Standard thinking in creativity – and for meetings designed to generate innovative output – is to create a climate where people can feel free to play with concepts, to risk their intellectual vanity and say things that might not make sense but might lead to novel ideas. The objective is to remove any negativity from the immediate environment, encouraging a playful stream-of-consciousness and flow of ideas. Keep reading »
The way we talk about our problems says a lot about how likely we are to solve them creatively. When we state a problem as a fact, it becomes a heavy weight. For instance: Nobody’s been able to model the XXX process. Indeed, that’s a problem. It’s also a negative statement – already a downer – and it doesn’t lead to any ideas. It’s a static problem.
A productive problem is one that’s phrased as a question: How might we understand how to model this process? It asks you to wonder about the problem, and even suggests other questions: In what ways is it like other processes that we can model? How might we understand and model aspect of it piece by piece? A problem posed as a question invites ideas that might be a solution. Not even just one solution; an open-ended, wondering question hints that there might be many approaches that could work. Keep reading »
Succeeding in the current business climate may have little to do with what you know, and much more to do with your ability to find out what you don’t know. In other words, asking questions may be one of the best tools for innovation.
The Harvard Business Review posed the question, “how do innovators think?” to two business school professors, Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregerson of INSEAD, who together conducted a 6-year survey of over 3000 creative executives to try to explain how the “innovator’s DNA” works. Keep reading »
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