Monthly Archives: February 2013

Innovation Competency #2 – Kaleidoscopic Thinking

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Edison’s ability to generate a vast range of ideas drove his world-beating approach to practical solution finding. He could consider many problems at the same time and was able to look at each one from multiple angles. At the height of his exploration into electrical power, for example, he worked on forty projects simultaneously. Edison credited his remarkable facility for making creative connections to his “mental kaleidoscope.”

Kaleidoscopic thinking is the term Michael Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott developed for Edison’s unparalleled approach to practical creativity. He had strategies for juggling multiple projects and how to “turn a problem around” from every angle. Kaleidoscopic thinking will help you develop your ability to generate ideas, make creative connections, and discern patterns. Using both your imagination and your reasoning ability, you can discover how to liberate your mind from the constraints of habitual thinking. Edison cultivated the use of metaphors, analogies, and visual thinking. His down-to-earth way of picturing things first in his mind’s eye and then on paper is surprisingly easy to learn.

Edison’s kaleidoscopic mind brought forward revolutionary ideas that changed the way we live. In bringing the world electric light, Edison bucked conventional wisdom. His ability to manage dozens of projects simultaneously at the height of developing his electrical power system stands as testimony not only to his exceptional kaleidoscopic thinking abilities, but his capacity managing complexity is a key skill covered in Competency #3: Full-spectrum Engagement.

Next: Full-Spectrum Engagement

Read on overview of Edison’s Five Competencies for Innovation here.

This material adapted from Innovate Like Edison, by Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott

A multi-part series being reposted in honor of Thomas Edison’s 166th birth February 11, 1847

Innovation Competency #1 – Solution-Centered Mindset

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The phenomenon of seeing what we expect or want to see is called “mindset.” It functions all the time, consciously or unconsciously, for better or worse. Your mindset reflects your sense of purpose, and your sense of purpose organizes your purpose. In other words, purpose determines perception.

A solution-centered mindset gives you access to a wide range of tools for innovating.

Thomas Edison’s purpose was clear: “bringing out the secrets of nature and applying them for the happiness of man.” He believed that his success was inevitable and this belief energized his every endeavor. Edison’s unwavering focus on finding solutions allowed him to embrace incredibly complex challenges and overcome many setbacks.

His solution-centered mindset allowed him to embrace seemingly fantastic goals – like lighting the world – and make them come true. Edison aligned his goals with his passions and cultivated a powerful sense of optimism that had a magnetic, positive effect on his coworkers, investors, customers, an d ultimately the entire nation. It’s called charismatic optimism.

Edison’s passion for his goals and his charismatic optimism were nurtured by an unrelenting desire to learn, especially by reading. Throughout his life, Edison devoured books, plays, journals, magazines, scientific papers, and newspapers. Edison’s voracious reading created a constant stream of ideas, insights, and inspiration that led him to breakthrough solutions. His never-ending quest for greater depth and breadth of knowledge helped him develop an unprecedented approach to experimentation in service of innovation. His experiments were characterized by a remarkable combination of persistence and rigorous objective that accelerated his success.

A solution-centered mindset is the launching pad for the realization of your most ambitious innovation objectives and the fulfillment of your highest personal aspirations.

Next: Kaleidoscopic Thinking

Read an overview of Edison’s Five Competencies for Innovation here.

This material adapted from Innovate Like Edison, by Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott

A multi-part series being reposted in honor of Thomas Edison’s birth

February 11, 1847

Turning On the Light: Learn to Innovate Like Edison

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Every organization – not just business – needs one core competence: innovation. –Peter Drucker

Thomas Edison was the most outstanding figure in an era marked by an extraordinary confluence of American innovation – including the work of Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, George Eastman, Harvey Firestone, John D. Rockefeller, George Westinghouse, and Andrew Carnegie – that accelerated America’s leadership in global business.

Edison understood that innovation is much more than invention. Through the establishment of his two extraordinary laboratories at Menlo Park and West Orange, NJ, Edison drove innovation on many levels, including strategic technological, product/service, process, and design innovations.

How did Edison excel in so many different kinds of innovation?

courtesy greenster.com

courtesy greenster.com

Innovate Like Edison presents Thomas Edison’s essential approach to innovation success. His approach is based on what authors Michael Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott call The Five Competencies of Innovation. The five competencies are comprised of a total of twenty-five elements – building blocks – that support them.

The five competencies and twenty-five elements represent a core curriculum for you to achieve innovation literacy. If you are new to innovation, there’s no better way to get started on the journey. Innovate Like Edison is a guidebook enabling you to thrive in a world that increasingly rewards efforts. Ready to start classes?

Edison’s Five Competencies of Innovation

Solution-Centered Mindset

  • Align Your Goals with Your Passions
  • Cultivate Charismatic Optimism
  • Seek Knowledge Relentlessly
  • Experiment Persistently
  • Pursue Rigorous Objectivity

Kaleidoscopic Thinking

  • Maintain a Notebook
  • Practice Ideaphoria
  • Discern Patterns
  • Express Ideas Visually
  • Explore the Roads Not Taken

Full Spectrum Engagement

  • Intensity and Relaxation
  • Seriousness and Playfulness
  • Sharing and Protecting
  • Complexity and Simplicity
  • Solitude and Team

Mastermind Collaboration

  • Recruit for Chemistry and Results
  • Design Multidisciplinary Collaboration Teams
  • Inspire an Environment of Open Exchange
  • Reward Collaboration
  • Become a Master Networker

Super-Value Creation

  • Link Market Trends with Core Strengths
  • Turn In to your Target Audience
  • Apply the Right Business Model
  • Understand Scale-up Effects
  • Create an Unforgettable Market-moving Brand

As you scan the 5 Competencies and 25 Elements above, consider how you might apply them to your most important innovation challenges. Think about questions like:

  • How did Edison develop his resilient, creative, and optimistic attitude toward life?
  • How did he find the right people to hire?
  • Why did he choose the collaborators he did?
  • What techniques did Edison use to teeth his ideas and then scale them up?
  • Are there implicit “rules” to follow in Edison’s approach to innovation?

Next:  Solution-Centered Mindset

A multi-part series being reposted in honor of Thomas Edison’s birth February 11, 1847

The Basic Four of Leadership: # 2 – Communicate

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A senior leader’s job isn’t to have all the ideas or even most of them. Her job is to communicate corporate goals to employees and motivate them to achieve them. – Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

A 200,000-person study by the Jackson Organization confirmed that managers who achieve enhanced business results are significantly more likely to be seen by their employees as strong in the Basic Four areas of leadership:

  • Goal Setting
  • Communication
  • Trust
  • Accountability

Authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton used that study as a foundation in their book The Carrot Principle, adding on the accelerator of frequent and effective recognition to illustrate that the relationship between recognition and improved business results is both highly predictable and proven to work.

As in all good things, you must start with the basics.

Communicating Openly

When you stop to think about it, communication within an organization is going to happen without a leader’s active participation. Communication is happening every day among employees. If a thing or a person or an event exists in an organization, someone, somewhere, is talking about it. So when a leader fails to constantly and openly communicate “who we are and what’s important,” the conversation doesn’t stop. The dialogue among employees just goes in a different direction, and the organization’s culture develops away from the leader’s influence, goals and priorities.

So what do leaders who openly communicate do? For starters:

  • Set clear guiding values and goals
  • Discuss issues facing the organization and the team – not just the big decisions and announcements
  • Pass on all useful bits of information to employees, especially those that involve change initiatives or that personally affect employees
  • Make time for employees and listen intently when they express opinions and concerns
  • Welcome open discussion from team members about rumors they hear
  • Respond promptly to team member requests for more information
  • Go up their own chain of command to fill in the details they don’t know
  • Introduce employees to other key individuals in the organization, sparking dialogue
  • Give employees online access to relevant databases

Leaders communicate on many other levels as well. They communicate by example, gesture, their decisions, what they value, and what they celebrate, what they reward and what they don’t reward, and their actions.

The one thing they can’t do is communicate from their office.

While meetings, conference calls, and reports are all important, the things that keep leaders in their offices are nowhere near as important as open communications with their team.

It’s impossible to lead people without open communication.

And that requires you to open your door and take a walk…

Adapted from The Carrot Principle by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

Part 3 of a series

Part 1

Part 2

The Basic Four of Leadership: # 1 – Goal Setting

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A 200,000-person study by the Jackson Organization confirmed that managers who achieve enhanced business results are significantly more likely to be seen by their employees as strong in the Basic Four areas of leadership:

  • Goal Setting

  • Communication

  • Trust

  • Accountability

Authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton used that study as a foundation in their book The Carrot Principle, adding on the accelerator of frequent and effective recognition to illustrate that the relationship between recognition and improved business results is both highly predictable and proven to work.

As in all good things, you must start with the basics.

Setting Clear Goals

The work life of many employees today is seen as a meaningless task with no end in sight. Too many organizations are operating in a vacuum where team members and even their leaders have no idea what is valued. Deprived of direction, team members coast along, getting nowhere fast.

Whoa – did those words just describe the organization that you are a part of? GASP – even your church?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

While leaders cannot often change the tasks in their organizations, they can change team members’ attitudes toward those tasks by setting clear team goals. Be defining the purpose of a task and tying it to a desirable end result, effective leaders infuse work with meaning and purpose. The task remains the same, but its significance in team members’ minds skyrockets.

Great leaders infuse their team with a clear sense of purpose. They not only explain the mission to the organization in terms of serving others, acting with integrity, being the best in their category, and so on, but how that grand, overarching mission applies to specific goals for their team and each individual’s daily work.

Teams need clarity from their leaders: clarity of goals, clarity of progress, and clarity of success. Leaders who provide clarity set an optimistic tone for the future.

A leader has to focus every day on gaining alignment with what matters most to the organization. Achieving goals should be noticed and rewarded while variances from the mission and values should necessitate quick action.

Goal setting may seem to be a basic management skill, but it is rare to find a manager who does this effectively. If you were to think back to an effective manager or leader you’ve had in the past, chances are they not only helped you understand the direction of the team, but how you as an individual contribute to that direction.

The power of a clearly communicated goal is amazing. Cultures around the world from all time periods have created epic myths about journeys through danger, despair, and ultimately, triumph. What makes the journey and its trials worthwhile is the hero’s noble purpose – his goal. Those stories live on today…

Isn’t it time for you to create an amazing legend of your purpose (goal) that permeates deeply within and through every member of your team?

Next: The Basic Four – Communication

Adapted from The Carrot Principle by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

Part 2 of a series

Part 1