Innovation sessions typically involve an expensive consultant who has some sort of manicured track record exhorting the group to ‘Be creative, let your mind wander, nothing is silly, think outside the box’ sorts of session.
That does not work very well, except of course for the consultant.
What is usually missing from these sessions is diversity. Not of gender, but of expertise, training, experience, and knowledge gained in seemingly unrelated areas.
Pose a difficult problem to an accountant, and you will usually get a numerical answer. Pose the same question to an environmentalist, and you will get a different, but entirely valid answer. People see problems and their potential solutions through the perspective of their training, domain knowledge and experience.
Imagine you are running an innovation session for Australia’s new space agency. Chances are you will have 25 rocket scientists in the room. All will be applying their skills and knowledge to the problem to be solved. Would you rather add another rocket scientist to that group, which may not add much to the 25 already there, or a biologist, musician, or surgeon, any of whom may not know anything about rocket science, but just may have a solution to your problem that comes from an entirely different field.
The best solutions to really difficult problems are more likely to come from asking better questions of different people, than from just asking more of the same ones directed to the same people.
Header cartoon credit: the great Gary Larson with thanks.
As a youngster I coached tennis.
I was a reasonable player, and had been well coached, and thought that I could transfere the ‘muscle memory’ I had built up by some form of osmosis.
Instead, I discovered that those who listened to the feedback they were given, and made adjustments, then monitored their own progress improved way quicker than the more passive ones.
Interestingly, it also made me a better player, because i had to break down and articulate the mechanics to others why a change was warranted, and how that impacted on the outcome.
Agree totally – by injecting someone who is not a specialist in the field will instantly lead to more and better questions due to a lack of bias
it seems so bloody obvious, I wonder why so few do it!
In a past life I was involved in coaching senior secondary school kids to sit in on selected meetings in several corporates. The kids asked questions that flummoxed people whose view of the world was so blinkered and narrow (that was the eaarly stages of NSW establishing Technology High Schools)