Well some of us do, but sadly most tend to become risk-avoiding because of the environment they are in or have been associated with for long periods, where avoidance rubs off, it seeps into the soul.

Many enjoy being simply ‘passive’, avoiding anything that smacks of being ‘proactive’; it is safer to be ‘reactive’. Innovation and heaven can equally wait.

Putting it simply most people and organizations are just afraid to take risks and this fear takes over and drives their choices. Innovation is certainly something that suffers from this fear of risk.

Organizations miss critical opportunities, individuals fail to speak out and argue for a given change or innovative idea. We can simply stop growing, to want to become something more, we take the easy option, we avoid risk.

Reducing innovation to the lowest common denominator.

How often have you felt all the risk mitigation has been taken out of the innovation concept you have been working upon, for it to emerge as a pale reflection of the original idea? Often I can hear.

We need to be reminded that innovation is the act (risk-taking) of introducing something new (creativity) that adds potential value. By reducing the risk we often do not produce something better, just simply an alternative to what is already out there.

Minimise the risk, strive for certainty, avoid the awkward questions, and just keep the head down and toe the line.

Our organizations talk about the need for risk but don’t walk the risk path.
The understanding of risk will always have associated with some fear, discomfort and resistance and that can be an uncomfortable place to go.

The whole ‘act’ of letting go is never easy. It is the ability to manage the risk that reduces its fear. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning, we actually are forward learning as we are accelerating our knowledge.

Surely the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving it makes for exciting work, we become motivated, curious and want more, providing there is an encouraging environment to experiment and explore.

As I have suggested before “shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance (of failure or debate), exploring the unknowns, all should be an integral part of innovation”.

Innovation is risk-taking so let’s embrace it, not just for the sake of taking risks where you can become addicted to the thrill but in constantly seeing the positive payoff within the risk, it needs to be appropriate and set against the ‘given’ situation and the learning in potential loss but recognizing the potential in gain.

The search is for meaningful contributions

There is so much negativity swirling around our organizations, a real detachment that is raising alarm bells.

Today’s workers are “neither empowered nor inspired to navigate the challenges faced by twenty-first-century organizations” according to a recent Deloitte report and commented upon here by Steve Denning .

As Steve observes in this article, as a result, creative, passionate workers simply don’t want to work in organizations with “clearly defined roles, organizational silos, and predictability”.

We are also in real need of better “inner working lives” and we need to look for ways to allow our people to become engaged, feeling part of something that allows for being more creative and passionate.

An environment offering somewhere that is seen as more productive, looking to build for future contribution and finding ways to be more collegial, working in teams on these experiments and explorations to learn and advance the innovation thinking. It allows us to grow from within.

We need to find ways for higher levels of risk tolerance. We push the ordinary back into the extraordinary and all of us what to be associated with those sorts of moments, those events that give meaning, purpose and pride to what we do. We need to allow risk in, so the risk can come and live with you.

Our leaders need to lead and guide.

When one hears that the leadership is in disagreement it tends to stop organizations from being adventurous until that issue or sticking point is resolved.

When it comes to innovation we do need to look to our management to manage option proliferation, resolve criteria disagreements, overcome stalled decisions, clarify rejections or discount new ideas before they are ‘fully’ formed

Those leaders assigned to lead innovation need to become more engaged, stop the limited participation and take the time innovation does require. Head nodding or ‘just’ talking innovation just does not cut it!

Commitment does matter, enormously, up and down the organization.
We need to recognize allowing risk is becoming the basis for a commitment to change

Wanting innovation requires the need to encourage the management of risk. Today we are in markets with slower growth, higher volatility and potential for disruption. Risk needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Equally the sentiment that we cannot disrupt our core needs some shifting in thinking as others are busy working on ways to do that to you at this very minute. Risk comes from not knowing.

We need to manage the ‘certainty of return’ by making the knowledge that comes from incremental steps of an experiment to validate an idea into a new innovation needs this consistently improving the business case.

That comes from steady ‘readiness-based decisions that prototypes or pilots put into the hands of the consumer or customer to explore around, will advance our knowledge, each time of the potential value and ‘seen’ worth of this concept over the existing ones in the market place.

Shifting our thinking can be gradual in learning

The effectiveness of risk assessments, capturing more and more external market data and attempting group prioritization certainly helps but in volatile markets this is not enough.

We need to develop those risk-mitigation steps to constantly increase confidence; we need to look more internally or with our partners at our capabilities to measure the controllable factors and events to keep innovation on track and we need to seek out individual stakeholders discussions to manage their unique concerns.

This is far more a shift to execution than relying on market attractiveness conditions alone.

Thinking about risk in those different and manageable ways to move forward and grow

We need to mitigate uncertainty by constantly reiterating known and unknown risks through these constant engagements in experimentation, prototyping, and piloting concepts. This needs to be in a more dynamic ‘management of the portfolio’ concept, from concept to commercialization process.

A place where risk-mitigation needs to be in-built all the way, to build knowledge as it ‘reveals’ itself. In innovation, mostly completely new to the world it is never apparent, you have to ‘tease ‘ it out on its value and contribution.

Everything simply cannot be available when you often just don’t know, you take small steps often to feel your way and build that knowledge up.

We need to understand our reach and ability to grasp

The ability to push on and find out, to stretch, to understand our reach and our grasp, does need some risk-taking but in thoughtful, measured steps.

Good innovation needs measured risk-taking and let’s learn the ways to allow our innovation to happen and get our passion and engagement back, flowing through the veins of our organizations.

We need a mantra of ‘build-test-feedback-revise’ iterations performing constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. One that is far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, and flexible that applies a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty.

We need to move forward with a degree of certainty but also perhaps a little fear.
How about this as an idea to explore?
How about approving some pilot projects and providing resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period, ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Then you embed the learning and further scale
It encourages risk but in clear time frames and with a definitive result that advances knowledge and takes you closer to its future value.

You look for and encourage new perspectives. Is this that risky or is it perhaps allowing risk to be managed in new ways of learning?

We do need to rethink the management of risk for innovation.

New business growth is very different from business as usual but in all honesty, is there that much business as usual still around?

We do need to loosen up our thinking on risk when it comes to innovation, otherwise, our growth will remain limited, stuck in the fear of the unknowns?

The post Risk Is Understanding Your Scope of Reach Should Exceed Your Grasp. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Time, we are told, can be our best friend or equally our worst enemy, it does give us all a  constant, certain anxiety and growing angst.

This week time showed its bad side to me, actually it might have been doing this for some weeks when I stop and think about it.

When you feel the pressures of time, you seem like you are “fighting the clock”, it just seems to heap more pressure on you and that need to break out, that spark of creativity, seems to have been buried under an avalanche of what keeps coming into you. The acceleration of what keeps landing on your desk, crying out to be read, answered or translated into something more.

Of course, most of us are that rational type and we tell ourselves most of this is self-imposed or is it? I think most of this is externally-imposed. I blame the advancement of our social tools and all the multitudes of opinions, thoughts, suggestions that are ‘spewing’ forth in streams and becoming so overwhelming you begin to go ‘stir’ crazy. I equally blame myself for getting so hooked.

Addressing the problem

This is not simply a time problem, it is deeper than this. It is actually tickling away at fear, it is giving a growing intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety and inner turmoil. I think I’ve been suffering this for some time. I’ve got FoMO thanks to all these social platforms I feel I need to connect into.

Each day is getting into a growing dangerous routine. I arrive into the office my early routine- check my emails, check twitter, check the blog, check facebook, it is eating into my time but I need it. Do I really? This is social anxiety with a big kicker. FoMo – that fear of missing out.

Then we have the staggering array of social networks constantly prompting us to check out our Klout status or your Kred score or the latest articles in our designated areas of interest. Then you go in search of the scoops of the day. You must feed the hungry beast, baying for your time.

Then the daily snippets, LinkedIn reminders, slideshare updates, headline notifications and then the drip of the dailies from paper.li capturing all the breaking stories you subscribed too, needed you felt for your work. Were they?

This is angst, an acute anxiety type, I am dreading where this is all going. So do we really need all these ‘social’ interactions, are they profitable investments or just simply satisfying events and quick fixes.

No, we just want to all feel loved, special, in the loop and by giving something back into this, achieve a little respect. What are we really getting out of them? We reply, we contribute and we feel productive but are we, are we economically productive?

Now if this economic productivity is happening then great. That is defined as increasing the economic value or are social platforms just simply sucking the economic life out of us all?

It just dulls our creative process so we are getting more defocused aberrations

The reality is it is dulling our own creative processes. Is it spurring us to do more within our own work? Is it not undermining the precise kind of creative thinking for us to do our own creative work? It is blurring us, it is surely this constant ‘mass’ of contribution that chips away at making us less individually distinct, perhaps a new form of defocused aberration.  The higher the intensity of this social ‘interaction’ the more we get defocused, not actually more focused, I feel.

Then we come to Kiasu.

Anyone who has ever lived in Singapore will recognise this word. They even have a Mr. Kiasu. This really is a wonderful word for that “fear of missing out”. I think it applies to me more and more. I’ve caught the dreaded Kiasu fever.

Kiasu is a mental attitude, it is always looking for a sense of opportunity. This has its positive sides but it shows itself far more in its less attractive ones. It makes you feel if you don’t do something now it will be missed opportunity and where it adds a real pressure on you, is you have this fear that it will not be simply lost, it will go to someone else.

So  you experience with Kiasu a sense of lost opportunity and a growing disadvantage in relation to other people who are ‘working’ the social scene. This feeds compulsion that I equally have to do something now, it is my own sense of obligation kicking in as I owe it to myself and so I have to do it. This nicely links into a pressure to compete with others and I can’t lose out, can I?

Understanding Kiasu

Anna Wierzbicka wrote on Kiasu “Singapore English- a semantic and cultural perspective” that does an excellent job of describing much around Kiasu. Also David Chan Wah offered a essay some time back on “Kiasuism and the withering away of Singaporean creativity” with the wonderful maxim of “better grab first, later no more”.

In Singapore, Kiasu manifests itself in queue jumping or others barging in front of you, with perhaps, if you are lucky, only a simply “sorry lah”, it also is seen on the roads when no one likes to give way when lanes are merging. Kiasu is deeply ingrained into Singapore ‘s psyche, it has its good and bad points.

Growing up with Kiasu and its pressures often makes for ambitious business people; you become ‘big’ on working towards number one. The problem is always double edged, winning is never totally sweet as it carries the dread of ceasing to win, to get ahead, to ‘grab’ the opportunity.

There is even a A to Z of Kiasu I came across sometime back, although I’m not sure of its source on the sometimes amusing side of Kiasu in Singapore. I think we should compile one for our growing social anxieties of that FoMO.

We are all increasingly in an information maze

We of course, do need to devote time to reaching out, reading, responding, to gathering in and absorbing but we do need our own plans of what amount of time we should spend on this and its ultimate purpose.

We need to certainly find time, to make available time as others offering their thinking and experiences does help us relate and often make sense of our world. It does stimulate our creative process but it is the ‘act’ of filtering but this can’t be imposed by a simple click of a delete button, it has to be more than this.

The pressure today is externally- imposed but we need to regain the upper hand by making this flow of social interactions coming to us, like a social tsunami, by taking back control to make it far more self-imposed. My anxieties, my FoMO needs redirecting into greater economic worth. Recognizing the symptoms is a start.

We all I feel, need to be more selective, more discerning to make our own insights more personally creative and not becoming even more elusive, growing reliant just on our ‘feeds’ being beamed in daily to dull our creative brain, by simply adding to them. We need to ‘carve’ out our own time to allow our ‘creative juices’ to flow more, I forgot to get this jab shot recently, where is that creative needle?

Becoming more selective- is that my answer?

So I need to come to grips with all this. I’m not sure if all this inflow is helping as much as it should be, it is not generating what I think it should be, certainly from the time I seemingly put into it. I need to break into this with a different perspective, it is sucking up far to much of my time.

But as Mr Kiasu says in Singapore English “I’ve got to get my money’s worth lah!” I’ve got to “everything also I want” and “everything must grab”  with “everything also want extra” but with more of “everything also sure win“. Work that out!

The post Innovation being served up with a growing angst, anxiety and Kiasu first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If we get to this point we are not just the ones in danger but we more than often involve others in this stupidity, with potentially serious consequences for all involved.

Organizations so often leave their own futures to the last minute by failing to recognize or acknowledge they are running out of time, the situation they have been so use too for such a long time has suddenly changed.

Well, for the vast majority, there was nothing “sudden” about it, they simply left it too late, ignoring all the warning signs and they decided to cross that “red light” as a last-minute panic to catch up and be back in charge of their innovation destiny.

Often all organizations want to do is get back in control, revert to being comfortable, managing “as usual” but in the process have missed so much innovation opportunity in these panic moments because they did not plan for it. T

hey just had a simple failure in not anticipating and thinking ahead, they “ran the amber”, not being alert to their surroundings and wanting to learn so as to adapt to changing conditions.

Not being open and receptive to reacting and exploring, in different more flexible ways, they simply have no time to manage changing events, they are suddenly out of their comfort zone.

They spin out of control and lose all traction.

Anticipation is something that always needs us being in “heighten awareness”
It doesn’t matter if it is driving a car, positioning ourselves to receive a pass on the football field we all need to anticipate, to be aware, to get into this ‘heighten awareness’, into the position to “receive”.

Otherwise, we are often left as the suckers or the ones that deal with the after-effects. So why is it, that organizations’ are so poor at developing heightened awareness?

As we appreciate “heightened awareness” is the idea of “having a higher appreciation, knowledge of, and consciousness of your connection between the physical plane, and the spiritual plane”.

Or in organizations speak, knowing what is going on, both inside your organization and connecting it to the marketplace. Heightening our awareness of innovation needs consistent renewal and anticipation, being alert to changes taking place in and around in our environments.
It is in this “heightened awareness” we can bring together observation and listening skills from what we can gather from the marketplace.

Often in this state, we are discovering unmet needs, jobs-to-be-done that customers need solutions for. You can’t achieve this if you are not alert and clearly drawn into yourself, often in the mistaken belief you know.

You know what it takes, how long it takes and you simply relax and suddenly you are caught out, as you cut corners and get caught out by others who have taken the time and invested in this “heightened awareness” plane and thought through their innovation journey.

These are the ones who don’t need to ‘run the red light’ as they allowed enough  time to be totally aware of their environment and  found innovation opportunity on each street corner, because they were alert to what was going on around them.

They not only planned the journey, they took the time to enjoy and remind themselves of why they were travelling in the first place, not just to get to the next destination as quickly as possible but to get there through appreciating the how, where and what as their contribution to improving “things”.

When we simply get caught up in our day-to-day lives, our world, our needs, we disconnect and then we again, simply, ‘run the red light’ as we need to suddenly, simply, just catch up but often it is just too late.

Developing Organizational Awareness

We do need to be so much more proactive. That is so easy to offer as a “catchy” solution as we can’t add a further one hour into our crowded days so easily but it is strange but whenever we are “proactive” we are stopping, reflecting and starting to structure our days far more consciously.

We confront face-to-face that running out of time, that flirting with danger by “jumping the red lights.” We begin to systematically break down short and long-term organizational needs based more on what is going on all around us, so we can lessen the pressures, heighten the understanding and simply allow more tuning in to innovation opportunity that is on that “every corner”.

This growing awareness begins to “process” the vast number of variables that must be analyzed before a true solution can be delivered because we have allowed some thinking and experimental time and worked out the journey a little bit more. Our minds actually unclutter as we sort our thinking and build in more proactive.

Being inquisitive, being curious, being aware

Innochat, (www.innochat.com) a weekly one-hour, highly fast paced “twitter chat” that goes on each week on Thursday, is a place for anyone who cares to contribute to the innovating topic of that week, and in this past particular week we discussed curiosity.

In writing this post I made a further connection in my reflections from these exchanges. Let me explain, Drew Marshall, who facilitated this session, offered a “framing post” around curiosity and one point just struck such a cord for me here: Curiosity in Intersections – the way in which thinking between subjects leads to innovation.

In Drew’s blog piece he talks about multi-switching where we need to recognize patterns and discern what these mean. In Drew’s view it is the innovators ability to rapidly switch from one area of curiosity to another.

Then he discusses multi-tasking as something potentially different. In multi-tasking an individual is moving quickly from one activity, or task within an activity, to another. Drew points out that the multi-tasker’s brain cannot fully focus when multitasking and therefore takes longer to complete tasks and they are predisposed to error.

We are caught today in a world of multi-tasking and as this seems to be quickening so perhaps we are more “predisposed” to increasing error. We are running the red light more often.

We can’t stop the need to multi-task otherwise we just get left behind but we can stop and think more of the “what if?” to anticipate, to be more alert, to raise our heightened awareness.

As we cross intersections we do need to be far more aware of the connections, not just of the dangers but of the emerging possibilities.

Organizations need to be alert to the dangers of multi-tasking for this risk of increased error.

We do need a “heightened awareness” of what innovation means and as more multi-tasking, more projects are being pushed on existing “everyday work” the risks of “running this red light” is increasing rapidly.

If organizations continue to “push” even harder, then they run the danger of risking more than they expected. More crashes leading to more crisis, to then be managed and then missing out on the alternatives that time helps to allow.

We all certainly need to allow more time

Allowing little time to be aware, to be inquisitive, to spend time investigating, discovering and listening to your customers means you are ignoring the ‘amber’ warning light and suddenly and too late you cross the red light, where you are in real danger of a critical crash- a crash where people leave, because they can’t stand the ‘fear’ or ‘ignorance’ anymore, the fact that there is a new juggernaut crossing your intersection at the same time and you didn’t see it coming and it smashes into you and the result can be fatal.

We must recognize for innovation to thrive, you need to allow time, you need to be fully aware of where the possibilities might be and they are often on every corner. Just don’t cross the red light, rushing to get somewhere and you miss all the positive signals around you and also don’t allow enough time to sense the dangers that might be coming towards you from every direction.

Arrive safely by driving appropriately.

I saw a quote:“I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don’t know its happening”- Mariel Hemingway.

I would argue those that seek and plan, that allow appropriate time and be responsive to others needs, will find “awareness” can come not just in these “incremental moments” but in powerful innovative “waves” due to this heightened awareness.

None of us should run the risk of crossing a red light when it comes to thinking about innovation, always feeling under pressure, desperate, we must allow innovation to “arrive” through the space and time needed for allowing those illuminating moments to (ful)fill your innovation journey.

The post Crossing on a red light at the innovation intersection is really dangerous first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.