How to Facilitate Innovation
November 3, 2011 3 Comments
Innovation provides a significant lifeforce and has become a strategic priority for most companies and organizations. An IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number one “leadership competency” of the future. A new and remarkable discovery is that the ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but it is also a function of behaviors.
Compelling ways to develop innovation are found in the Harvard Business Press book entitled “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators”. The work of authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen emerged from an eight-year collaborative study to uncover the origins of innovation. They were less concerned with the companies’ strategies and focused on understanding the people responsible for turning creativity into value propositions.
Five skills surfaced from their investigation including one cognitive (ie, genetic) talent and four acquired behaviors. The cognitive skill is called “associational thinking” or the ability to make connections across seemingly unrelated fields, problems, or ideas. The other four skills are learned (ie, behavioral) and include:
Innovation: Creativity Turned into Cash
• Networking
• Questioning
To our regular readers, perhaps not surprisingly, the required behaviors are virtually identical to the core skills of our professionally trained FAST facilitators. The researchers discovered that innovators are much more likely to question, observe, network, and experiment than typical executives. They also discovered that innovative companies are always (ALWAYS) led by innovative leaders.
“ . . . Innovative people systematically engage in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting behaviors to spark new ideas. Similarly, innovative organizations systematically develop processes that encourage questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting by new employees.”
In their discussion of innovative failures, the authors discovered that people did not ask all the right questions . . . thus they emphasize the value of the discovery skill. In other words, be willing to challenge your people to think clearly. According to the authors, the behavioral focus found in our facilitative leadership training could pay for the training in a matter of weeks.
Their book also provide details on how to calculate an innovation premium for companies; ie, the proportion of a company’s market value that cannot be accounted for from cash flows of current products or markets. Investors take note. This factor alone could pay for the time you took to read this blog, many times over. The innovation advantage found in our curriculum can be converted into a premium for your organizational value by building the code (ie, DNA) for innovation directly into your people, methods, and guiding philosophies—beginning with a facilitative and collaborative culture.
Facilitation Skills
The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).
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- SMART Versus DUMB Criteria (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- Facilitate Meaning, Not Words (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- How To Actively Listen (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
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About FASTInstructor
Love the idea that a facilitator is an innovator. This takes me back to the beliefs that human beings are intelligent, creative and want to make a difference. The concept of the innovation premium intrigues me and satisfies the desires of my accounting background. Hard figures sell, and the idea that there is a payback to innovation is something that an executive will find the time to stop for. Makes me want to take a read of the book myself, thanks for the linl.
Executives scream for quantification. Nouns scream for adjectives. Cash begs the question, “How much?” Fast begs the question, “How soon?” Indeed the subjective screams for the objective, to give it shared meaning. Scoville units help us understand and consensually agree on the spiciness or heat of a given food dish. Thanks for taking time to comment.
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