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How you can address expectations for innovation and the reality not matching up at your company.
We’re adding in a new format to the podcast to answer your questions! Whatever your challenges, hurdles, and roadblocks are, I want to address them so that we can all keep learning and keep moving forward. I’d also love to hear of best practices of what’s worked for you in pushing innovation and change forward and how all of us can implement these ideas.
This episode’s question comes from Tracy: When there is an expectation for innovation, but the reality doesn’t correspond, how can you work around that?
There are two aspects to that the external perspective (which includes environment and culture), and internal perspective (how to improve getting buy-in for our ideas). There are three main things that keep us from innovating: fear, comfort, and constraint. Externally, constraints are the thing we need to address. It is impossible to tackle all the constraints that exist immediately. What you need to do is to look at the constraints in your system and remove the easiest ones first to get a little bit more traction. I also share ways to overcome a “no” to break down an external constraint.
From an internal perspective, we need to think about how to communicate our ideas in a way that will get buy-in, traction, and momentum. We’re all susceptible to “they” syndrome (blaming them for not seeing our brilliance) but not all the blame belongs to the other party. We need to get our ideas across in a way that makes them see opportunity and potential, rather than change, discomfort, and extra work. Also, as much as people want innovation, they don’t want others pushing their brilliance onto them, so find ways to include their brilliance and bring them into the conversation. Find out how “wet clay” can help with that!
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