The impediment to action advances the action. What stands in the way becomes the way. – Marcus Aurelius
Leaders need to make decisions big and small day in and day out, sometimes with the “luxury” of precedents, facts, statistics, upon which they can weigh costs and benefits, assess risks, and make decisions to optimize outcomes.
What happens when there is no precedent to rely on, no roadmap to follow? How can a leader calculate cost and benefit, risk and reward, when nothing is familiar? How do you turn obstacles into a path forward?
That’s the topic of this second installment of the Innovative Thinking series. In Part One, we examined the “foundation” of creative thinking with Isaac Asimov. In the final part, we’ll consider ways organizations can become more open to innovation.
Innovative thinking embraces ambiguity and the unknown. Instead of focusing on what’s come before, and how it has always been done, it dares to imagine what might come after. The norm and the precedents do not dictate your ways of thinking and solving problems. Innovative thinking might be compared to Alexander the Great slicing through the Gordian Knot.
Decision making based on past knowledge and experience without the audacity of using new, outside of the norm creativity will not lead to innovations. It can be compared to the experienced hand of a captain, piloting the organization through shifting, but familiar, currents. Experience is very important and valuable. Experience and innovative thinking are not mutually exclusive. Leaders today need both.
There are times when relying on the captain’s experience in coastal waters will no longer suffice when the ship is foundering in the deep ocean. Take the Apollo 13 crisis, for example: When the Moon mission had to be aborted after an oxygen tank in the Service Module exploded, the three astronauts could only use the Lunar Module to get back to Earth.
Although the Lunar Module could only support two astronauts for two days on the Moon, Mission Control had to innovate ways to deal with a myriad of problems such as controlling the carbon dioxide level for three men on a four-day journey back. It is a true case of innovate or die. The NASA scientists, in a frenzy, created a carbon-filter using socks of the orbiting astronauts, and instructed them to assemble. It worked. The collective wisdom from NASA’s improvised innovation returned all three safely.
Reusable rockets: Just because for decades rockets are splashed or burned does not mean it is the way it must be. SpaceX dared to think otherwise, and that led to reusable rockets.
3D printing: Printing for two millennia has been 2D, until recently 3D printing became the reality.
AirB&B and Uber: The digital economy enabled their disruptive business models, tantamount to a paradigm shift from the traditional hotel booking and hail-a-taxi models.
“Think different”, – notice that Steve Jobs purposely dropped “ly” at the end of “different”, ignoring the grammar? – that is exactly his point. It is arguably more showmanship than Apollo 13’s socks.
The challenge is to switch viewpoints and get an assist from Alexander the Great – or listen to Marcus Aurelius, who urged us to turn obstacles into opportunities.
What do you do when there is no path, when no one is an expert, and it seems that only obstacles lie ahead? Here are two approaches to consider:
The beginner’s mind. When faced with a novel problem, there are no stock answers in the back of the book. The beginner’s mind, an idea borrowed from Zen Buddhism, offers an alternative viewpoint. The first step is to admit that there is no playbook, and that we haven’t seen this movie before. The next steps are to ask questions, keep an open mind, and be willing to experiment.
Leading without authority. Building on the beginner’s mind, we “lead without authority,” a phrase taken from adaptive leadership. In response to disruptive challenges, we recognize that there are no experts or authorities who can order the correct course of action. Instead, leadership guides a collaborative effort in which all contributions are valued and all opinions are given a hearing.
Instead of experience and authority, it favors a collective, open minded approach to discovering new solutions.
We’ve only scratched the surface of these concepts, but we’ll return to them in the third installment of the series, when we consider how organizations can foster a culture of innovative thinking.
Copyright ©️ 2024 by Stephen Wullschleger. All rights reserved.
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