𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀.

You’ve seen the disclaimer on investment ads: “Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results.” Sometimes, past success guarantees future failure. When innovation teams get locked into a “formula,” it leads to a rut of derivative ideas that don’t drive growth.

Ensuring that individual team contributors continue to challenge and evolve their knowledge, imagination, and attitudes is critical to getting out of this rut. Leaders need to encourage, in fact, push their innovation teams out of their comfort zone – in other words, disrupt the disruptors.

Knowledge is “fuel” for imagination, so contributors should be expected to continuously explore beyond their existing expertise into other seemingly unrelated fields. The core elements of imagination include the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, reframe problems, and challenge assumptions. Leaders should regularly challenge teams to consider different approaches (models, systems, and ways of thinking) to defining and solving problems. The work being done in the field biomimicry is a great example of how knowledge about the natural world is being applied in novel ways to product design. Leaders must also embrace and espouse a trial and error attitude as essential to generating insight and unearthing truly novel solutions.

Of course, organizations must have the right resources, environment, and culture to foster this continuous cycle of learning, exploration, and development. I’ll be addressing that in a future post.

If this sounds familiar and you think your organization could use some support, reach out and let’s chat. Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/gUVkJq8R or just learn more about how we can help you at https://lnkd.in/edfHQag

By Helder Sebastiao