Challenge the status quo

Do you think innovating is difficult? Do you often get asked to be ‘Innovative’ at work? Well, I have often been in situations where I have felt intimidated by the sheer breadth of what to do and where to start. Can you guess what the image below is, it is the very first version of what is now called a Rubik’s cube.

Source: https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/first-rubiks-cube-prototype-invention/

A group of eight wannabe innovators were ushered into a conference room in the tony Koramangala locality. We were all geared up with biases, tools and prejudices of our own for innovation. Guess what? All that was about to be thrown out of the window! Over the next two days, we would be debating, facing our deepest fears (read biases), learning and unlearning about prototyping, collaborating, preparing challenge boards, thrashing out case studies, among other activities. Our current state was pretty much like this crude Rubik’s cube.

     This was about to change.

Day 1

So here we begin, we learnt about the categories of innovation and you do not necessarily need to ‘INVENT’ something to be called an innovator. There were four broad categories where we could innovate - Product, Process, Customer Experience and Business Model. We also had the point driven home when we were told – ‘Patents are only useful if it adds value to a larger populace’. Point taken!

            We were then guided into the actual approach of systematic innovation, the 8 steps which can be broadly classified into three categories – Pipeline problem, Velocity problem and about Batting Average.

            We next discussed about having a – ‘Challenge Book’ that would be the place where challenges can be made available for other stakeholders to see. It is also important to have a clarity on these challenges and allow for anyone to suggest for solutions to a problem. Often, we are stuck with a bias that an 'outsider' cannot offer a solution to my problem.

            We were then handed over a case study, popularly called the Grossmann and Patrick IBM Problem. A classic case study about how a frontline employee – Grossman, who was not responsible for Innovation, Creativity or Strategy almost single handedly got an ailing IBM (in the 90s) into the internet era. But wait, was he able to do it singlehandedly? Nope, what he needed was a person who believed and backed his idea. A Champion. In most cases, we need people convinced about your idea to take it forward and to socialize it amongst the larger audience. Some of the questions we answered about this case study got us a broader perspective into some of the roles needed for a successful innovation.

An Idea either finds a Champion or it dies

Also, about some of the attributes of an Innovator, broadly a person who is curious, does a lot of experiments, can communicate well and collaborate.

Day 2

The most fascinating thing about the session on this day is about how we face our biases, it was mind altering, to put it mildly. We were shown a few monostable optical illusions. We were shown a couple of images/ gifs, which each of us saw it from a biased view (and each of us strongly thought that his/ her version was the correct one). We literally could not believe our eyes. Imagine the amount of havoc it something mixes up your vision and how it is wired to your brain!

And the best part of making us realize about these biases - the video of the Backwards Bicycle.

And, guess what - Cognitive Biases are supposedly much stronger than optical biases. We also realized how difficult it was to think thorough our biases. And when it comes to innovation we need to park some of these biases from not altering our decision. Something that is very difficult, what is easier is to be ‘aware’ of the biases and to an extent not allow them from interfering with our thought process.