In a recent conversation about innovation, my friend Peter posed a series of provoking thoughts. Innovation, he says, may be associated with learning difficulty, an inability to accept the truth:
It's as if you have to hold everything without judgment and then at a point you put the fragments of experience, observation, knowledge, relationships etc. together in such a way that when you look around you're surprised that the whole world doesn't put the pieces together that way.
Business love ideas (innovation) but hate thoughts (questions ).
Does the intitutionalisation of big "I" Innovation within larger corporates limit the opportunity for much bigger innovations throughout the market?
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In this ChangeThis manifesto, Corinne Miller, Founder & Principal Consultant of InnovatingResults!, talks about the role of questions in innovation. She calls it Questionating, a new term.
Questions stimulate the brain! Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions.
The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.
Why is it that the older we get, the fewer questions we ask?
We’ve found that the most popular answers to this question have been: asking a question makes one look stupid; asking a question is a sign of weakness; and people think they know the answer so they don’t feel the need to ask.
What if questions were baked into the business processes? Corinne suggest four steps to developing a QuestionBank: Identify Question Sources, Collect Questions, Organize Questions, and Refine Questions. Two of the most provocative questions might be:
“What or how might people change or improve ___________ to _________ ?”
and,
“What new or different ideas might change or improve _____________ ?”
What are your most thought provoking questions?