Thoughts of Thursday: Want to be successful at innovation? Be a good story teller

At its heart, innovation is a profoundly social phenomenon. More often than not, it is the story that makes the innovation, rather than the other way around.

Story Telling is a forceful tool.  Enjoy these quotes from Bill Fisher – Every Innovation Needs a Story 

My experience is that it is easier than most think, and that you can tell your innovation story in three parts: Why? What? How?

In order to rally the troops around your idea, there needs to be a shared awareness and agreement that doing something different is a good idea. Otherwise, we all find inertia to be a powerful force opposing innovation.

Repeat after me: it makes no sense at all to consider a changing business environment (why?), and a different way of going to market (our innovation; what?), without acknowledging that we may have to change the way we work, as well. Once you pitch the “what”, the evaluative portion of your audience will immediately be thinking “how are we going to make this work?”

A story has to be something that is unexpected. What is predictable is never material for a story. “ (this is often about the “why?”)

“Stories are all about discovering the mundane in the exotic and the unusual when all of it is predictable.” (this is typically about the “what?”)

“Storytelling must be about the audience. Stories have to leave some role for the audience. They persuade the audience to suspend their disbelief.” They also speak to the audience’s principle concerns or hopes. (this often speaks directly to the “how?”)

Edison realized the importance of story-telling to the innovation process, when he indicated by the observation “Inventors must be poets so that they may have imagination.”

Let us all be poets in our roles as innovators.

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at  your own door, in your own mirror;
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love-letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on you life.
Source:  “Love after love” from Sea grapes by Derek Walcott. (1976)

……on idle time

That idle time………

Sitting on the back verandah
    or by the corner window
Gazing over grassed paddock
    or paved car park
It matters not………

Seeking space for ideas to fit
    or making sense of that observed
Reconfiguring patterns known
    or grappling with the unknown
It matters not………..

From farm to c-suite
    experience is the same
Answers emerge from deep thought
    ideas grow in unfettered space
It matters…..that idle time


Shaun G Coffey
31 December 2013

ONE MINUTE FOR MYSELF


What it is:
I balance my life by taking as good care of myself as I take of my family, my friends and my work.
I treat myself the way I would like other people to treat me.
I stop, look and listen.
I take one minute for myself a few times every day to stop and ask, “IS THERE A BETTER WAY FOR ME TO TAKE CARE OF ME RIGHT NOW?”
I realise that I have the answer within me.  I am quiet and listen to the wisdom of my best self.  I wait for it.
I discover what is best and I usually do it.
I give to myself and I receive from myself.
I am happier.
Why it works:
When I take as good care of myself as I take of others I am happier.  Because the better I take care of myself the less angry I am with myself and others.  And the more loving I become.
Source:  Originally taken from  One-Minute Manager Audiotape of the same name.  See the Spencer Johnson book – http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88180.One_Minute_For_Yourself