As I struggled to foster a culture of continuous improvement at work I used to say: “Ideas are cheap – we don’t need more of those – we need more people who can do something with them.” This book ratified some of my beliefs about the importance of culture and process to implement solutions but challenged my assumption that “we have enough ideas.”
“Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric that Matters” by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn makes the point that we need more ideas, more perspectives, more innovation and creative thinking everywhere. They claim research has shown that the Idea Ratio of total ideas for solutions to a good solution to a problem is 2,000:1 (more or less). That means we need a lot of ideas. And we need better ways to deal with all these ideas: which ones are worth committing capital and how to implement?
Ideaflow is the rate of idea generation and propagation throughout a system designed to solicit, assess, test, and implement solutions. Organizations without strong Ideaflow will not innovate, thrive or even survive.
💡 This made me wonder. . . .
If Ideaflow is “the only business metric that matters,” what is the role of a leadership in optimizing this metric?
Leaders who seek to contribute to Ideaflow by coming up with a lot of ideas for their teams to work on are, in my mind, missing the trick. Instead, generating Ideaflow throughout a business can be a prime opportunity for leaders to develop their leadership strength in critical areas such as curiosity, creativity and innovation.
Role of the leader:
1. Be curious about others’ ideas instead of bombarding the team with theirs. Not only does this approach create more ideas that arise from more possible sources, it reinforces several important points:
o Everyone is responsible for looking around and seeing how the group can better accomplish its mission.
o Successful innovation grows out of “bad ideas,” experimentation, and failure: the best idea is usually not the first idea, despite what anchoring bias leads us to think.
o Safe expressions of candor are valued and require trust which builds over time through steady reinforcement of behaviors, starting at the top.
2. Create and support a process by which an organization deals with ideas – assesses, prioritizes, tests/experiments, and ultimately puts the right ideas into production in a way that promotes business and team members and generates even more ideas.
3. Call on and promote the power of empathy to better understand the needs of the team and the customer – however “customer” is defined. This means shaking up perspective, stoking curiosity, and fostering real connections unburdened from prior conceptions or beliefs.
What’s the Idea Ratio in your organization? What can you do to maximize Ideaflow?
Thanks to Jeremy Utley for presenting his thoughts at a recent MoVi community event.