Tag Archives: Intellectual Innovation

Using Intuition to Drive Innovation Success

Using Intuition to Drive Innovation Success

Americans are in love with data, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

… and the rest of the world is catching the same disease.

Data is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is only one side of the coin driving innovation and operational success.

On the other side of the coin is intuition.

As smart organizations try and make greater use of human-centered design, empathy and intuition can and must play an increasingly important role.

Bruce Kasanoff states that “Intuition is the Highest Form of Intelligence” in his article on Forbes.

Intuition is incredibly important to human-centered design from the standpoint that an “intuitive” design taps into our shared understanding as humans of how things should operate.

Intuition is the secret sauce of the quantum human computer, and as the pace of change AND complexity both accelerate, we must change our brain function to develop not just our intellectual capabilities but our instinctual capabilities as well.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote about these two ways of thinking in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Let’s look at a short video looking at intuition, science and dreams:

Science Intuition and Dreams – Dean Radin

Dreams can be an incredibly powerful tool for innovation, in fact the Nine Innovation Roles that play an important role in the best-selling book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire came to me in a dream. Many experts recommend that you keep a pen and a notebook next to your bed to capture these flashes of brilliance.

Dreams and shared understanding are but two manifestations of intuition, of our interconnectedness with each other and energies greater than ourselves. But how do we leverage our intuition for innovation?

One way is to use your innovation as an input to use with a tool like The Experiment Canvas™:

The Experiment Canvas

Which is available as a free tool here on my web site from the forthcoming Disruptive Innovation Toolkit™.

You can use it to craft a hypothesis based on your intuition that you want to test, it keeps you focused on what you hope to learn during the experiment, and to consider the setup, operation, and wrapup of your experiment – among other things.

Too often people ignore their intuition because it doesn’t seem scientific. But, turning intuitive insights into hypotheses to test will help you overcome your hesitancy until you train your intuition and to learn to trust it as the potential human quantum computer that it could be. The other reason that people ignore their intuition is that well, they just can’t hear it. For many people, their intellectual mind is so busy that they can’t receive and react to what their intuitive mind is telling them.

Here is an interesting video that highlights these two points and how humans communicate behind the scenes:

Are you drowning out your intuitive mind? Are you failing to consider what is saying, and to test its assertions?

If so, please stop it, and learn new ways to keep innovating!

SPECIAL BONUS:

If you’d like to watch and learn even more about intuition…

Here is a video on Nikola Tesla and the Power of Intuition:


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Directed Innovation for Strategic Success

Directed Innovation for Strategic SuccessIt seems like every organization has a vision and a mission statement, and some even have mantra’s. My personal innovation mantra is to make innovation and marketing insights accessible for the greater good.

At the same time organizations are creating their mission statement, many take the time to create an organizational strategy, only to then neglect the creation of an innovation strategy.

I believe that every organization should create an innovation strategy with the same diligence and precision that they attempt to create their organizational strategy with. Has your organization created an innovation strategy?

An innovation strategy, what’s that?

An innovation strategy sets the innovation direction for an organization. It gives members of the organization an idea of what new achievements and directions will best benefit the organization when it comes to innovation. As with organizational strategy, innovation strategy must determine WHAT the organization should focus on (and WHAT NOT to) so that tactics can be developed for HOW to get there.

There are two main kinds of innovation – directed innovation (or intellectual innovation) and emergent innovation (or instinctual innovation). An innovation strategy benefits both types. An innovation strategy provides the contraints that the organization’s directed innovation needs, while also providing the focus that helps emergent innovation, well, emerge over time as members refer back to the innovation strategy.

Innovating Inside the BoxBest practices indicate that innovation succeeds best when it is constrained. But for some people, it doesn’t make sense that innovation needs to be constrained. – “Don’t great ideas come from giving people free reign?”

The short answer is no. By giving people constraints, it actually sets their creativity free, but in a directed fashion.

A well-defined innovation strategy helps the organization define which innovation challenges to focus on and what tactics will best help the organization overcome those challenges. An innovation strategy provides a map to refer back to as projects and ideas are being evaluated.

An innovation strategy should communicate to the organization the kinds of innovation that will be most valuable to the organization in helping it achieve its corporate strategy. It is best practice for an innovation strategy to support the organizational strategy.

Without an innovation strategy, an organization can find itself pulled in many different directions, dissipating its innovation energy and preventing it from accelerating its innovation pace by combining the outcomes of strategically-related innovation efforts.

Finally, even those organizations that have successfully created an innovation strategy, often miss the most important part – to communicate it out very clearly to all members of the organization, so that members know exactly what the innovation strategy is and precisely how to contribute. If you’ve done a good job of this, you won’t be afraid to ask your members the following question – What is our innovation strategy?

Are you afraid?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation

One of the best Twitter names that I’ve come across in the past few years is @ShowerThinker – almost as cool as mine – @innovate. It’s an account for an inventor that makes post-it notes for the shower called Aqua Notes.

This Twitter name captures a well-understood fact – that a lot of great ideas (and ultimately innovations) come to us not from brainstorming, but from the connection to our subconscious that occurs in the shower (or pretty much anywhere else in the bathroom). If so many great ideas come to us when our active mind is elsewhere, then why is such little attention paid to this source of innovation.

A lot has been written about creativity and the brain, left brain vs. right brain thinking, and how often the brain just needs to get out of its own way for creativity to occur as there is no single creative area of the brain.

In my own cuarto de bano moment, I came up with this contrasting phrase to help us frame the conversation – Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation.

Intellectual Innovation begins with active efforts to capture and develop ideas using techniques such as brainstorming, greenhousing, etc.

Instinctual Innovation springs forth from a collection of sometimes un-connected information that collects in an individuals brain. Often ideas that form the basis for instinctual innovation rattle around as part of a collection of problems in search of solutions for a long time before emerging.

I’ve created this table to lay out some of the differences:

Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation

Innovation has garnered a lot of attention in the press over the past couple of years, and many executives have the word rolling off their tongues quite easily now. In some organizations this has translated into employees being trained to be better intellectual innovators, or into creativity consultants helping stimulate the organization’s intellectual innovation for a particular project.

But much less attention is being paid to instinctual innovation. To build sustainable instinctual innovation you have to train members of your organization to be business innovators. You also need to provide members with a set of clear and actionable innovation goals along with a simple visual framework to decipher them. And, most importantly you have to invest in the organizational change necessary to create a culture of continuous innovation.

Then, and only then, will instinctual innovation be best able to emerge from any part of the organization on its own timeline and integrate with the intellectual innovation that is also going on at the same time.

Intellectual innovation can help drive the short-term growth of an organization. But, when combined with instinctual innovation, the two together can create an innovation engine to power the organization now and into the future.

What do you think?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.