It was 1999. My 4 year nephew Mrinal had devoured a bar of chocolate without seeking permission and predictably his mom caught him red-handed. When she confronted him, he innocently replied that he had heard the bar of chocolate telling him "EAT ME! EAT ME!" and so he had just gone ahead. Most of us who were around fell off our seats doubling in laughter & what struck me was how easily children take chances. Think about it, when children are lost for options or if they don't know something, they'll always take a shot! They're seldom afraid of being wrong. And while one can't equate being wrong with being innovative, what I've seen over years of facilitating innovation workshops is that if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll rarely come up with anything new.
Last week, I heard Rita McGrath (Professor at Columbia Business School) on Harvard Business Review talking of 'Using Failure to Grow'. She was talking about how we must plan to learn our way to future growth opportunities rather than rely on the traditional method of extrapolating from the past. This is what she said "Plan to learn, not plan to be right. Manage failure costs not rate of failure. And as they say in Silicon Valley, Fail fast. Fail Cheap & Move on. Measure not - did someone succeed at what they hoped to achieve. Measure instead - if they failed, did they fail cheap? Did they learn a lot? Have they incorporated the learning going forward?"
Which brings me back to Mrinal and us. Why do adults lose the capacity to be wrong? Why do we hate being wrong and run our businesses by stigmatizing mistakes? Why does everyone want innovation to happen but end up with a poor strike rate? Why don't we reward what we want reinforced? Picasso once said this " All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up'.
In the FireStarter workshops, we talk about the FireStarter mindset. And one of the attitudes of a FireStarter is a bias towards high speed, low cost & low risk experiments rather than over analyzing. In today's context where we're constantly faced with new & unforeseen challenges, shouldn't we leverage simple options within our sphere of influence? So, if you want to bring alive the Picasso in you that you were born with - start experimenting! Stop over analyzing and instead of the old proverb 'Seeing is Believing', try 'Believing is Seeing'.
Innovation, now thats been a topic that i have got very close to in the last month or so.. Why? well, because i am supposed to deliver a program internally.
ReplyDeleteThe preparation for the same, increased first my acquaintance which then turned into a complete awe for the topic.
There is no other single factor that can bring such drastic changes in the world around us.
But yes i completely agree, that there is a aura around the topic which makes it easy to appreciate and laud yet difficult to practice.
And the best part is this aura is just a myth, our mental blocks about innovation, which are requires it to be path breaking, magnificent, larger than life.... that hinders are capacity to innovate.
It is these blocks that, keep us truly from soaking in the sheer innovativeness of Mrinal's answer.
If there is one single criterion to succeed as a innovator it is to let your inner child take over. Why? because, a child's mind is like a empty black (whit, green) board which gives them a lot of "space" to innovate. Where as as we grow the space is taken over my not only our own but learning from other'e experience also.
This stops us from asking the questions and once that happens, then there is no room for innovation.
PS: i really like Scott Burken's work on"Myths of Innovation. The video is available on Youtube.