Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Where do the new ideas for improvements come from?

There are habits that make a person more likely to come up with ideas. According to Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's DNA, the habits include

• Questioning
• Observing
• Networking
• Experimenting

We can change our likelihood of coming up with great new ideas by consciously increasing our questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. And this applies to organizations as well.

Consider the opposite: Let's say we wanted to decrease the likelihood of people coming up with new ideas. Is there anything we could do? Sure. We could discourage questioning by admonishments like "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "keep you nose to the grindstone" or "mind your own business." We could discourage observing by telling people not to bother looking at how others do things that are related to what we do. That's someone else's job. We've got our ways, end of story. We could discourage folks from asking others about their ideas or asking them to react to our ideas. And we could discourage experimentation by insisting that there be no time "wasted" on learning and that failure is not allowed. Experiments often fail and one tends to learn from them whether they fail or succeed. But if there is no time for such silliness or it's fine as long as it's on your own time, we can effectly shut down experimentation.

What might you do to encourage your own ongoing habits of questioning, observing, networking and experimenting? What might you do to encourage those habits in others in your organization?

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Keywords: continuous improvement