Discovering Value is hard work.
Finding opportunities for Innovation and Growth is hard work, and the value of having good, interactive, highly participative workshops breaks much of those initial barriers to allow the hard work to begin more cohesively and collaboratively.
I believe any design of workshops must meet your needs, push the thinking and generate new returns in innovation understanding. Boilerplate designs might look initially attractive, but knowing your unique needs, limitations, concerns, resource constraints, and ambitions can transform a workshop into one that lasts in the participant’s minds as it was “clearly” designed for them.
Which end of the innovation spectrum do we need to go to?
- Workshops can mean different things to different people. Find ones that are 100% focused on engaging with and accelerating innovation. They need a couple of simple rules.
- Conducting ‘open’ dialogues or focused conversations should always have a sound context, so the contributions slowly build out and hold real promise.
- Discoveries can start with different ‘fields of enquiry’ to achieve different connections and deepen our perspectives.
The essential Three Horizon framework for discovery, planning and resource allocation
The Three Horizons is one frame that I really recommend; it shapes and determines much that is needed for managing innovation.
One post I wrote gives a good outline of its positioning “Three Horizons- Providing a Common Language in its Innovation Use.”
Go to my posting site of www.paul4innovating.com (link opens to a recent article) and then you can also go to the search button and enter “three horizons” you can view the different articles I’ve published on this, or equally, you can download these as summary series within my “insights and thinking” page under the three horizons. They do provide a comprehensive and detailed build on this critical innovation frame.
Then I find the Divergent / Convergent approach to thinking highly valuable.
We must always challenge ourselves, and taking you through a set of lenses of discovery that go from ‘divergent to convergent‘ is important.
You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme. In contrast, convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct’ solution to the given problem.
You encourage and ideate many possible and impossible solutions and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.
I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops, it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other. Still, the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces but giving each a clear discipline of dedicated time as you need a different mindset to think openly to begin narrowing the options down.
Creativity uses divergent thinking, which is solving problems with many possible solutions, as opposed to convergent thinking, which is solving problems.
These journeys are personal and team-forming opportunities and form the backbone of good dialogues to build innovation into your core of the business.
Understanding innovation requires a deep awareness- through various tailored or purpose-designed workshops, dialogues or discovery trips, you can rapidly enhance your awareness and grasp of what ‘makes up innovation.
Innovation is 100% of our focus, and we can, without question, advance your knowledge and insights across all of its complexities to be simplified through our workshops, dialogues and discovery approach.
