|
How to start using your Yearly Idea Leadership Navigator Guide
A manager's perspective on making your teams more innovative
The Yearly Idea Leadership Navigator Guide combines a yearly calendar with a tool kit of innovative perspectives. Each perspective is a resource that you can use for personal learning, team meetings or one-on-one conversations. The Yearly Idea Leadership Guide is written for anyone to use individually or as part of a team activity that helps you and your team focus on what is important for the upcoming 12 months.
A team leader or manager can use the perspectives to get better results by using the Guide this way:
- Read the Yearly Idea Leadership Navigator Guide and pick the perspectives that you feel are most useful.
- Distribute the Guides to staff. During a meeting, allow 45 to 60 minutes to discuss the concept and to kick-start planning. Use the page "What people need to know about innovation" as a discussion for a team meeting.
- Review the four main sections of the Guide:
- Monthly calendar helps you to identify activities where and when innovative thinking is needed, such as important meetings, projects or goal formulation for the month.
- Twelve 1-page perspectives on innovative thinking help you manage your ideas and give you new ways of thinking.
- Three quarterly innovation scorecards help you to measure your results (odd-sized pages). These pages also give you a great focus for monthly or quarterly meetings.
- Twelve "Idea management" note pages at the end of the Guide help you manage 12 ideas into results. Each is designed for one challenge and to capture all of your ideas, insights, reminders and resources related to that challenge.
Great solutions may take a week or month to develop. How long it takes to develop a solution is less important than ensuring that it solves the problem well. Sometimes creating a new initiative will take even longer, as it is often harder and more complex to create something totally new. The key is to continue to focus on your challenge until you feel it is ready for action. At this point, you can use each page to draft a more detailed plan of action. By investing some time each day, and doing so over a period of days or weeks, you will develop the conviction that your actions will be worthwhile, as you will see the potential for results.
The benefit of investing in your challenges over time is that you will find two types of issues:
- Some will help you to build a stronger solution.
- Some will identify areas of weakness that need to be satisfied for you to move forward.
Foresight for success
Identifying the potential weak aspects of your solutions gives you the power to ensure that you can deal with issues as they arise. Every potential solution will have implications. The better you can identify the positive and negative implications, the more useful your solutions will become over time.
Leading people to help them develop their potential to innovate
Use expressions like "managing our ideas", "solving our challenges", "we need big ideas and lots of small ideas to be successful" and "let's change some of the rules around here." Look at page 1. Use the section "How can we find 12 minutes to be innovative each day" as a discussion theme.
Organize monthly challenge meetings
Each month, host a meeting (or build this into an existing meeting). Call it an "idea factory" that looks at the coming month and asks:
- Where are new ideas needed over the next month or two? or
- Where is innovative thinking over the next month or two?
Generate a discussion on the challenges that are coming up, such as planning for new events, programs, launches or assignments. The key is to refer to the essence of this question: Where can we apply our capacity to innovate?
- For staff - at a personal level it can reflect some processes of their jobs.
- For the team or organization - it can be much more involved and longer term in nature.
When people define challenges that are truly useful (no matter how big or small the challenge), have them write one challenge on the top of each "Insights into actions" page at the end of the Guide.
The goal is to use these as the place to start. People can start to look for insights, facts, research or other ideas to satisfy the challenge. This takes a commitment to find 12 minutes per day to work on just one idea. Tell people to think about it and then collaborate with someone until a rough idea is formed.
Overall, it is totally acceptable to work on five or six ideas at a time - as long as people keep each challenge separate (hence, only one challenge per page). Once you have a clear idea in place, use the prompts for "opportunity thinking" on pages 29-30 to develop the idea further.
- Once someone has developed a complete idea, produce a more formal version of the idea in a word processing document that resembles a plan of action.
- For small ideas, simply act on them. Make them happen.
- For big ideas that need resources, refer to "Strategies for promoting your ideas".
- Every three months, create the opportunity to discuss results. What was created and what skills were learned in the process. The quarterly scorecards were created to prompt this quarterly review.
Alternative idea: team challenges
Each month pick one important challenge for the team or organization and use it to focus your search for new ideas. For example, "In May we are looking for ideas to improve the way we distribute our products to customers - from receiving their enquiries to the shipment of the products."
- Encourage this focus for the month - define the challenge in exact terms. Provide a description of the challenge in writing. You can include some key issues and explain why this challenge is important.
- Discuss the challenge and encourage people to think about it.
- Remind people each week.
- Recognize and reward the ideas that are received.
- Tell people which ideas will be used or taken forward. Also explain why some ideas are used.
Order your extra copies now
|
