Do Your Work Innovations Have Value?

From the thinking chair…Innovation could be considered the result of a special situation not always coveted within today’s business environments.

Through long-time observation, real innovation has seemed linked with the mastery of one thing, exploring FOR alternatives beyond the obvious when problem solving. This open, brainstorming thinking approach has helped to yield many more choices from which to create solutions. The alternatives have been good, bad, ugly, unique, redundant, brilliant, stupid, exciting, or boring. Each have been evaluated for individual merits to solving the current or future problems. When considered together, two or more alternatives have delivered much more interesting ideas to use.

Innovators have relied heavily on one important work element to perform well. Time! When given ample thinking time, innovators have come up with highly effective and efficient solutions. Their explorations have yielded higher quantities of alternatives. With more ideas, the solutions have become more thoughtful and thorough. Additionally, the opportunity to cross-over more alternatives has helped develop greater robustness and lasting effects in innovation based solutions.

Today’s work cultures, however, have seemingly become impeded to support innovation thinking time. The very prevalent fix-it-now problem-solving approaches have resulted in conditioning some work cultures into being reactive instead of proactive, an essential element to innovation. The always on nature of email, phone, texting, meetings, and other daily transactions has taken away the amount of available innovation time. Making a situation worse, work environment reward systems have been redirected towards the heroes of the situational rescues instead of the innovation deliveries that usually have delivered higher value for lower cost.

What have you done to steel back your innovation thinking time and appropriate recognition? Have you talked with the leadership members that love the ideas but then tell you to keep them to yourself? Have you chatted with peers only to perceive that they prefer to do no more than required for their jobs? Have you talked with other group team members to socialize innovation ideas only to receive a blank stare back on what the heck could you be thinking? Have you considered molding back to the norm of less innovation? Or, have you chosen to seek opportunities where innovation time has formally become part of the work environment and culture?

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Do you have personal innovation stories to share? I would love to hear about them. Send me a note through LinkedIn or post a comment here on this article.