Practices to Sustain Innovation
11/07/08
In the current financial turbulence, organizations find themselves trying to do two different things: one, to cut back, jettison anything nonessential, and become as efficient as possible; and two, use innovation to find new ways of operating that are more productive with fewer resources.
Here’s another level of challenge - these two efforts are diametrically opposed. Innovation by nature is chaotic and inefficient, and therefore can be jettisoned by companies just when it is most needed.
Here are seven practices - repeated action grounded in the organization’s culture and values - that leaders will want to encourage strategically to keep innovation alive, even while making corresponding efforts toward efficiency.
- Openness - Keeping an open mind to ideas from other people, fields, industries, points-of-view; actively considering a wide range of alternatives.
- Questioning - Critically questioning ideas, whether new or status quo, about how it applies to the organization and its future.
- Risk-Taking - Willingness to take action that might fail.
- Experimentation - Prototyping, demonstration projects, mitigating risk and increasing learning from experience by trying and retrying specific actions.
- Optimism - Maintaining trust and confidence that what we do matters and makes a difference, that our actions can influence outcomes.
- Persistence - Sticking with it, making a sustained effort.
- Leadership - Keeping high level goals in front of people, and guiding choices that balance efforts organized for efficiency (managing) with the intrinsically chaotic efforts of innovation and change (leading).
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