January 18th 2022
#messingaround in #innovation?
I just read a brilliant post on LinkedIn. I’ll include a link, but the post is in Dutch – or rather in a dialect from the eastern part of the Netherlands– so even Google translate might not be an instant solution, if you want to read it.
Disclaimer – I am not sure about who originally wrote the text (success always has many parents), but all credits to that person!
The core of the post however, is about ‘messing around’ (in the shed). It is a ‘glory song’ to tuning motorcycles and building a flamethrower in order to ‘sort of safely’ take care of a wasp nest, and about failing and learning and about doing that together with others.
And that made me smile…
Not so much because of the ‘taking care of a wasp nest’-part maybe; as an amateur bee-keeper I believe that there might be other solutions for such a problem. The ‘working on motorcycles’- part, I have started to enjoy more and more though during this Covid-pandemic – I hope to put new tires on my bike in the upcoming weeks. Reading the post probably mostly made me smile, because it reminded me that I highly enjoy building, creating and repairing things at home in a creative (but safe!) way. More than once I have been labelled as a ‘MacGyver’ …
The other part that made me smile is the link to work… #innovation #intrapreneurship and #makingshithappen
The post also highlights using that experience of ‘messing around’ (in the shed) in every day work-life and valuing that experience. Besides the fact that messing around leads to great stories, it stimulates creativity, makes one solution orientated (‘street smart’) and gives invaluable practical experience. The post even included a typical Delft Blue-tile with a ‘saying’ that celebrates ‘messing around’ in creative processes. I included an English version in the attached picture below.
There is a great parallel here to innovation and to the question whether innovation should be structured or unstructured (do I dare to call it ‘messing around’?). Innovation is a lot about learning (and valuing failure!). Using pivots and developing MVP’s can all be done in a very structured way, but does that exclude the innovation process from ‘messing around’ every now and then? And that’s where another (older) article came in that I recently read.
Short story shorter – that article ends with:
“Let me finish with quoting the advertising genius David Ogilvy who, in my opinion, gave the best description of how innovation and structure are connected: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” This is how I interpret what Ogilvy was saying: Here is a problem we’re trying to solve. Here are the requirements any successful solution must meet. Here are the criteria we’ll apply to select the best solution. And that’s it. Now, go and find this solution. And while doing this, feel free to be creative, innovative, unexpected, unpredictable, unprecedented, uncontrolled, bold, wild, out-of-the-box and out of hand. And unstructured too, of course.”
And that is what I think #innovation and #intrapreneurship should be about – using structured ways of working, but also allowing for #messingaround -especially in a creative phase- to #findwaysforward and #makeshithappen.
