Innovation… how do you build it into your culture?
In his recent article at Fast Company, Scott Anthony, the Managing Director at the innovation consulting firm Innosight, laid out a compelling view on creating a culture of innovation entitled, How Do You Create A Culture Of Innovation?
He discusses four time-tested approaches successful innovators follow to gather stimuli that spur these connections.
Here they are for your review:
Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.
So, what’s all this mean for the nonprofit in a corner of the world doing good work, helping others, and making an impact in one shape or form?
Nonprofits, well really any organization this day and age, are at an interesting and profound crossroads to the future. Quite simply, it’s make or break time. We either adopt and adapt to the changes under foot or we are left behind to die a slow and painful death. A death by a thousand cuts as they say.
You see, you are, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your glass half-full vs. half-empty paradigm, at pivotal point in time. A confluence of things are happening right now. In one-hundred years it may all make sense, but at this moment in time, living through it, we can only surmise and project and assume what might happen.
Regardless of the perspective, we are in the midst of change that is undeniable. Culture is changing, people are changing, demographics are changing, everything is changing.
And we as nonprofit leaders need to change with it. Not for change sake. But to adapt and change with the times. In short, to figure out how we can remain relevant in this new order of things where the tried and true of yesteryear are simply a bi-gone memory.
Perhaps you have the solution or the insight that will help a colleague bridge the gap form the old to the new.
What might that be?
Please share your thoughts!!
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