We hear a lot about “innovation” in business…about the need to innovate to hold a competitive edge, for example, or innovate to attract people to our association’s conference year after year. Whatever the reason, we’re always on the lookout for how we can be more innovative in our work.
I’d like to postulate that what we want isn’t innovation…it’s imagination.
Last Friday I wrote about the vision held by the Challenger 7 families and the organization they founded, the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. That got me thinking, in the funny way our brains work, about the role of vision in learning, which led me to recall a blog post I’d read in early January. That post from Jonathan Fields featured JK Rowling’s 2008 Harvard commencement address, in which she makes a pretty strong case for the power of imagination and failure. A little later in January, Fast Company featured in its daily e-newsletter 13 “radical ideas” for spending $100 million dollars to really save education, a response to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million contribution to the schools and city of Newark, NJ last September.
And then yesterday morning, another article in the Fast Company e-newsletter introduced me to No Right Brain Left Behind, an intriguing 5-day challenge to the creative industries to “concept ideas that can help the creativity crisis happening in U.S. schools today.” One reason for this emphasis, cited in a slide presentation about the project: a lack of creativity in schools and a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identifying creativity as the “#1 competitive edge for the future.” Yes, schools have become much more about standardized testing than about sparking the creativity and critical thinking that foster imagination. Without building those skills, will tomorrow’s employees even be able to tap the innate creativity that leads to true innovation?
Can we truly innovate without creativity…without first imagining what could be? Innovation can, I think, occur without imagination; ideas new to your organization don’t have to be original to your organization. Think about how often you ask how others have faced and overcome the same challenges you’re facing. Conferences are loaded with case-study sessions; books are filled with “real-life examples;” and we listen and read and figure out how we can adapt what’s been done elsewhere to our own situations. Do we really want to do nothing more than repackage what’s been done before?
Let me be clear: I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with avoiding “reinventing the wheel.” I just wonder if it’s enough to help our organizations and our stakeholders succeed over the long haul. I’m curious about the possibilities that could arise if we imagine more, and adapt less.
It is the ability to allow our curiosity to take over and imagine that truly encourages new methods, new concepts, new ideas to surface. We don’t allow nearly enough time in our days to explore and imagine. It’s true that not every idea is a winner. Yet the value of imagining goes far beyond the ideas it generates. Dr. John Medina says, in his Brain Rule #12, that we are “powerful and natural explorers…despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into.”
Our lives are busy, packed with things to do and schedules to meet. I wonder, though…what could happen if we allow a little more curiosity and imagination into our days?
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