Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Innovation Insight

Recently I was at a conference where we did some team activities. One of the activities really shows impact of assumptions. The leader of the excercise gave four groups of four people a card with an assignment. All he said was, "Each of you represent an office and you must answer the question on your card." He also said that the team that finished fastest would get the largest bonus.

Each of the offices jumped into their task with excitement. But as each group looked at their cards, the question was not answerable - we didn't have all the information. But because we thought we were competing for bonuses, we did not even think to ask any other office.

Well, lesson learned, the answer to our question was on the card of another office and the same was true for each office. The lesson: any space at all (even only a few feet) creates seperation.

Innovation requires that we break down walls of seperation. This is hard because we put them up everywhere we go and we struggle to think about our world in collaboration. But that is the only way we can do innovative thinking in the nonprofit world. Because we lack resources of major corporations, we have to use the resources at our disposal - our networks, friendships, partners.

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