Tag Archives: innovation

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

A sense of wonder

Leave a comment
Embrace the feeling of surprise and admiration that occurs when you see something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.
This sense of wonder can drive creativity.  The feelings associated with wonder are driven by curiosity and create a desire to know more, to discover.  This is the underpinning of innovation. 

Keep it Real

Wonder often starts with things we don’t understand but which have something exceptional about them that draws us in.   The mystery of the thing is compelling.

Acknowledging the unknown exists is our first step but then processing the reality of the situation we are wondering about can lead us to something better.

We must determine the underlying factors that create the object of our wonder as these will allow us to both replicate and expand on that which we wonder about.

Embrace the Opportunity

Things that amaze represent an opportunity for you to use them.  First work on understanding the phenomenon and then let your thoughts turn toward how to leverage it.

How can you use the power of this amazing and mysterious experience to improve yourself, and others.   It makes sense not to ignore your curiosity but build on it.  Things that make you wonder can be fuel for your creativity, to your benefit.

Beautiful, amazing yet mysterious, the thing you see and experience that develops a sense of wonder can provide you with a chance to surprise both others and yourself, seize the moment.

Take Action

Viewing and experiencing the wonders of the world may take your breath away but this is just wasted is you do not use the feeling to expand the opportunity.    Don’t just enjoy the things you wonder about use them to your benefit.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Thinking

Leave a comment

Thinking begins in your mind.  Thinking is the process of using one’s mind to consider or reason about something.  Typically thought is constrained by pre-defined concepts.  

That is, you need something to think about and normally that is already defined.  Based on the already known concepts you use reasoning to develop an understanding that goes beyond, or perhaps just validates what is know. 

Unconstrained Thinking

Given most thoughts begin on the foundation of an already recognized concept truly free thinking is difficult to engineer.  In essence the thought process begins from nothing.  

There is no starting point or beginning.  Thinking without reference or conceived understanding of something is the most innovative and creative.  

As there is no defined starting point or goal, free form thinking almost needs to start from a point of unconscious awareness (two contradictory concepts).

Manage your Thoughts

While you can use your mind both consciously and unconsciously, control of the process typically requires some conscious oversight to be a fully formed idea you can act on.

To avoid constraints, migrating the idea from your sub-conscious to fully conscious state of mind enables you to initiate the thought process without casting out the apparently unrealistic thoughts.  

Unfortunately our conscious minds apply pre-conceived constraints, assuming they are valid, which causes ideas which do not conform to known concepts to be cast aside arbitrarily.  

Unconstrained thinking does not always lead to results but if you shut ideas down without some thought, good things can be overlooked. 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Ideas, the journey begins

Leave a comment

Ideas are thoughts about a potential course of action, typically for beneficial purposes.  Ideas can also be philisophical and highly conceputal both with a mental image or etherial perspective.

For todays post I am focusing on the more material form of ideas, those that can be converted to reality.  That is, the potential is acted on and ultimately beneficial gain is realized (monetary or otherwise).

Inventing

Often the conversion of an idea to reality is termed as the process of invention but this is not always the case.  Invention implies the idea has a newness to it, i.e, never seen before, unique, innovative.

Inventing can be a profession ranging from creating and patenting the idea without making it a reality, to actual building and implementing the idea, that is acting as an entreupreneur.

 Implementing Ideas

Arguably  the most satisfying process is not the ideas inception, rather implementing the action arising from the idea and of course reaping the benefits thereof.

This is the journey from the germination of the idea to conceptualization and finally reality.  Like many journeys it can be long and tiring, can have frustrating moments and even times when you wonder why you even started.

The key here is overcoming the motivation not to act.  Often the getting the idea is as far as it goes.  For those few that take the journey and overcome the challenges the satisfaction can be high.

Of course it could lead to failure, willingness to accept the risk is, of course, one of the key barriers to taking an idea to fruition.  Ths can be offset by the pleasure of the journey.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Prioritizing effort

Leave a comment

You might have an idea of your overall goal associated with a specific strategy.  At a very top level, it could be something like; attaining the most recognized brand,  having total customer loyalty (100%) or the most efficient operations (profitable).

Next

The next step is to determine the objectives that support your goals and the associated implementation activities.  You can blue sky the objective gathering and hope for the best or you can be a bit more rigorous in your methodology

Blue Sky

Innovation and creativity are typically present when there is no bad idea.  Just gather up all the thoughts, throw them in the wide opening of the funnel and hope they don’t get stuck on the way down.

Of course this method, while it is highly collaborative, is not efficient.  It can work where efficiency is not a priority, creativity is.  The result might really knock the overall goal out of the park once it oozes out of the neck of the funnel.

In many cases though analysis paralysis and too many cooks collaborating without direction leaves the output wanting.

Planned and Controlled

Filtering the ideas and objectives, through the use of defined filtering criteria, before they get into the funnel, improves the flow through the neck of the funnel.

These might not be highly innovative and creative ideas but they will work and it is a good probability the overall goal can be attained.