17 The Po!nt

The following are 3 examples of exercises for students to learn key insights respective to real world understandings for developing and managing innovations.

The Po!nt(23)

Invest 30 seconds in your innovation success.

You can’t dig a new hole by digging the same one deeper.

Did you walk on the sidewalk today? Why? Every day people go thousands of meters out of their way just to stay on the sidewalk to reach their destination. Why? There is no gun to their head. Perhaps doing what was done yesterday is more comfortable than doing something new today.

Right Side Learning: Parents often hand things to babies from their right hand to the child’s right hand. In response, a baby hands things to others from their right hand. Parents also assign names to items and point with their right hand. Eventually words became phrases that established patterns from which liner thinking emerges. Soon after, a child’s self-awareness becomes reliant on the dominance of left-brain thinking.

Left-Brain | Right–Brain: The left-brain governs the right side of the body and relies on what has been done. The right-brain governs the left side of the body and explores what has not been done.

• Left-Brain: Handles reading, writing, and calculations. Left brain thinking is often described as logical, analytical, and orderly. It relies on rote learning, linear thought, and systems.
• Right-Brain: Focuses on visual awareness, imagination, emotions, spatial abilities, holistic thought, abstract correlation. It creates associations between related and unrelated stimuli to define possibility.
• Balanced Mind: The optimum brain balance is 60% left and 40% right (source: Innovation Engineering Institute). Innovators must learn to combine the strengths of the left-brain to give guardrails for the cognitive skills of exploratory thinking. Below are two examples:
• Systems Thinking: You might think brainstorming would be superior to a structured approach in developing innovation. Not so. In a study reported in the publication, Research Matters, researchers found that a break-the-rules strategy for generating ideas was inferior to a structured process as a framework for inventive thinking. Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky, and Sorin Soloman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem determined that the use of rules to generate ideas enhanced creativity, according to the disciplines of cognitive psychology. They concluded system planning guides thinking in patterns using templates can serve as an infrastructure to consistently generate on-target ideas.
• Lateral Thinking: Edward de Bono coined lateral thinking in 1967 (horizontal thinking). It is a form of ideation to solve problems by imagining unique solutions that cannot be discerned by deductive or logical methods. This involves reasoning that is disruptive or not immediately obvious. With lateral thinking, someone conceives a solution by mashing together relevant and disparate facts to come up with a meaningfully unique discovery. Or, at the very least, they challenge the status quo.

The Po!nt: People have been conditioned to think and engage the world by what has been done before. Breakthrough innovation blends the disciplines of the left-brain to guide right-brain attributes to form new associations that consistently spark fresh – on target – opportunities.

The Po!nt(23)

Invest 30 seconds in your innovation success.

Innovate to Embrace Failure

Have you ever heard the word “No.” NO! I suspect all of us have. But to be blunt… are you willing to fail?

Most organizations abhor the word “failure” or “death threat.” In doing so, the term is watered down to a “challenge” to motivate positive attitudes. However, innovation is often an assertive passion-based initiative that can cause participants to overlook tripping points of distraction. As a result, people subconsciously develop avoidance mechanisms to address these potential incidents. State problems for what they are – situations that can cause an innovative effort to fail.

A System of Repetitive Learning is Necessary

Meaningfully unique solutions that create breakthrough opportunities often have never been done before. Embracing failure is the normal process required to refine big ideas into reality. Rapid phases of experimentation around milestones of death threats are run because we don’t know the answers. Importantly, these cycles of learning are not random. Rather, they are disciplined phases of benchmarks using systems thinking such as design thinking, agile development, and Innovation Engineering’s™ approach to the Deming cycle – Plan, Do, Study, Act.

Fail Fast Fail Cheap (learn forward)

• Trust: When implementing a system, people must trust the process. Following a systems thinking process allows addressing failure as a non-threatening unbiased evolution of productization. Every failure is a catalyst that refines insight, discovers unlooked-for opportunities, enlightens reality, and challenges the vision to evolve.
• Inspiring Time: People must be encouraged to develop their innovations quickly. Otherwise, smart people will often dwell on their thought. Overworking an idea either gets boring or entrances the team (and the stakeholders). Discipline innovation commercialization with fast-paced deadlines of objectives when embarking on new concepts.
• Plan: Start the process with a clear understanding of WHY. Use one-page templates that force concise logic and critical thinking for the mission of a program. This helps define what expectations look like. At this stage, it is important to identify potential death threats along the production value chain in addition to respective disruptions.

Special Note: The mission does not identify the solution… that is what the innovation is supposed to do.

• Do: The charge of a thousand baby steps to action that engages tactics to attain what is articulated in the Plan. To increase speed a team must break achieving the Plan into small, fast, cheap learning cycles often in parallel to each other. Engaging these elements in sequential order helps build momentum and insulate issues to guide direction.
• Study: Entails thinking deeply about the discoveries during the Do phases relative to the Plan. This thinking allows for new quick cycles of clarity in developing a realistic meaningfully unique concept.
• Act: Is about deciding where the project should go next. At this point there are four common options:
• Declare victory that the death threat is resolved… and move forward to continue the cyclical process.
• Plan to reengage the cycle with different activities and adjust the concept.
• Stop the process, make changes, and pivot to work on other approaches to achieve the mission.
• Stop allocating resources and archive the project because the work required is not worth the effort.

The Po!nt: When failure stages are acknowledged and confronted proactively in a sequential order then clarity is established to identify realities of malfunction. Death threats should be anticipated early with documented assessments of resolution or expectations of pivot. Achieving innovation realization must see failure, not as a result, but as an incident of learning to guide transparent expectations to continue rapid progress to a result and conservation of resources.

The Po!nt(23)

Invest 30 seconds in your innovation success.

Rhythm of Your Brain

We all have music in our lives. While everyone’s choices can be rather unique, the over-arching idea is the same: music creates a mood and often makes us feel good. Have you ever wondered how the rhythm of music motivates you?

Ignition of Ideas

Research has shown that listening to music has many benefits. Listening to music releases dopamine in our brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter our brain produces to nudge us into productivity. It stimulates and inspires multiple parts of our brain into action. It can stimulate positive behavior, guide the engineering of ideas, create a structure of focus, and can help us heal from trauma. Even more remarkable is that researchers from Stanford reported when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas. Neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor, who did significant work understanding how music affects our brain adds:” Music is an intellectual reward. It is really an exercise for your whole brain.”

Engineering Innovation

Many of us listen to music while we work to help concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity (Oct. 5, 2023 National Institutes of Health). Music is a useful tool in concept engineering and working through writer’s block. It provides non-invasive noise, and pleasurable feelings, to engineer focus on a point of thought while neutralizing the unconscious attention system’s ability to distract us.

The Mind Is an Engine of Patterns

Creativity is an emotional product. Music is a language of emotion representing different feelings that barge or seep into thoughts with no boundaries or limitations. Why is this the case? Perhaps it is because we have language, we communicate, we think in structure, and the music forms a system of neural patterns in our brains. These patterns guide thoughts and establish rhythms of frameworks to converge ruminations like a silent flowing mathematical logic formula. It ignites our brains to action as an engine of processes.

The Po!nt: When people are happy, or at the very least content for the moment, they often generate more ideas. When you are working on a project or need to develop a solution… or just to think. Take time out… tap your foot, hum a beat, or notice a tune and participate in the musical rhythms of the logic of your mind.