Too often, we take the status quo for granted and don’t challenge our assumptions about the world around us. This can lead to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
Tag: innovation
How To Ride the Long Tail of Innovation
I get it; we are easily distracted. Ideas are addictive. This post explores how to make the most of the more mundane phases of innovation.
5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity
Hello there! Welcome to the Dialogic Learning Weekly. It’s Friday, February 20. I’m Tom, writing to you from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Reach out with comments, questions and feedback at tom@dialogiclearning.com or on Twitter at @tombarrett. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe to get the Dialogic Learning Weekly sent straight to your inbox.
In our last issue, we explored the notion of innate creative thinking. Today, we look at mental models associated with ideas, creativity, and originality.
- Divergent Thinking
- Convergent Thinking
- The Innovation Jolt Model
- The Creative Habit Model
- The Creative Process Model
Regardless of the model, we use to understand creativity, at its heart is a desire and an intention to be creative. Our focus will be: how we can create the right intention to be more creative.
Divergent Thinking
Divergent thinking involves exploring lots of possible solutions to a problem. At the same time, convergent thinking looks for the correct answer to a specific problem.
Culturally, we are trained to think in ‘right or wrong’ terms and that the only way to be creative is to come up with new ‘right’ answers. When we feel like this, it is impossible to be genuinely innovative.
I often describe Divergent Thinking as a mode when we generate lots of different options. It is an expansive and open mode of thinking.
Convergent Thinking
We narrow down the options in convergent thinking, finding a smaller selection of possibilities.
Convergent thinking is often described as a more analytical and closed mode. Usually, this is done by filtering or voting on collections of ideas or datasets.
When we think in convergent thinking mode, we are not open to new ideas because we attempt to make decisions.
Example questions to encourage convergent thinking:
- Which five ideas have the most potential?
- Which of the questions sums up your current challenge?
- Put a sticker on the three words that resonate with you the most?
- Of all the places we could start, what feels like the most appropriate?
Sometimes there can be a clash of people thinking in opposite modes. Which explains much of the conflict and idea squashing that can happen. This is a dynamic to look out for and facilitate with care.
The Innovation Jolt Model
The analogy is that the moment you get a great idea is like getting hit with a large jolt of electricity — your mind becomes excited and can’t wait to get started.
When looking for ideas, this is the feeling you want, so if it doesn’t happen right away, don’t worry. Keep asking questions until the jolt happens.
The more you can get in touch with your feelings of excitement about an idea, the closer you are to being creative.
The Creative Habit Model
According to this model, creativity is a habit that requires dedication and effort. This means while great ideas may come naturally to some people, they can also be developed by anybody who knows how to practice regularly.
By practising our creative thinking every day, we gradually retrain our brains to think in new ways, increasing our ability for originality and increasing the number of ideas we can develop.
A simple exercise you can use every day is to ask "What if…" and to follow with any question you feel inspired to ask. Some examples:
> What if I didn't have to work?
> What if we didn't have to travel?
> What if the students chose when to learn?
> What if we could harness energy from the wind?
> What if we create an app that makes it easy for people to water their gardens?
The Creative Process Model
This model suggests that creativity isn’t only about understanding when and how to be creative and learning the correct type of thinking for a given situation.
Thinking of creativity and idea generation as a process also helps us manage and understand what we are doing and where we want to go.
We need to learn how to apply different types of thinking to different situations.
Your Talking Points
- How can you use these models to bring out greater creativity in yourself and other people you communicate with?
- What specific practices can you do daily to increase creativity in your life/work/studies, etc.?
🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole
Complement this issue with my Atomic Essays: Solution Siren Call, Walt Disney Creative Strategy, Feedback is Oxygen For Your Ideas, Willful Blindness, Counter Wooden Headedness.
Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett
5 Idea Characteristics to Increase Traction and Adoption
How to give your idea the best chance of success
I enjoyed the responses to this tweet from Nick Parker.
A whole range of technologies was shared, here are a few interesting examples:
“The idea of IoT (Internet of Things) in general. Not a single tipping point but a convergence of: (fairly cheap) sensors everywhere, better network bandwidth, better batteries, and the cloud.” ⟶ Tweet from @seanmfdineen
“Accurate mechanical timekeeping — Took 500 years to get from the first mechanical clock to Harrison’s first sea clock. A lot of technical innovations, as well as a lot of public and private investment, were needed to get to that point.” ⟶ Tweet from @AGMonro
“Maybe mundane, but LEDs suddenly passed some sort of cost/performance barrier a few years ago and went from being the little diodes on stereos to changing the way cities look.” ⟶ Tweet from @snillockcirtap
“Shipping containers … first used in the 1760s … became mainstream in 1960s/70s” ⟶ Tweet from @davegentle
It got me thinking about the tipping point or critical mass of innovation and its usefulness for understanding the broader theories of change.
For a long time, I think education has focused on the wrong part of innovation theory.
Diffusion of Innovation
Before we get into talking about the pattern or curve of adoption that a new idea takes, it is worth reminding you of the work of Everett Rogers.
Back in 1962, he wrote The Diffusion of Innovations, where he looked at the rate at which an idea spreads through a community.
Although telecommunications and digital technology later co-opted this model to explain why your Dad doesn’t use a smartphone, the original innovation Rogers studied was in agriculture.
He looked at the shift from farmers using particular variants of crops and livestock to more widespread adoption of a new way of doing things.
What encourages the adoption of a new idea?
Rogers proposed five main factors that contribute to the rate of adoption.
He hypothesised that there is a direct relationship between the characteristics of the innovation (relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability — how easy it is to try out) and the percentage of people who adopt it over time.
It is these characteristics that I find the most fascinating and which are often overlooked:
#1 Compatibility
Why would your father want to have a smartphone? Because his friends, family and colleagues already do! Technology has to be a good fit for people’s lives and interests. Innovation must be compatible enough with existing beliefs, values and practices.
#2 Trialability
The ratio of effort it takes to try something out versus the benefits gained from doing so. In an interview exploring these ideas, Rogers stated that “the more convenient a test is for you, the less involved or complicated it is to get into a trial, the easier it is going to be for you to make up your mind about trying a new idea”. This suggests a threshold effect — you’ll try something if there’s little risk and the benefits outweigh whatever barrier might exist between thinking about trying and doing it.
#3 Complexity
The more complicated the idea, the more time and effort to try it out. If there is a choice of which new thing to try out, this factor suggests that people choose the more straightforward option. Rogers says that an innovation will be adopted when it is “simple enough to understand and use, but complex enough to offer challenges”.
#4 Relative Advantage
This one also gets considered in behavioural economics through concepts such as loss aversion (people are far more risk-averse when it comes to losing something than gaining the same thing). This is probably the one we most want to understand of all the factors. It is, after all, the idea that anyone adopting a new technology must have more to gain than they have to give up.
#5 Observability
I find this factor fascinating because it suggests that whether people take up the idea depends less on its benefits than how easy it is for them to see other people using it. This one is fascinating in the context of education. We all know that using the latest technology in class isn’t enough; people also have to see it used well and learn how to get started with it themselves.
Adoption Curves
Rogers proposed that a new idea or technology would typically follow a bell curve to diffuse through a community. This is referred to as the S-curve, adoption or diffusion curve. The emphasis was on members of a social system and our labels for them.
There was a time when every education keynote — yes, even mine — provoked an audience to think about the different groups of people that adopt an innovative idea.
The segment names directly illustrate the group’s propensity to adopt an innovation.
- Innovators
- Early adopters
- Early majority
- Late majority
- Laggards
Over time, these groups adopt an innovation at different rates and represent different community proportions.
While this pattern of adoption is not universal, it happens often enough that we can use it as a general way of understanding how people will accept new things.
Focusing on labelling people and their response to the idea is a dead end. It is much more helpful to think about the characteristics of your idea that might be changed to encourage adoption and acceptance.
Your Talking Points
I have two key provocations for you to ponder and reflect upon.
- Within the theory of diffusion, we are not attempting to change a person’s label from one to another. It is not people that change but the innovation itself as, over time, it improves, changes and diffuses throughout a system.
- Identify a new programme you are starting this year — your innovation — and score it according to the five essential characteristics: relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability. How could it improve?
If You’re The 1st Responder To New Ideas, You Have A Critical Job
You get a moment to choose.
Your decision influences the dynamic of talk and wonder, whether you like it or not.
The pocket-sized hidden curriculum encourages or dampens enthusiasm-worse still, it spirals into self-preservation.
Questions litter the learning space in the primary and early years, often strewn around quite randomly.
I was once asked, If a pea had a brain, how big would it be?
Mourn Those Precious Little Sparks
These precious sparks exist momentarily, but the impact of our response to questions has an extended half-life.
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk. We need both. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
How you react to ideas is comparable. Consider the response when new ideas or contributions are shared in your team. There is a fundamental similarity to this moment of micro-judgement.
I wonder how the tiny moments of judgement or encouragement shape the climate of our teams? My hunch is, over time, they shape our experience in a significant way.
Culture Is Key To Innovation Potential
The Australian software company Atlassian recently published results of a study into the health of teams with evidence from 1,500 team members outside of Atlassian in the US and Australia. They found that 88% of participants are operating in an ‘unhealthy’ environment.
56 percent feel their team is poorly connected on a personal level, and 37 percent feel like they can’t try new things or express themselves fully.
This is the outcome of the block we started to explore, the micro-judgement of new ideas (or questions).
I wonder why 37 percent of participants can’t express themselves fully? The reasons for holding back might be:
- fear of being penalised unnecessarily
- perceived lack of impact or influence
- worries about how their manager will respond
- fear of not looking like a team player (they don’t want to appear different)
The Hidden Curriculum of Your Teams
I’ve seen this happen many times. A team member shares something new, and others require an immediate response in the group. Someone questions it confidently (because decades of experience tell them it’s not worth exploring), and the others on the team nod (because they’re too afraid to be the first one out). The new idea is squashed.
It takes more courage to applaud someone who shares new ideas than put them down.
What does this do, though, in the long term? If we belittle, shoot down or diminish new ideas or people who present them, the person might learn that it’s not safe to share in this environment.
In our study, members of healthy teams noted feeling a sense of belonging and support for new ideas. This creates an environment of high engagement, which, in turn, serves as a buffer against burnout and fuels even higher performance.
The first responder to questions or new ideas sets the tone.
Your Talking Points
A few weeks ago, I shared the mental model of compounding in issue 237.
Unnecessary negative micro-judgement of new ideas compounds, the result is unhealthy teams — an example of how compounding works even for negative behaviours.
Your challenge is to notice the first responder and reflect on what behaviours and responses are your standard.
Some of the report’s takeaways direct leaders to focus on encouraging ideas and are worth discussing with your colleagues. Let me draw your attention to these below:
- Carve out time to explore new ideas, both individually and as a team.
- Make space for calculated risks and incorporate the lessons you learn.
- Elevate the importance of diverse viewpoints and make space for respectful dissent.
You can read the complete set of recommendations here from the State of Teams Report 2021 — Work Life by Atlassian.
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