We’ve all heard the statement that “everybody is creative”, and you should “follow your passion” – but what if your passion is just to do your job? What if you, as an employee, just loathe to be involved in an innovation project? What if your deep-rooted belief is that “this is an absolute and complete waste of time”?
You can of course put forward all the arguments about that innovation is a prerequisite for survival and so on. But you will, in any organisation, have a distribution of interest between, say, the 15% in one end of the scale (innovators and early adopters) will be ready for “anything innovative”, and the 16% in the other end of the scale that really don’t like to be involved in this (laggards). So what do you do? How can we leverage everybody’s energy?
The last thing to do is to leave the laggards alone – but you shouldn’t try to force them either. One tactic is exactly to leverage the skepticism, and to include them in the projects as valuable, critical resources. Include the skeptics in your regular conversations, and let their voices be heard just as much as the optimists. Remember that one person’s wild dream is another’s nightmare – and both may be right!
Adding management softwares like OKR would be another way to include everybody in the project. As, OKRs are the new way to get more out of your staff, this is a software worth consideration in the work environment. This software can help employees to be more accountable, and to collaborate with the team. Implementation of this software can also help in achieving measurable goals, with the inclusion of everyone.
In the article “Facilitative leadership and intervention implementation practices” you will find some good advice on how to move people along the Innovation Bell Curve. One way to accomplish this is to employ facilitative leadership, which is defined as follows:
A people-oriented approach to achieving the mission and goals of an organization. With clear objectives and goals in mind, the facilitative leader supports active interaction between participants to make the most of their strengths, knowledge, skills and talents to ensure the best possible outcome. They encourage team members to contribute their insights, resourcefulness and expertise to study and analyze the situation, opportunity or issue. Facilitative leadership requires the leader to have a high degree of patience and be proficient in communication and social skills.
In order for a change to be adapted, you need to move the potential adopters along five steps, and address some key questions along the way:
Key Question: To what extent can I make the case that this new thing is better than what we have already?
Key Question: How consistent (on a scale from 1 to 10) is this innovation with the values, experiences and needs of the potential adopter?
Key Question: How easy and relevant is it to use this innovation, and how many will use it?
Key Question: To what extent are there opportunity to try out this innovation on a limited basis?
Key Question: In what ways can the innovation be made tangible, understandable and clearly visible to others?
We have facilitated numerous innovation projects, which you may read more about in our Testimonials section.
We finally got a meeting in the network again – and it was much needed! Throughout the network’s 7-year lifespan, all our
The collaboration with Finn Kollerup was very rewarding for us. He inspired our participants to think about their everyday challenges in a new
Our task was to facilitate an efficient process and collect the results from a high-profile meeting. A special factor was that the schedule
