No Idea is Perfect, Mistaking Your Way to Better Products

Original thinking and innovative new ideas are to business and progress what bees are to the pollination of the food chain.  Those little buzzing, bumbling, marvels amble about carrying the essential nectar that ignites new life and growth in plants that would otherwise be impossible.  Likewise, original, outside-of-the-box thinking and ideas rarely come in a complete package.  Big innovative ideas almost always come from bits and pieces of smaller, incomplete ideas that are brought together little by little to eventually form the usable and valuable whole.  But getting to that whole can be a difficult and mistake prone process.  The great idea that is without flaw doesn't exist!  (In other words the queen bee needs all the worker bees to complete the hive.)  Instead of a CEO maybe we need CPO's (Chief Pollinating Officer) someone that is constantly connecting with idea makers and spreading those ideas.  But it goes deeper than that, in the immortal words of Ken Robison, "if you are not prepared to be wrong (and take input from others) then you will never create something truly remarkable!”  Take a moment and remember the last time you were wrong and I mean wrong in a big way, then add to that, wrong in front of a crowd.  Can you remember how it felt?  Did you break out in a cold sweat, did your face and ears get flushed with heat, did you want to crawl under a chair or anything and just disappear?  Being wrong is certainly not fun for any of us and the bigger the ego the harder it is to cope.  So what are some ways to prepare ourselves for the inevitable “wrongs” when they come?
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1. Stop needing to have the answers and get back to perpetual learning.  When we're learning, and admit to being a student, it's perfectly acceptable to be wrong.
2. Practice saying "I don't know or I'm not sure, what are your thoughts.”
3. Lose the ego, pride gets in the way of so much progress, humility enables us to learn and improve so much more quickly (and it's easier to live with!)
4. Believe that no idea is perfect, that way you will always be looking for input from others.  (Which also helps build better teams.)
5. Learn to laugh at yourself, there's nothing that opens up creativity and broadened perspective better than humor!  (There is scientific proof of this!)
6. Make sure your work includes some fun.  A nerf basketball tournament was the simple tool that one creative art director used to ignite the creativity of his team!
7. Always lead by example, make sure you make it easy for others to be wrong by being willing to be wrong yourself.  (In fact point out your mistakes, revere them!!)

Being wrong is essential to learning, it's the perfect drug to induce a fervent desire to learn.  But unfortunately many work cultures see being wrong as the kiss of death rather than the building blocks of innovative progress that it truly is.

By: Kevin Minne
InnovationGrowthSystems.com  
720-354-0291

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