Discussions with fellow professionals at the Educause conference are engaging. I so appreciate all the opportunities to speak with fellow CIOs and IT leaders at this conference. I find this a time to pause and think. That ability to pause and think is increasingly rare on our campuses as we try to go faster, move with greater agility, and do more with dust.
The phrase that caught my attention today was from Lev Gonick of Case Western Reserve University. He spoke about reorganizing to create capacity for innovation. I thought about the characteristics of that innovation. It is time to think in one sense. Innovation needs time to play and time to experiment. It includes access to tools and techniques to facilitate innovation. It needs time to experiment, make mistakes, and find solutions and resolutions to both the mistakes and the paths that led to the mistakes.
Innovation doesn't happen alone, in my view. To be really effective, we need to create a community, a group with availability to think creatively together. There's a synergy and a flow that gets created when a group has the capacity interact.
I am giving thought to how I can create capacity for innovation in my organization.
Some of Google's best products came from employees pursuing pet projects in their own "innovation" time totally unrelated to their primary job function(s).
ReplyDeleteFreeing staff to have "tinker-time" can have huge paybacks. Also, sometimes the best way to overcome a problem that has you stymied is to walk away or work on something else.