Words That Kill Innovation
Jan 23, 2023
“If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.”
--Henry Ford
When I was the CEO of a non-profit, I wanted to be on the cutting edge and serve with excellence. I was always looking for better ideas or even new ways of doing things. I'm still that way. I look back on our exponential expansion and marvel at the things that we accomplished.
We found one sentence that could nip a great idea in the bud, “But we’ve never done it that way before.” Our answer to that statement became, “Yes, isn’t that exciting?” Okay, most of the time:)
If we are going to improve and change, we can't keep doing whatever it is that we are doing the same way.
I’ll never forget when someone donated a motor home in 2013 to convert into a mobile clinic. Waaaat? I had no clue about anything regarding motor homes, let alone retrofitting it to use as a mobile clinic. That mobile clinic impacted three outlying communities that wouldn’t have had our services otherwise!
How did we transition? How did we innovate? Here are steps we took that may help you:
1. We found someone else who had already done it and asked them for help. We found out how they did it. It gave us knowledge that we didn't have. That knowledge moved us forward more quickly than if we had tried to go it alone.
2. We brainstormed it. We were amazed at the fresh ideas that came from throwing ideas out and writing them on a flip-chart. We always heard, “I never thought of it that way before.”
“Capital isn’t so important in business, experience isn’t so important…. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn’t any limit to what you can do with your business and your life.”
Harvey Firestone
3. We kept looking at the result of what we wanted to accomplish. We focused on the goal and not the obstacles. Concentrating on the why and the what, brought the how ideas out of the woodwork.
4. Last, but certainly not the least, we learned to embrace change (actually, embracing change became our mantra way back in 2009.) Change is going to happen anyway and it takes so much energy to fight. So we decided to harness that same energy to achieve our goal.
That statement, "We've never done it that way before,” brought a smile to those of us who were on that team. We knew those words and the corresponding steps to take could cause positive change and dramatic growth—not only for our organization, but for us individually!
Embracing change,
Jan
Jan McDonald
Maxwell Certified Leadership Team
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