Are you one of those people who switches off every time you hear or read the word INNOVATION?

Does the word “innovation” suggest science and technology and big corporate organisations with their R and D departments? Does it also create images of new inventions – equipment and products – that require millions of dollars in planning and even more in bringing them to market?

Is it any wonder then that you, in your professional service firm, small business or as an employee of either of these, would switch off, believing that “innovation” is for the big guys and has no relevance to you? Rather than empower you, the very concept is very disempowering.

But I’m sure you have read, in the increasing amount of material that is bombarding us about innovation, about how important it is. As Tony Buzan says in his introduction to Stephen Lundin’s new book, CATS :The Nine Lives of Innovation: “….it is a globally accepted awareness that right now any individual, company or country wishing to survive in the twenty-first century, must develop the brain’s seemingly infinite capacity to create and to innovate.”

Deep down you believe this and in a leadership position in your organisation you think you should be taking the whole idea more seriously. You don’t know, however, how to take this macro concept and make it relevant and important for your “small” organisation. Innovation is about change but also about empowering change. It’s one thing to accept it when it has to happen, or when it is forced upon you. To actually encourage it, provoke it or set up an environment that “breeds” it – that’s another issue. Why would I want to do that?

In this newsletter we are going to address those issues:

• Innovation and the Empowerment of Individuals

• CATS – The Nine Lives of Innovation. A Review of Stephen C. Lundin’s new book

Let this issue of the People Empowered newsletter start your journey for you.

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Innovation and the Empowerment of Individuals

While all innovation in organisations needs inspired and supportive leadership from the top if it is to produce results, it is important to remember that it is individuals, not organisations that innovate. When there are enough individuals who are given the space to be creative and imaginative, to see things differently, to think and plan outside the box, then what emerges is an innovative organisation.

 Why would you want to be innovative?

• It is the best insurance policy against becoming jaded, disillusioned or stuck in your work and your life.

• It “wires” you to see old things in new ways all the time, to find new meanings in old realities.

• It stretches and grows you and your ideas.

• It offers every opportunity for you to discover and enhance your talents and abilities.

• It gives meaning and purpose to your life by keeping you energised and engaged.

• It gives you the “right” to question and explore time honoured orthodoxies and beliefs and the potential therefore to discover new meanings.

• It triggers existential emotions like fear, doubt, risk, failure, rejection and devastation. Learning to cope brings with it enormous potential for personal and professional growth. The self-awareness that ensues is immeasurable. The reflection that generates this self-awareness is invaluable.

• You are always in charge of your own life. Whatever happens, you always look at it proactively, believing that there is always a way through. You just go into that mode.

So how do you do this - build innovation into your life?

• Don’t stay in the one place too long. It becomes too comfortable and we know exactly what is expected and we stop having to stretch ourselves to discover what is next.

• Surround yourselves with other innovative, creative and energised people who are always thinking and talking about the latest thing.

• Be interested in everything that is current.

• Explore new knowledge and new ideas.

• Explore experiences that you haven’t had before. Go for a hot balloon ride or bungey jumping.

• Take holidays in different places each year and explore places and situations that stretch you a bit.

• Volunteer to do something you’ve not done before.

• Get a new hairstyle.

• Wear a colour you haven’t worn before.

• Take up a new hobby or sport that is out of the box for you.

• Be the leader who supports others to be innovative also by encouraging them to take risks and discover their uniqueness.

Just doing these things doesn’t necessarily make you innovative. It’s your motivation that’s important – that you will expand as a person by taking this initiative, that it will take you into a new part of yourself whose potential you do not yet know, that it will help others to see you in a new and different light, for example. It’s also the reflection you do afterwards on what happened for and to you as a result of taking that initiative that is important and significant. It sparks and triggers further initiatives.

How does being innovative “look” and “feel”?

Few, if any, innovative people will tell you that they can make new discoveries, have “ah! ah!” experiences, gain new insights or get a new burst of energy while operating within their normal work or domestic environment.

It doesn’t happen, for example, at the board room table. It might appear during a long distance run, or while surfing or walking along the beach.  It often happens in the shower, or it used to before water reform and 4 minute showers! It might also appear around the imaginative work spaces that are now being created in many of the new corporate buildings. It often happens on days off, at week-ends or on holidays. Or have you noticed when you are stuck on something and can’t move forward that if you can get out of the place for a while – go for a walk or a run, head for the gym – that you often come back having made a breakthrough.

So if you are one of those people whose life is very routine, where nothing is happening and you feel you are going nowhere fast and every day is “same old, same old”, then you don’t need a coach, but rather a dose of what we’ve detailed above. Doing just one of those things for the right reason and reflecting on it afterwards will begin to make a difference.

If you are working long hours, letting your holidays and rostered days off mount up, if you have lunch at your desk most days and drink copious amounts of coffee (again at your desk) in between, if you take work home most nights and come back to work for at least some hours over the week-end … what are you doing to your physical self? But also, what are you doing to your creative self? What are you contributing of your unique self to the organisation for which you work? Do you even know who that unique self is anymore? You also don’t need a coach, but rather a does of the above.

I want to end where I began. Innovative individuals empower themselves and everyone around them. They become the energy and fire of innovative organisations.

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Copyright © People Empowered-Maree Harris 2007
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