| In Innovation, General Couple of weeks ago, David Pollard posted on why it's hard to sell innovation services.....I recommend you read the whole thing, because whether you are buying or selling innovation, you can gain insight from this post. (See his post here: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/07/19.html#a1215) What struck me too was that one of the reasons he mentioned completely dovetailed with some thinking I've been doing for several weeks now on how mental clutter affects creativity and innovation. I'm talking about how difficult it is to come up with new ideas when your mind is just plain stuffed full of thoughts and emotions and plans and to-do-lists. Last month I went on a week's vacation, something I've rarely managed to do over the years. Instead, I had perfected the concept of the three-day weekend, often checking work email while gone. I left for this trip stressed and fatigued and feeling as though I probably hadn't had an original idea in months. I had a mind full of emotional baggage I needed to let go of, around things that had happened with projects that were over and done with. I took my laptop with me because I couldn't bring myself to leave it home. But while I was gone, I never even booted it up, except to download photos from my digital camera. I didn't check email, didn't blog, didn't call the office. By the fourth day of vacation I was more energetic, had let go of emotional baggage, and was having idea serendipity -- odd, random ideas about things that I had been working on both personally and at work. Obviously, this is not a new concept. It's one reason people take longer vacations and sabbaticals. But consider the waste of inovation potential if an entire *company* gets into the state I was in when I left for vacation. So -- here's the connection to Pollard's post: He says one reason innovation is hard to sell is because "it requires understanding of how and why the market has moved on without you." There is so much in this one statement. Pollard is saying that being open for innovation requires an understanding that whatever you have been doing in the past has failed. And, I would add, it also requires that you manage to let go of the emotions generated by this failure. Letting go is not often encouraged in our professional lives. We're rewarded for hanging on, staying with something, seeing it through. If we make a mistake and we are not suitably and demonstrably upset over it, we run the risk of being seen as not taking things seriously enough. Perhaps, in order to be truly open to innovation ("apprentice mind" again?!), we have to be willing to let go of a lot of things. We have to be willing to clear enough of what's on our minds to create an open space for new ideas, and to recognize them when others bring them to us. |
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