Beginning with collaboration

Were we to consider an innovation process more as an intent to arrive at excellent collaboration then we would best begin by talking a lot about mindset and particularly about the differences between them and how they can share, value and make use of their differences .

Sharing Mindsets.

Assumptions and Mindset

Erwin Polanski wrote a book on Tacit Knowledge, and in it he gave an example of what tacit knowledge is. A man goes into a very dark cave armed only with a stick. Using the stick, he explores the cave and when he comes out his knowledge of the cave is in very large part formed from his prodding about with the stick. Any image or map created was strongly influenced by the stick. If the man had used his hand instead, he might well have constructed a rather different map.

Tacit Knowledge & the Might of Assumption

Intent over Declaration

One over-riding characteristic of the start of innovation is that the end result can never be precisely described. Never really be more than a firmly declared intent, a goal, or a set of aspirations. A great deal of time, money and effort on the part of consultancies and enterprises has gone into systems and methods of checks and balances that might give more certainty but ultimately they rarely yield sustainable results.

Goals and Aspirations

Aspects of Innovation

Innovation comes about through effective and sustained collaboration over a long period of time – which is true even when it appears to have been rapid – it will actually have emerged via numerous earlier and possibly still ongoing collaborations.

If we want a better understanding of the processes of innovation then we need to think a great deal more about precious human fundamentals.

Innovation & Collaboration

More About Conversation

 We absolutely know when we have had a good conversation and it felt like a meeting of minds. There is an intensity in the moment of thought, an energising moment that opens up new possibilities. It is quite short lived, nevertheless it leaves a form of a residue, a trace that lingers on in our mind’s eye. Good conversation is a precious commodity.
–Theodore Zeldin, Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life

“When minds meet they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, draw different conclusions from them, engage in different trains of thought.”

A Precious Commodity

Shifting The Sled

Imagine being at the top of a hill, the snow is pure and virgin, and you have a sled. You get on the sled and away you go down to the bottom, up you go again to the same starting place and the sled more than likely takes the same track it carved the first time. Every time you go up the hill to the same place to begin, the sled will pretty much use the pre-carved tracks, it is most efficient to do so, it is just the nature of things. We can think about the sled as an analogy for the oft times that innovation gets caught up and bogged down: same start point, same conditions.

To alter the route downhill in order to get to a different place, we will do well to change our “starting out place”

The business of honesty