Is Your Team Innovative?

What is Required for Innovation?

Creativity. What is it, and why is it so hard to measure? We are naturally creative beings, but our desire to measure and quantify everything, especially in business applications, gets in the way of our creativity. The popular approach of monitoring productivity is a silent killer of ideas.

When ideas die on the vine, it reinforces the understanding that creative freedom does not happen here. Your technical teams must have time in the SDLC (software delivery life cycle) for innovating as a team, either in person or remotely. The design phase is not all about designs. The design phase is about deep understanding through the free flow of questions and answers between stakeholders, preferably end-users and the development team.

Are You Asking Questions?

Many companies find it difficult to embrace processes that do not lead to directly measurable outcomes, but I argue that our insistence upon this approach is outdated and misguided. If you want to know whether your team has the emotional and intellectual safety to allow ideas to flow and creativity to generate innovation, ask yourself when the last time one of your team members posed a challenging question. How did you respond to this? If the question was bigger than your team, did you take the issue up the ladder? What was the response?

Fear & Scarcity

Fear has been driving many of our practices in business and in life, and we are only beginning to understand what it means to be free from the shackles of scarcity-based thinking. In particular, artificial intelligence will push us to understand the abundance of ideas as a universal truth. Now we must incorporate creativity into our business processes and structure. We have created the ultimate ally in the form of generative AI; now we can focus on creative work and thus, innovation. But we must get out of the way and allow ideas to flow.

Some ways of thinking from the prior millennium are still with us. Some of these ways are no longer serving us. The compulsion to not believe what we cannot measure and what we don’t understand is irrefutably best sent to the archives.

What Next?

If you want to know more about unlocking creativity in your technical team, contact us at The Tech Margin. If your team is already deep in curiosity and innovation, let us know what you do to facilitate this, and we might invite you to join us on our podcast.

Watch Sonia at The Tech Margin discuss how creativity and innovation are linked in this video, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel.

Thank you for reading, and stay curious 🚀