1. Real Innovation is about diversity

Think of it this way. If wearing a different colorful shirt is frowned upon in your business, so will having a different color skin. If you’re not diverse with personalities, you’ll never be diverse with ideas. The more uncomfortable your team work is, the more likely you’ll be willing to give new ideas a spin. Different types of people make the best team, but you have to be in for the long haul. Diversity of personalities leads to diversity of thought, and it takes a lot more effort to maintain. You have to teach your people to communicate and welcome the hiccups. If progress is easy, you’re not attempting anything new.

2. Innovation is creativity.

From birth we start creative. willing to make new things with no rules attached. However, modern schooling and parenting teaches us to “not draw on the walls” and the result is that 90% of the population is terrified to be creative.

3. Innovation is about culture.

From birth we start creative. willing to make new things with no rules attached. However, modern schooling and parenting teaches us to “not draw on the walls” and the result is that 90% of the population is terrified to be creative.

4. Innovation isn’t an item on any check list.

You can’t plan or require innovation. The best innovation happens when you are desperate or hit a wall. If hitting a wall is never allowed, you’ll never find innovative solutions because your employees will make excuses, they’ll lie, and they will cheat their way to success, always spinning every problem int a version you want to hear. If we don’t run into trouble, we’ll never run into crazy solutions.

5. Innovation starts at the top.

No culture can be maintained if its not continually fed and maintained by the leaders that set out to drive its success. Those leaders can be obvious ones, such as VP’s and managers or those leaders can be within, such as lead technicians and senior engineers. Regardless of their pay scale, the people you assign to drive innovation and creativity, they have to be given the voice to freely keep your culture in check and as crazy as their input may come across they have to be listened to and can’t be hidden from view. The people that think different keep us all accountable for making creative choices and avoiding snuffing out new ideas. Without the buy-in and support from upper management a culture can die within a company one color at a time until overnight, your walls are grey and your employees all start to look and dress the same.

6. Innovation is unhinged.

Much like a living thing, creativity must be fed and watered and fertilized and given space to breathe and grow. It’s the enemy of routine and predictable and it withers when it waits for permission. It’s trauma sensitive. as soon as you ban it from your board rooms and report outs it’s going to take you a decade to re-create a space where it can trust to safely return. at first, losing it may feel like temporary but the truth is that long term no business or institution can survive once its lost if they ever want to be recognized as going against the status quo ever again.

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