Innovation is essential to an organization—all it means, at its core, is being able to come up with new ideas, and your association hasn’t survived without doing that a few times. Why, then, is it such an intimidating concept for so many?
Jim Harrison, senior creative director at the University of Florida, pinpointed one reason why in a post earlier this month at John Spence’s blog. Organizations like to talk about implementing innovation processes, but innovation doesn’t thrive on structure; indeed, it needs something closer to the opposite. Innovation requires creativity, and “creativity as a process is messy,” Harrison wrote. “It’s a different, never-the-same-twice, unpredictable adventure.”
Now, as a leader, you probably have limited patience for an adventure. But take heart: The right environment for innovation, Harrison explains, isn’t a free-form, metrics-impaired, deadline-less sandbox so much as a collective mindset that encourages exploration. Getting to that place requires some work, though. Last month, I wrote about how we might make conversations about innovation less intimidating by framing them as conversations about the future. Harrison drills a little deeper: If we’re going to have creative teams in our organizations, we need to address the biases that stifle creativity.
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