If you want to become more innovative as an organization, you need to acknowledge that innovation happens in people’s minds. Accordingly, you have to give your employees the freedom to explore new ideas and feed them back into the organization. They need time to do so (e.g. to work on their own initiatives) as well as encouragement to try something completely different and to make mistakes.
Learning to let go
In order to come up with novel ideas, you have to let go of your patterns of thought. To identify your patterns it helps to confront yourself with foreign, even contrary, patterns and views. To that end, we can only encourage you to have open discussions with people of different backgrounds and perspectives. Like this, you will grow personally and be able to innovate.
The ability to leave conventional concepts aside and to open up to completely fresh thoughts should become part of your organization’s culture. Furthermore, combine this culture of openness with an agile approach, which is people centric and focusses on concrete results. In this way, everybody in your organization can contribute and help to ensure that it remains viable in this fast changing world.
This article is a summary of the interview with me in Königswieser-Journal 09:
http://www.koenigswieser-consulting.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Mediathek/e-Journals/k-journal-09_17.pdf (see interview on page 15)
All journal editions: http://www.koenigswieser-consulting.com/media/e-journals/
