Did I forget to mention that she just started this summer job only two weeks ago, and had received no training on our innovation platform?
Seeing the incredible progress the co-op had made in such a short period of time, without guidance and all on her own initiative, was impressive. The psychological inertia, so typical of most successful and experienced innovators, had not affected her in the slightest way. She mapped out how easy it was for her to teach herself Goldfire's basic (and advanced) operations and integrate them into her employer's own processes.
When I asked her what she felt was key to her rapid success, she looked at me quizzically and said, "I was just being curious...it's a lot of fun."
Common wisdom that tells us a fresh set of younger eyes will look at problems differently. Years of exposure to the grinding, soul-sucking monster of professional life dulls our sense of wonder. It traps our personal initiative, and outright kills any passion we once had for our callings.
Such wisdom certainly contains a blend of myth and truth, but there are some very important and real-world lessons this co-op can teach us:
- Outstanding performance (in the innovation organization or just about anywhere else) starts and ends with curiosity at the individual-contributor level.
- Curiosity is not a luxury to be dismissed in the name of process or efficiency - it is an asset.
- A sense of wonder isn't dangerous romanticism - it's the best and most honest of all motivators.
- Curiosity can't be faked. Curiosity can't be assigned nor can curiosity be delegated. It has to come from within.
- Fun does not have to mean distraction. Fun can accelerate the quality and quantity of results. Leaders integrate fun as key strategic deliverables in any project.
Experiences such as these are some of the most rewarding aspects of what I'm lucky to do each day. They not only continue to spur my own sense of wonder, but they make me forget that what I'm doing is actually work.
So as you ponder your own innovation initiatives and processes, remember to ask yourself one very serious question:
Are you having fun yet?