Necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve talked about that quite a bit. I like referring to the Dr. Seuss legend of the fifty word challenge. I’ve gone off on the idea that a blank page is not your friend.
I usually don’t offer any practical advice here but I thought what the heck. I have this exercise I want to go through. Here we go.
What if you could just change one thing in the next three months to your organization or team? You can’t change anything else for the next three months. Nothing.
If you said to yourself, “THIS has got to change,” what would that be? Think about it.
Wait. There’s more.
What if it had to be something that over half the people on the team or in the organization do? So it has to be somewhat common. No taking care of big exceptions or one offs. Ain’t nobody got time for that. What might that be? Ponder on that.
Hold on. What if that one thing had to be an everyday occurrence? It could happen once or it could happen twenty times a day. No changing some KPI or end of month report. Think about it.
Nope, not yet. What if that thing had to take less than five minutes? So we are talking a relatively small task. It might have great significance but it doesn’t have to. Obviously it’s something that needs to be done. What would it be? Hmmm.
OK, one last thing. What if you could only change one step in the process or the situation? No re-engineering the whole thing, no sweeping changes, no week long brainstorming event. One step in the process. What would it be? Done pondering? What might that change be?
Is it different than what you may have first pondered? Maybe you ended up somewhere you didn’t expect. Perhaps you painted yourself into a corner. There is no right answer.
The idea is that you were forced to make choices. You had to think about the limitations. Which is good because despite all our theories and methods, there are always limitations. Learn to make them work for you. Learn to find the creativity born out of necessity.
It’s a skill. Even if it’s just an exercise to stretch your mind, the above example illustrates that innovation is not always of the pie in the sky variety. Sometimes it’s hiding in plain sight. Sometimes you get there step by step by step.
Now try it again. Would you start in the same place? Will you end up in the same place?
Once More Unto the Change 