“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert
This quote fairly well summarizes the basis of the philosophy of INNOTIVITY.
Thinking differently from others is a good start. But if you keep thinking the same way over and over again, that’s not creative in a meaningful way. Every challenge you face is different, and requires a different approach.
Creativity is the ability to think differently from yourself.
Consider a couple of creative thinkers you admire. Chances are, you’ll notice, especially if they’ve been around awhile, they change their output and how they confront the process often.
This applies very obviously to masterful authors, who have a completely different approach and even style from book to book. Or consider Picasso, who had seven recognized distinct “periods” in just the first twenty years of his career. If you didn’t know better, you would never imagine that his early works and his Cubist paintings of just a decade later could possibly have been created by the same person.
Yes, we tend to experiment more when we’re younger or learning. And that shows we have the inborn ability to adapt that we can apply whenever we want to.
Innovation is creativity in action.
Innovation is just creativity implemented. Creativity with a job to do. Creativity with an impact.
Other than the difference between thought and action, there is not much difference between innovation and creativity. They are just two parts of one process, that begins with encountering a problem or challenge and ends with sorting out the solution.
At the Innotivity Institute, we call this full process INNOTIVITY.
INNOTIVITY is the combination of the two words, innovation and creativity. But it’s far more than that. It’s an acknowledgment that the two concepts are intimately connected and driven by similar skills.
In NLP language, INNOTIVITY is a metaprogram – an array of possible states along a single axis. They are two extremes of the same basic quality. If you can create, you can innovate, and vice-versa.
Innovation is the basic state of being human. Innovation is what humans do.
You want to be a better parent? That takes innovation.
A better brother, sister, friend, or citizen? Yup, that demands innovation too.
Anything that changes a situation or a system using a new way of approaching an existing problem is innovation.
When you wake up in the morning and think, “Today I’m going to do life better than yesterday,” you’re mapping out a vector into an innovation sprint.
Even returning to an “old” solution you’ve not used in some time can be innovation, because applied to new circumstances the old solution will need to be adapted.
Whenever you create something different and apply it, even unsuccessfully, you are innovating.
Really everything is innovation unless you are trying hard to maintain the status quo. Even then, accidental innovation often happens, because innovation is hard for human beings to get away from.
The truth is, in this rapid-fire world, like swimming against a tsunami, just staying in one place requires innovation, honestly.
The true challenge isn’t innovating. It is innovating effectively.
Innovation is easy, actually. Although we fear change, we innovate automatically. Indeed, the heart of what is special about humans is the tug-of-war between innovation and stasis.
That tug-of-war is what makes innovation seem so difficult, and the results so haphazard.
The truth is, innovation produces a snowball effect. In other words, innovation is the source of innovation. The more you innovate, the better you become at it.
What we’re aiming for is not just innovation, but innovation in a chosen direction with an intended result.
Why it continues to seem hard is because we forget the next point.
The most important innovation anyone will ever make is to innovate themselves.
Only after innovating oneself can one create or inspire innovation in a goal, a project, a team, or a company. No system, or structure, or process, or series of functions will ever work as long as the people remain stuck in the same place.
Imagine society, at whatever level (team, company, city, world) as a bunch of robots programmed to do the same thing again and again without stopping. That’s your client. They are automated to have the same response to the same impulse. It’s how they stay safe most of the time in life.
You know that famous quote, supposedly from Einstein, that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result? Well, that’s the normal daily insanity of human beings.
The single biggest mistake people or companies make in attempting to improve innovation is to hope that improving systems or even culture will alone solve the problem. The greatest block against innovation is not the system or the process or the company. It is always the human beings in the system.
When a person is stuck, it is the person that is stuck, not the circumstances. And the techniques we are about to learn will help you help them get unstuck.
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