Many thanks to blogger buddy Ben Martin for recognizing one of my posts to The Forum Effect Blog as best blog post of 2007. (FULL DISCLOSURE: Ben is affiliated with Principled Innovation LLC, but his blog awards are completely independent.) I'm incredibly grateful for the award, although I'm disappointed that I was unable to defend my 2006 best blog about associations award. Hearty congratulations to Acronym on receiving this year's best blog award, but I want to put Scott and Lisa on notice that I plan to make a contest of it in 2008!
I am re-publishing my winning post below. Please share your feedback on it!
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In organizations, the ability to recognize and confront reality is widely regarded as an essential success attribute. Most board members and association CEOs come to their roles with the unswerving conviction that there is an objective reality to explain what is happening both inside and outside their organizations. Other staff and volunteer leaders bring the same belief to the table, although not always with the same level of commitment. For the most part, all of these leaders dutifully embrace their responsibility to manage their organizations as efficiently as they can within the agreed-upon boundaries of the reality they see.
But what if the so-called "reality" we're recognizing and confronting as leaders is nothing more than a construct we've created both individually or collectively based on our assumptions, inferences and interpretations of the world as we experience it? Is adopting and advocating for a single "realistic" perspective of the contexts and conditions in which our associations operate actually counterproductive to the pursuit of innovation?
This brings us to our question for this week:
Is reality the enemy of innovation?
Dean Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto believes it is. The dean wrote a very intriguing article exploring this question for BusinessWeek Innovation Online back in December 2006. In the article, Martin argues that while we have wholeheartedly embraced Aristotelian scientific and analytical thinking, we have failed to understand that this way of thinking does not serve us equally well in all situations. When it comes to organizations and the work of innovation, Martin contends we need to use the thinking tools that Aristotle described in his book, Rhetoric: conversation, invention and intention. The goal of innovation, after all, isn't to describe what is "real," but to imagine and create what does not yet exist. Martin draws the distinction in this way:
Analytical reasoning seeks out and reveres reality. As long as we apply analytical thinking to things that can be other than they are, we will convince ourselves that what we have now is 'reality' and we will be both blissfully ignorant of the possibilities that could be and comforted that there is nothing to do but accept the situation.
Instead, our core assumption should be that we are not looking at 'reality' but rather seeing just another modelâ€"one that is likely to be imperfect. If we start with that assumption, we open ourselves to imagining better, different models. With that mindset, we can create the future rather than reinforce the past.
So how can you and your colleagues prevent reality from becoming the enemy of innovation? Here are three ideas for your consideration:
+Test your personal assumptions about what constitutes reality-Try to step back from the intensity of your worldview and look at it as an incomplete model of what is. Actively question the way you are looking at specific trends, challenges and opportunities.
+Engage in organization-wide possibilities conversations-Bring staff, volunteers and other association contributors together regularly to explore what is possible for the organization. Take care to include voices in those conversations that are not normally heard and enforce one simple guideline: what is real is not as important as what we can imagine together.
+Build reality-busting probes and prototypes-Isolate the most persistent assumptions and inferences and design experiments with the specific intention to undermine those views within the organization. In other words, do exactly the opposite of what you think should be done in order to learn. If you're going to go this route, however, you must be fully committed. You will not gain new insight from half-measures.
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