3 Why Is Innovation So Hard?
You Can’t Dig a New Hole by Digging the Same One Deeper (8)
The challenges of thinking differently: Left Brain Versus Right Brain. Why is learning skills of ingenuity and innovation so difficult?
Here is an analogy: Did you walk on the sidewalk today? If you went out of your home… you did walk on a sidewalk. Why? To get to a destination. However, was there a gun to your head to make you stay on the sidewalk? Was there a guard to make you? Most likely — no. Did you think about it? Most likely — no. If your answers are anything similar to “never thought about it, doing what I always do, everyone else does, we are supposed to”, etc. Then do you realize you have trained yourself to abdicate the journey of successfully reaching your destination to the limitations of patterns and opinions of the world and others around you? Which means someone who is faster, smarter… whatever… is capable of surpassing you to arrive at the destination before you… and achieve what you seek to attain.
Change The Rules
How do you compete against someone bigger, richer, smarter with better resources? The answer is to change the rules on the competition. How do you change the rules? You step off the sidewalk, cut across the grass, be divergent and pioneer a different path to discover a new possibility. Changing the rules comes from the innovator, not the market. Henry Ford is attributed to have said, “If I asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse” (9).
What causes you to be averse to stepping off the sidewalk? Doing what has always been done is more comfortable than doing something new. The hypothesis is parents and adults around the globe make significant efforts to cognitively train infants to be right-handed at the same time teaching words. The left brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. Therefore, over time, many infants’ behavior and thinking in words evolve to become left brain reliant. Doing what has always been done before is safer and does not conflict with humans’ natural instincts related to danger broadly associated with self-preservation and survival (10). However, this principle of behavior continuity is also an impediment to maintaining successful momentum in a world constantly immersed in change.
Innovators and entrepreneurs are often confronted with the word “NO” because decision makers and gate keepers of resources have a hard time advocating the value of something that hasn’t been done before. There is an art to designing ideas and communicating to get access to resources to achieve what you seek to attain.
