“Fall in Love with the Problem You’re Trying to Solve”

When it comes to inspiring innovation among team members, what creativity tools or practices, or strategies do you use?

One strategy we use is really deciding what is truly essential and aligning your innovation with that. Because if you are innovating in areas that aren’t critical to the business, they may be interesting and fun, and a pet project for someone, but they’re not going to have the impact that’s really needed. So, we decide what is truly essential to the business. And we’ll identify that and that ends up being where we focus our innovation efforts.
The second, I think, key principle to innovation is to fall in love with the problem you’re trying to solve, not your solution. So, we can get very wed to a solution that we have for something. And I think that hampers innovation, versus if you fall in love with either the opportunity you’re trying to maximize or you fall in love with whatever that business problem is, then you’re more open to looking at different ways of achieving that.
And I think that’s really important, especially for leaders, because if a leader falls in love with their solution, it’s really hard for team members to speak up and challenge it, even if they have a much better path. And so it’s something that I think we have to be aware of and make certain that we stay open to solutions or ideas.