Guest Post: Ghosts of Innovations Past
Let’s talk about an innovation blocker, one that I like to call The Ghost of Innovation Past a.k.a. “the GIP.” A common discussion in innovation circles is how to remove obstacles to innovation. The thought is that people want to innovate but are held back by their rigid companies. The GIP is one of those things that makes companies rigid but get this, it can also make you rigid!
The GIP happens when “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” goes wrong. Somewhere, sometime in the past an innovation occurred and brought some measure of success. Then that idea just became how things are done.
As an innovation professional I should be aware of The GIP but it snuck up on me not too long ago. I noticed my vacuum had been performing worse with each passing use. After a bit of grumbling failed attempts to fix the problem a block was finally discovered in the hose. In a moment of innovation I grabbed a wire hanger, fashioned a hook, and proceeded to fish out the compacted carpet lint.
After creating a sizable pile of removed floor hair I was having troubles with the deeper, more compacted section of blockage. I went doing what worked before, I just kept hacking away with my hanger even as my returns diminished drastically and my frustrations mounted.
Even still, I dipped that hanger in again hoping that something more would come out on this attempt. That is until my dog needed me to take her outside to measure a tree and I stepped away.
After a walk outside, I returned to the problem with a beginner’s mind. The correct solution then presented itself. By disconnecting the other end of the hose the hanger could be pushed through thereby dislodging the nasty culprit! Easy as that the plug was pushed out revealing a miniature Christmas stocking.
If I had relied on my original innovation I would still be picking lint out of my vacuum instead of writing this article. To get breakthrough I had to step away from the problem and apply a beginner’s mind to solve it.
Remember that it is easy to get sucked into the toxic sameness. It heats up slowly like cooking a lobster by slowly turning up the heat. In the end it doesn’t get you as far as you want to go. It takes either discipline or the assistance of a dog on a mission to step away for that fresh perspective. I would take my chances with the discipline route, it smells better. The rewards are worthwhile, so don’t get GIPPED!
Loren Verville is a collaborative partner with PentaVision and a so called innovation expert. He can be reached at loren.verville@gmail.com.
Hello Guest Author;
Nice post and I really like the GIP handle!
But to a process bigot like me, all that you write about smacks of the old Process Mantra: Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. Yeah, I know it’s a little stretch to apply this back to your furball and hangar, but bear with me, here’s how it would work:
Think: Your first thought was to use the hangar
Plan: Get the hose set up well, straighten the hangar and make your hook.
Do: Haul out some stuff
Measure: How much, and how much is left?
If you had then started again at Think, and based on what you said about the Process you used before Kitty demanded a break, you would have repeated the exercise a few times, but then when the measurement showed you how poorly you were doing, instead of simply “doing it” again, you would have gone back to “Thinking”. Which is precisely what you did while watching the cat measure the tree (love that expression – my dog “reads the news” with his nose!).
It’s that vital pause to think, contemplating the actual result which is so important.
It may help to illustrate this a little further. We produced a formal process specification along these lines of “How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign”. The Process description can be found on the blog index linked to at the end of this comment. The index contains 4 Posts:
1) How to Run a SMM Campaign. This is the formal process description (remember the Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat?) And because this process specification calls for one to measure ROI as one of the metrics to use in monitoring your campaign, the other 3 posts cover:
2) How to measure the ROI of your website as a whole
3) The 10 best free ROI calculators on the Web and
4), How to build your own ROI calculator so that you can measure the ROI of your SMM.
Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln
Eric,
There is indeed process in everything we do but the challenge lies in the actions that fill the process. It is easy to give generalized steps, it is quite another to do the planning, implementing, and measuring (etc).
The point being made here is through a humorous story with a real person facing a real problem . It is easy to be lulled into a state of status quo even when you know better. My brain knew at some level that it needed to take several steps and did not because it was already engaged in a problem solving process. It took an external force to disengage that process which had become stuck in a loop.
The real value comes with the mindset needed for the solution. Beginner’s mind is one way to put it, although it takes many names. It is simple and powerful yet difficult to achieve. Why? Because we can think through the process mantra without using it and still believe we did as well as possible.