Innovation

We hold these truths to be self-evident: we recruit people whom we like. We encourage coworkers to get along. We make decisions based on experience.

Now flip those assumptions upside down.

Hire people you dislike. Encourage them to argue with their managers and peers. Think of ridiculous things to do, and do them.

As management practices go, these sound wrong. Yet they’re some of the most powerful practices for generating and capitalizing on new ideas. To stimulate innovation, we must depart from deeply ingrained beliefs about how to treat people, make decisions, and structure work.

The organizing principle for innovation is to treat everything like a temporary condition. It’s about variance. When innovation is the goal, organizations need massive variation in what people do, think about, and produce.

The most creative organizations see old things in new ways. The ability to keep shifting perceptions is crucial, to switch from foreground to background, to think of things that are assumed to be negative as positive and to reverse assumptions about cause and effect. It means looking at every challenge, project, and task with fresh eyes.

An innovative idea works because it trips discomfort. The idea is to flip from from autopilot to mindful creation.