
![]() Basic fact: We are all looking for clues that we are having an impact and that our life is making a difference. On the larger scale we want to see the impact of our businesses as well. Most of those clues will come from the visual. We look for numbers to see if our investment was a good one, we look to see if there is physical progress on a construction project, we track our weight our number of prospects our efficiencies and so on. If we don’t see some change then we wonder if we are getting anything done and having an impact. Operative word being see. On the other hand we all have a need for some certainty and routine in our life, which is such a paradox. Even if it is boring at times to be in a routine, we still tend to be more comfortable with the familiar. But, innovation and change are not comfortable, they might be exciting, but not comfortable, because all change requires energy and effort. Becoming an innovator and making big change takes time and progress is usually harder to see. So, we need to create noticeable, visual proof that things are changing in our immediate world and it can be as simple as rearranging the furniture in the office to facilitate the new thinking and working processes or changing where you meet your clients or how you communicate in meetings such as flip charts and pictures instead of just verbal discussion. It doesn’t take much to give your mind clues that you are trying to improve things and seeing results. Results, even the small ones, are exciting and can give that little dopamine bump that will boost the speed of your progress. However, you must have enough visual change in your work environment to convince your brain that things really are different, it actually builds momentum for change. So, work on creating continuous improvement in small ways everyday that you can see so that when you don’t, it will be a let down, not just “the daily routine.”
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![]() Have you ever heard of a college or professional sports team that wants to win but doesn’t invest heavily in selling and recruiting top talent for their teams? Probably not, and some sports teams even have “Farm Teams” to make sure there is an adequate pool of developing talent to choose from. These teams want to win so bad that they leave nothing to chance. After all, getting the best team on the field is truly the key that unlocks the door to winning. It is amazing to me that the United States can have such a low official unemployment number, yet have so many people unofficially out of work and no longer counted. The number of people that are out of work has rarely been higher, yet there are industries that are desperate for skilled labor and can’t find any. What a paradox! No matter what the cause of this condition the question really is how do you fix it? The construction Industry for instance has been surviving by finding lower and lower cost labor for years but eventually that backfires and there is no enticing draw for top talent. In addition to that negative the industry is notorious for its booms and busts. With all these challenges there are very few in the industry it seems that actually have a strategy to recruit, develop and keep skilled labor. It has just been assumed that it would always be there. But now it’s not! So, what would an innovator do? Innovation can come from looking at an old problem with a new set of lenses or from borrowing ideas from another industry and adapting them to your own. In the case of the construction industry it might be time borrow from the sports teams create a training mechanism for developing skilled labor and creating closer relationships with sub contractors. There might also be opportunity in promoting the industry to the younger generation like a good college or military recruiter. If any of you remember the movie “Top Gun” when it came out in the 80s, it was just another exciting Hollywood movie about being a Naval Aviator. But the glamorous picture it portrayed of life in the Navy initiated an enormous boom in naval recruiting. The Construction Industry needs a glamorous promotion of their industry. Now maybe there isn’t a top gun movie for construction right now but promoting the benefits of the industry might just be a timely move for some innovative thinkers. And, yes it does take money to do these things but it’s hard to win the game without a team on the field! ![]() When developing a new innovative product or program or process the tricky question is when to get the stakeholders involved. (By stake holders I mean those that might be affected by your new innovation in some way. For a product it could be the end user or the distributer, for a program it could be the audience and for a process it could be those that will be managing or participating in the new process.) The old way of innovating would have been to do all the work based on your research and assumptions to bring a finished product to the market. If you were wrong and the stake holders didn’t like it there was a big crash and failure was costly. But that is the old and busted way!! The new way is to involve stakeholders early on in the creation of the innovation so that their their buy in at the end is not an issue, since they have helped create the product. Sometimes, its easy to forget that even though the research is the biggest part of the innovation idea it is not the most important. The most important part of the process of innovation is the final vote of the stakeholder. If they don’t like it, it’s a flop. So, the question still remains, when do you involve the stake holder? You are probably not going to like the answer because there is no perfect time other than, it is better too early than too late. Most stake holders don’t really want to be included in the exhaustive research part but just about all of them will have an opinion. So, ask them how you can improve what you have already come up with and take it to heart or you might not get the vote you are looking for. ![]() Most of us want to avoid pain at all costs and the minute we have any it gets immediate attention. Finding the pain point is usually pretty easy if it is anywhere on our bodies but it gets harder to find the real pain point if it is outside of us in something like a business. Unfortunately, there are usually lots of pain points in a business and it’s not always clear which one to solve first. Like I’ve mentioned before there are more great ideas than there are great managers and I might add than there is time and energy. It is too easy to start innovating on problems that are urgent and right in front of you rather that taking the time to really identify the biggest source of pain. If we use the 80/20 rule here it would mean that 80 percent of the pain comes from 20 percent of the problems. So, you don’t want to be wasting energy and precious resources on the 80 percent of your problems that will only solve 20 percent of your problems. Real valuable innovation is a journey that takes time and energy and profits away from your daily operation so it is absolutely essential that your innovation efforts have a strategy that identifies the biggest sources of pain. If you solve the biggest sources of pain with a new innovative solution you will often find that the whole organization will benefit in ways that were unexpected. Much like a patient that has chronic back pain and when that pain is taken away there is an explosion of energy that was previously being used to deal with pain. |
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