The Three Realities of Innovators
If Einstein needed help, so will
you. Visionaries don't have to make everything work themselves. Some innovators
see the vision and pass it on to the next thinkers, while others build on the
work of people who have come before them.
How
do you build a bridge to a place that doesn't yet exist? This is the
paradoxical challenge that every innovator faces: to envision and reach for the
future before it happens. This requires the gift of foresight-a skill that
involves seeing emerging opportunities and taking action on those
opportunities.
There are two ways that innovators
navigate the unknown. The first is by seeing the future first and then
constructing a bridge toward it. This is what Copernicus and Einstein did: they
made game-changing observations and provided pathways for practitioners to make
use of that knowledge.
The other way is to build a bridge
and see the future as you cross over it. Consider all the important
experimenters who discovered things and then worked backwards to build theories
around them. This is what the Wright Brothers did for avionics and what Marie
and Pierre Curie did for radiology. They all noticed phenomena that didn't
correlate to accepted theories and then created new models based on these
observations.
What all these great thinkers have
in common is the ability to make sense of changing worlds. Crucial to the
initial steps of any innovation project is sense-making: understanding the
inner workings of your surroundings and knowing how to apply and re-apply your
deep insights. That is how innovators make their visions come to life.
So how can you take the abstract
musings of early-stage brainstorming and turn them into real projects with real
results? Here are the three realities that we must see, integrate, and act on
in order to make innovation happen.
Imagination.
This is a vision in its most powerful (and least concrete)
form. There are three forms of imagination. The first is fantasy: something
that you create in your mind, not unlike the way a novelist dreams up another
world. The second is vision, which is less about creation and more about
discovery. A vision is something that you've gone out and found or stumbled
upon yourself. Think of yourself as Magellan or da Gama, on your own
exploration voyage. The last kind of imaginative reality is a
revelation-something that is given to us. In his journal, Tesla writes of
angels that showed him what went on to become Tesla coils, oscillators that
create high-frequency, high-voltage electricity. Inspiration may come from
unlikely-even unbelievable-places.
Speculation.
Once you see something noteworthy, it's time to make a
hypothesis about it: come up with a cause-and-effect explanation for it. Then,
once you have many little hypotheses, bring those together in a larger theory.
This entails filling in the gaps between hypotheses and coming up with a more
complex account of the trend. The final part of speculation is creating a
complete worldview-connecting the dots in the largest way possible. There are
tons of examples of this process in scientific discoveries. A classic is the
Broad Street Pump Incident of 1854, when physician and skeptic John Snow linked
a London-wide cholera epidemic to a single water pump. Once he removed the handle
from the pump, the epidemic stopped. This breakthrough observation and action
went from hypothesis to theory to an entire worldview, changing the way people
think about communicable disease. A personal speculation has the potential to
shift paradigms.
Realization.
It's no coincidence that this form of reality has the word
"real" in it: this stage of sense-making is about making your ideas
tangible and bringing them down to everyday life. Be flexible and run lots of
experiments. Take your observations and break them down into their individual
parts. Be a reverse-engineer-deconstruct to reconstruct. After you've done your
experiments, interpret the results. See what works and what doesn't work.
Innovators do not work alone. They
may start with a vision, but it takes a team of people to turn that vision into
something bigger. Einstein first published his theory of relativity in 1904,
yet it wasn't until validated until 1922, when a man named W. W. Campbell took
photographs of the total eclipse of the sun in Australia at different times of
the day and found that the stars were slightly out of position. In fact,
Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for general contributions to work in
electromagnetism, before his theory of relativity had even been accepted as
reality.
If Einstein needed help, so will
you. Visionaries don't have to make everything work themselves. Some innovators
see the vision and pass it on to the next thinkers, while others build on the
work of people who have come before them. Innovation is an ensemble
performance. The best kinds of visions are collective visions. Who will help
you move through the three realities of innovation?
By Jeff
DeGraff
http://www.inc.com/jeff-degraff/the-three-realities-of-innovators.html?cid=em01020week31a
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