We spend a lot of time teaching people how to innovate.
– Design thinking skills
– Creativity skills
– Experimentation skills
– Problem-solving skills
But innovation rarely happens alone.
It happens between people.
Which creates an interesting problem.
You can put seven smart, capable people around a table and still not have an effective team.
– Different priorities
– Different assumptions
– Different language
– Different ideas about who is responsible for what
I was reminded of this in recent consulting work.
The brief initially looked like an execution problem:
‘Help us deliver on our goals.’ But as we dug into it, something else emerged.
Before the team could deliver well, they needed to work well together.
There were silos.
Some blame between functions.
People viewing problems through the lens of their own role.
So the work became less about the delivery and more about the people creating it.
Getting different voices into the room.
Building understanding of each other’s work.
Creating clarity around goals, roles and how they wanted to work together.
What happened afterwards was interesting.
Words shifted from: “That’s not my problem.”
to:
“What can I do to help?”
That might be one of the most important shifts a team can make.
It’s one reason diverse collaboration is a fundamental principle in Innovation in Action.
Because you can teach someone all the tools in the world.
But if the collective can’t listen, challenge, disagree, learn and work across boundaries effectively, those tools won’t get them very far.
Innovation capability isn’t simply the sum of the skills of the people in the room.
It’s what happens between them and the collective genius created.
We spend a lot of effort teaching people the skills to innovate.
Maybe the real work is teaching them to innovate together.