This week I was invited to help a leading pro sports team build innovation capacity. Talk about a fun assignment.
As my host escorted me to the room where I was to meet the GM and the leadership team, he apologized that we had to take the long way. “The guys are practicing.” We literally walked outside, through the parking lot, around the building, to avoid disturbing practice.
I loved every step of the inconvenience, because it reinforced one of my core values: Respect for Practice.
I’ve long held that if folks want to build innovation capacity, they need to treat it more like a practice, and less like an event. The disservice that workshops and hackathons and sprints do to the business of innovation — however helpful they might be as a tool to build momentum — is that folks start to think about innovation in terms of events. Hackathons. Sprints.
“We plan to innovate at Ideajam 2024!”
But here’s the thing: if your people aren’t practicing before “Ideajam” — conditioning the mental muscles that otherwise lie dormant, unused in most “corporate” environments — you’re not winning medals. You’re gonna pull a hammy!
Here are three simple ways to flex the muscle every single day:
Keep a bug list - write down things that bother you. Attending to problems has a way of courting the muse.
Do an idea quota - push yourself to generate ten solutions to a problem rather than one. Do it every day. Bad ideas still count.
Be sparkable - next time someone shares a “meh” idea, reject the typical response of “what do I think of this?” And instead, try out “what does this make me think of?”
These are three simple things you can do every single day (FYI each has details in a separate write up at the link below). Who knows? If you take it seriously, and protect your practice sessions as this team did, you might just “go pro.”
And if you need help prioritizing and protecting your practice, you should find a community of practice. You’re welcome to join the Try Ten™ community. We’ve got ~50 folks committed to honing their creative craft, checking in regularly, sharing tactics tips tricks, and seeking collaboration along the way.
