{"id":6165,"date":"2015-01-20T17:56:22","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T00:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cerebyte.com\/?p=6165"},"modified":"2015-01-20T17:56:22","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T00:56:22","slug":"learn-to-be-more-innovative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cerebyte.com\/2015\/01\/20\/learn-to-be-more-innovative\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn to be more innovative"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"compass\"<\/a>\n\nMany people hold children\u2019s learning processes up as a model for adult innovation. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, for instance, attributes his great performance to the consistent exploration of new ideas through a mindset of \u201cchildlike wonder.\u201d People often perceive that children begin life with curiosity, wonder and the ability to \u201cimagine\u201d beyond the realm of possibilities. However, as you get older that curiosity disappears and life experiences dictate how things should be which can slow down your ability to be radically innovative. Wouldn\u2019t it be great to still have the same kind of imaginative mindset that you did when you were young?\n\nThis is an unfortunate misunderstanding about children\u2019s learning and adult innovation, which tends to impede the very thing it aims to promote, greater adult innovation. As some of you may know, I spent the first decade of my professional life as an elementary school teacher, have a Masters in Education and, in my doctoral work at Stanford, delved deeply into child development, before switching to a study of management decision-making.\n\nWhen you dig into what children are actually doing as they learn, it becomes clear that they are not being \u201cimaginative\u201d in the adult sense of the word. Instead, probably the closest parallel to what they are doing is a form of rapid prototyping. Because everything and every situation is new to them, they are constantly experimenting with what works for them and what does not. They aren\u2019t ignoring or overcoming barriers, which is the adult version of imagination; they are trying to discover the barriers. Children are actually striving to gain control over their environment by becoming more adult-like.\n\nPromoting innovation in adults is a very different process. The issue for adults is to overcome well-engrained limitations and barriers. One of the findings from my doctoral dissertation was that adult learners evaluate a range of possibilities and discard those that don\u2019t fit their immediate criteria. Once discarded, opportunities are rarely revived. When people have discarded enough possibilities over time, their thinking becomes rigid and sterile. People look to the metaphor of \u201cimagine like a child\u201d as a means of escaping this narrowing of perspective, which is not an equivalent situation.\n\nWe have done many programs where the goal was to broadly increase innovation in an organization. As one of our clients put it, \u201cI have 50 engineers. Five of them can regularly produce ideas for $50M products. The rest can barely produce one idea for a $5M product. What makes those few high revenue generators different?\u201d\n\nIn this organization, and many others, we used our Wisdom Discovery process to determine how the most prolific innovators conceived of their innovation. A consistent pattern emerged. Top innovators do the following:\n\n\n