As an innovation speaker, this is a subject that I approach systematically, and which is now widely documented in neurobiology or psychosociology research. (and creativity and the ability to innovate are not only studied in the United States! In France too, and in particular at the Sorbonne x CNRS;) 🐓)
I share with you these 5 great abilities, as they are widely accepted today.
1- 🤯 Become aware of your automatic thought mechanisms
Super hard: the famous ability to think “out of the box”.
Everyone is talking about it, but nobody defines the “box.” This box is what Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman calls judgment heuristics, thought reflexes in which we are all prisoners. And that make us all think the same way when faced with a given problem.
For Kahneman, you have to break his heuristics to “think different” - yes you know 🖥️. In other words: be wary of spontaneous, rapid, reflexive thoughts. And take the time to dig and question.
2. ⁉️ question the evidence accurately
A major principle of Designer.
In other words, ask why things are the way they are and why they couldn't be different.
Questioning a process, questioning “ready-made” answers, questioning habits. To get out of it and do something different.
3. 🛸 break down silos in your way of thinking, and stay open to other ways of doing things.
With a great ability to go where you are not expected: designing a lounge chair with aeronautical engineers, when you are a furniture designer for example (this gives the Wassily Chair). There are lots of other examples in the industrial and design world.
It requires a real openness to the other, to the other person's thinking software. And as a result, a hell of a lot of leadership to get lots of very different people working together... Collaborative innovation is not easy.
4. 🧗 be resilient and be prepared to struggle
To innovate, to create, is to take risks. Taking risks is also called experimenting. But who says to take a risk says possibility of failure. And that's only possible if we accept it in order to learn from it and make progress. But above all, your management must be OK for this: to innovate is to accept that very often, ideas do not give anything. Not always easy to reconcile with short-term KPIs...
5. 😅 Last ability: work continuously.
Innovation and creativity are not very flexible: innovating is not just having ideas. It is even very far from that.
Rather, it is 95% of perspiration, failure and work to transform an emerging idea (always imperfect) into a business if you are an entrepreneur, into a novel if you are a writer, into an airy piece of furniture if you are a Designer, etc. And we never say that. You never see it in the movies!
Innovating is hard work!
Alexis Botaya, innovation and creativity speaker
- My creativity podcast upon Majelan
- My Challenge Create to Innovate on WelcomeOriginals
