Deliberately forgetting stuff is actually quite hard to do. As Dee Hock, creator of Visa once said “The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.” Familiar? And, blimey are we having to forget things. We need to unlearn how we’ve been taught to market, how to treat people, how to do business, what aspects to focus on, how we make money, who is important. The trouble with all of this is that its rather unsettling!

Jack Uldrich outlines unlearning in his neat post below:

http://www.unlearning101.com/fuhgetaboutit_the_art_of_/2010/03/mix-up-your-mind.html

People often say that they don’t want to disrupt something thats good or works. I understand this, but is it working and is it good is my next question. This isn’t about reinventing the wheel, its about forgetting a lot of what we have been conditioned to do. If you want to stimulate new stuff, you have to accept you need to forget the old stuff.

We need to stick our necks out more, play more and forget more. What do you need to forget this week?

We’ve come to accept blandness as the norm not imagination. The basis of imagination is the freedom from constraints, the abolition of conditioning, the space to think and the confidence to push boundaries.

Limitations constrict the ability to break the habit of consistent repetition. As I’ve mentioned before, the tragedy of complacency is eventual failure. Imagination allows for exploration and going places you haven’t been before. Consistent repetition needs to be replaced with consistent imagination, permitting your mind to roam free and play with the existing experience and expertise in your head. Imagination can even sometimes make you believe the impossible.

How we innovate and invent is set to change too. With the advent of globalisation and technology, its easier to find someone, somewhere in the world who can solve your problem right now. Â The traditional models are evaporating. No longer will we expect to innovate solely on an internal basis. Its just too expensive, narrow minded and loses you a whole bunch of chances.

We are well past the Issac Newton days of solving problems way ahead of the questions and just not telling anybody about them. Innovation has become collaborative. Technology develops at such a speed, organisations and individuals can longer keep up. That combined with the fact that most of us can’t attract and retain the best people in the world makes sole innovation almost null and void.

Thinking that you have all the answers and spending years developing the ‘great idea’ is a little egocentric and albeit gone. Someone has already sorted it. Peer production, open source communities, customer cocreation are all about harnessing the opportunities that bound in from several places. I call it the liquidity of innovation.

Just look at the examples of www.innocentive.com and www.yet2.com in house innovation is no longer enough, we can’t keep up. Our organisations need to turn innovation on its head. Research and development departments in the past were rewarded for getting patents, in the future it will be about assembling the best team to solve the problem.

By not pursuing a solution to our own innovation problems, we are losing out on an abundance of opportunities. Thats one of the reasons why communities and being close to our customers and people is going to be so damn important in the future. As well as being connected across the world too. Most of us act locally which is important, too many of us act multi nationally and not enough globally!

When was the last time you let your people play? Not throwing a ball around the car park or the games we all get on our computers and mobiles nowadays, but serious play.

Play is the essence of innovation and idea creation. It requires freedom from constraints and freedom from conditions.. Watch the kid in the school yard with his/her tractor. Complete absorption in the activity, unadulterated imagination and clear determination is at work.

Play is critical, it’s serious stuff and it encourages us to look at things differently. With your team look at something mundane in your customer process or consider that boring waste management project. Play with it, modify it, destroy it, build it up again. Completely go wild, break it open and come up with 10 new ideas and see where that takes you!

As Joesph Chilton Pearce said “Play is the only way the highest intelligence of mankind can unfold.” Not a bad quote really.

Are you keeping people out or inviting them in? It costs very little to pick a great customer who has fabulous ideas and creates value for your business and then mix him/her up with a few of your other customers and let them come up with the next developments you need to make. Imagine how that may impact your reputation too!

Linked to the post on ‘Allow mistakes’ yesterday. For one idea to be great, you have to have tens of duffers. You’re people know where your business is screwing up and many of the ideas/improvements shouldn’t really be coming from you.

The more staff, customers and followers you have the less you control your business. Get real, other people are orchestrating it’s future. Be sensible enough and have the brains to create that environment where your people can offer those suggestions and solutions.

People at the ‘coal face’ and ‘on the shop floor’ often have more valuable knowledge than the control freaks at the top. Let go, free up their time to think. What they come up with may be scary, but there again, that’s my point!