Good news, everyone!
Your boss announced a workshop on creative thinking. Creative thinking about your job.
The end result of this creative thinking will be innovation! What will this innovation achieve?
Only one of three outcomes is possible:
- More work. Yay?
- The same work. So what’s the point?
- Less work. So you might get laid off?
Mustering a positive response
Competitive landscape
Like it or not, we all inhabit a competitive landscape. We compete for jobs. Our department competes for work with others within the organization or companies outside.
Being on a team that innovates blunts competitive forces.
On the job training
As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, creativity and innovation skills are going to be vital on any resume in the future. Participating in a departmental innovation exercise is a great chance to bolster these skills.
Management doesn’t have a clue
Do you really want management to innovate without you? Participating up front is a way to ensure that your knowledge and skill nudge the project in the right direction.
It’s actually a lot of fun
Idea generation beats work any day. Humour and mutual respect are ingredients of a well structured brainstorming process.
Your hand on the thermostat
Read the headlines and we are clearly doomed. The interest rate is up? Doom. The interest rate is down? Doom. The dollar is up? Doom. The dollar is down? Doom. The unemployment rate? Housing prices? Doom, doom.
Imagine if we acted this way in our homes. The furnace just came on? The headline would read, “If trends continue, we’ll burn.” It just turned off. We’ll freeze.
If you are overworked, then identifying innovative ways to do your work more efficiently is a good thing. If you have just enough work and you identify a way to provide better service without a change in workload, that’s a good thing. If you are working under capacity, then identifying innovative ways to be of service is a good thing.
Innovation is about first identifying the problem and then solving it. Be in the room when the problem is identified.
