The worst thing about being an active innovator is the demands of doing innovation often dominate the demands of writing about innovation. This blog has been like an overdue homework assignment, growing later and sadder, and more ignored every week as we got on with the business of running innovation projects. There was a huge temptation to claim the dog ate my blog, but it didn’t. I don’t have a dog. And even if I did, it couldn’t eat a blog. That’s stupid.
So, here come some short blogs to get the homework monkey off my back.
We’re always innovating in our process and trying out new ways of getting the big change that clients want, but don’t always know how to deliver. The bigger the change agenda, the harder the sell. Even when that is exactly what has been asked for.
The problem is not necessarily coming up with the innovative idea, but is often one of challenging experts in their field to stop thinking about their business the way they’ve always done and to take a look at their challenge from a different perspective.
Steve Denning, who has championed the cause of business narrative and the use of Storytelling as a business tool, nails it when it says:
“most of the leading thinkers on innovation focus their attention on invention rather than innovation, i.e. how to come up with new ideas. This is the easy part of innovation. The hard part of innovaion is inspiring enduring enthusiasm for change in people who are not particularly interested in changing.”
Innovation works best when we collide different ways of thinking, inspiring stories of other people’s success and we find new ways of creating success for ourselves. Stories provide inspiration through new principles we can steal, or illustrations of how different thinking has been applied.
We use stories all the time - at work and at home. It’s a natural part of the way that humans communicate, and always have. The past survived as Oral History before written books were invented. I watch my children navigating the world through stories - even Rex, my 3-year-old, will make up stories of he and his sister’s alter egos (Beanie and Capuccino - don’t ask) to make sense of his world and amuse himself and others. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this way of making sense of the world around them, in “The Tipping Point’ as the genesis of the children’s prorgramme ‘Blues Clues’.
So, we’ve started to use stories - and storytelling - more actively in helping to bed in innovation visions. We’ve used creative writing techniques and structures to help re-frame the corporate story, and give us greater understanding of what type of new story we’re trying to create.
I’ve been writing a novel for the past 3 1/2 years, and am now half-way through the third draft. My support structure is the Writer Studio in Bronte, where I learnt to understand the building blocks of story-writing. So, we used the creative writing principles learnt there to help us create a new vision for a client by listening to the story arc, theme, main characters, opponents and 7 key turning points, and reframing the corporate story as a business narrative. It’s allowed us to can get commercially creative and creatively commercial and free ourselves from the corporate history.
If you want to know more about storytelling visioning, watch this blog or get in touch.
cheers
Matt
