Being creative is not enough. Brilliant ideas, singularly, cannot take you and your organization to the next level. Innovators not only come up with brilliant ideas. Innovators orchestrate a plan on how to take action on that brilliant idea, but they don’t stop there. Innovators are responsible in turning ideas into action.
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Tom Peters
Creativity is a crucial component of moving forward. No individual, organization, and mindset can evolve and adapt to constant change without the spark creativity brings to the table. Being creative means having the ability to look past the chaos of failure, the excitement of success, and the refuge of stability. They hold the answers to ‘what’s next’ or ‘what if’ questions.
Creative people supply the power that lights up the metaphorical lightbulb when an idea comes to mind. They represent the many Post-It notes on whiteboards in conference rooms across the corporate world. Unfortunately, many of these bright ideas get kicked around—caught in the vortex of indecisiveness and inaction. We need innovative people to carry these ideas to production.
Ideas are useless unless used
Creativity is a gateway to innovation, but it doesn’t automatically lead to it. It requires the horsepower of competent and courageous leaders to kick these ideas off the starting gate and to the finish line. The decisiveness of these leaders makes the difference in organizations, especially those that have sustained excellence in their fields and markets.
Getting things done
Creative individuals are great in getting folks excited about an idea. They’re good at anecdotes and PowerPoints. Words have no meaning, if it’s not backed up with decisive action. For creative ideas to innovate, it needs to have an actionable path to production. In Leadership IMHO #11, I talked about Intuit co-founder, Scott Cook, on how he pushes for experimentation to get ideas tested and validated. Cook pushed for ideas that can be validated in the marketplace.
“Not because of my words—those are cheap and untrustworthy. But because of my action, which are expensive and trustworthy” – Jon Acuff, Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters
Three Attributes of Innovative People:
Competent
Courageous
Resilient
Competent. Innovative people need to be intelligent and skillful in developing an idea, planning a course of action, and knowing when to take the action. They not only look at the idea with focus, but they also look at the environment—anticipating hurdles and speedbumps they need to get past through. In order to persuade upper management and other stakeholders to support their idea, innovative people gain their confidence by demonstrating the well-thought proposal with the plan of action.
Courageous. Innovative people boldly take the calculated risks to pursue the idea. They don’t fear failures and they don’t fear being ridiculed for taking such actions. Many of these ‘innovations’ show little promise during the first few stages of its lifecycle. Though they don’t fear failure, they don’t seek it. Instead, they seek the learning experiences that stem from these failures.
Resilient. Innovators are tough-skinned. They take criticism well and are quick to bounce back from any setback. There’s really nothing much to say here. Simply put, innovators do not get discouraged easily. They’re relentless and optimistic in continued progress.
Brainstorming < Action-Taking
Brainstorming is a great exercise to generate ideas and concepts to move the organization forward. My proposal is to have equal or greater investment in building rapid-action teams that would act on those ideas. Keep the teams small, 7-10 members, and give them the resources and the authority to take action. These small teams come in different names: skunk work, task-forces, scrounging, and bootlegging.
“Nothing succeeds like success” – association to past successes has a correlation on increased motivation and persistence. To get successes (small wins), one needs to take action. In every organization, action need to be encouraged, experiments supported, and repeated tries tolerated.
Start = Stop
Lastly, I’d like to make sure that I mention the power of ‘stopping.’ In the past few minutes, we talked about how innovators are action-takers, with the ‘go-live’ attitude. But it needs to be said that innovators should also know when to fold. Having this insight stems from the learning experiences these innovators have had on each action taken. Learn when to stop and don’t get caught in a vicious cycle of meaningless failures.
Crowdsourcing FTW
Have you experienced the distinguishing characteristics of a creative and an innovator? Have you caught yourself in the endless cycle of coming up with ideas with no action? How did you break that cycle? How is your organization making sure there are teams in place to act on these ideas?