Responding to Ministry Innovation Negatives: Learn to Experiment and Prototype

by: Tim Kastelle

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Encountering an Air Sandwich

I was teaching an executive education class recently when I saw a textbook example of an “air sandwich.”

If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s how Nilofer Merchant describes it:

An Air Sandwich is a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle—no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company.

I was working with a group of future leaders that had been identified by the management of their company.  The firm is in a pretty conservative industry, but they are starting to try to differentiate themselves through innovation.  This vision has been articulated from the top.  And the young managers in the class had been asked to think about how to embed innovation within the organisation.

They came back with a series of pretty interesting ideas, and they presented them in our workshop, with a number of senior leaders from the firm present.  And every new idea that the young guys put forward got shredded by the senior leaders.

Air Sandwich.

How Should You Respond to New Ideas?

There are two ways in which you can respond to new ideas.  Your first response can be “no, that won’t work, here are the problems.”  Or, you can say “that’s interesting.”  And with the second one, you can find ways to build on the idea, or connect it to other ideas to create an even better idea, or at least figure out some way to support the idea.

The firm I’m working with is in a pretty tough industry, and I suspect that the guys giving the rough feedback would say that’s important for the younger managers to harden up – that if they want to make it in this industry they’ll need to be tough.  And that may well be true.

But still, if you are trying to build your innovation capability, you can’t take ten of your bright young managers, ask them to come up with creative ideas to help build that capability, and then just absolutely tear those ideas to shreds when they show them to you.  This is particularly important for this firm – because they have set themselves a tough challenge.  But their overall objectives are admirable, and it’s important that they succeed.

How Should You Respond When Your New Ideas Get Shredded?

So what can you do if you’re the bottom layer of bread in an air sandwich?  You can’t control how others respond to your ideas, but you can exert some control over your own actions.  Here are some ideas:

• Learn from it. Getting our great ideas to spread is an important part of the innovation process.  Overcoming resistance is a big part of that.  Every criticism of your ideas contains some element of truth – even if it’s based on a misunderstanding, that shows that you need to get your point across more clearly.  We have to learn from this, and improve the deliver of our new ideas.
• Don’t take it out on others. One big danger in a situation like this is that the young managers will learn that this how to respond to ideas in their firm, and react the same way when the people working for them come up with new ideas.  This will completely kill off innovation.  Instead, we have to use these experiences to build our empathy.  This way, when others put new ideas in front of us, it might help us respond by supporting the idea, building on it, and connecting it to other good ideas.
• Change your culture. The culture of a firm is not an unchanging fact of life that simply acts upon us.  We re-create it every single day through our interactions.  Just because our managers act in a particular way doesn’t mean that we have to.  We have the opportunity to start re-shaping a culture by changing the way we respond to things.  If we accept new ideas and build on them, others will start to do so as well.
• Band together. It’s hard to change a firm’s culture on your own.  So another good idea is to find others that are also committed to driving change, and band together.  Cultures rarely change through edicts – it is one thing that is especially open to bottom-up change.

This is Why Innovation is a Challenge

Innovation is hard – if it weren’t, everyone would be doing it.  The environment that we create for new ideas is an important part of building an innovation culture. One of the big problems with shooting down ideas immediately is that doing so assumes that we can know in advance which ideas will work and which won’t.  But we can’t.  This is why experimenting and prototyping are such critical innovation skills.

The best way to figure out which ideas are good is to try them out.  If they work, scale them up.  Here’s how Saul Kaplan puts it:

Learn by doing. Constantly test new ideas. Learn, share and repeat. The world is ever changing — stay ahead of the curve. Embrace the art of discovery.

We need to try more stuff. Innovation is never about silver bullets. It’s about experimentation and doing whatever it takes, even if it means trying 1,000 things, to deliver value.

My main piece of feedback to the teams was: “how could we prototype your ideas?”  If we test an idea, gather data from the test, and learn, that is the best way to combat a culture that shoots new ideas down on sight.  It’s a lot harder to argue with data.

Testing your ideas, and making evidence-based decisions are two more ways to change your culture.  That’s my new idea for the day.

How will you respond – will you tell me why it won’t work, or will you build on it to make it better?

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

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Midnight Lunch Team Worksheets

by: Sarah Miller Caldicott

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Sara Miller Caldicott, great grandniece of Thomas Edison and author of the new book Midnight Lunch, has translated Edison’s world-changing innovation methods for use in the 21st century. Here are some of her thoughts on collaboration:

True collaboration embraces:

• A discovery learning mindset versus a pure task orientation
• A belief in anticipating and creating rather than merely reacting and responding
• Presence of inspiration across multiple facets of both individual and team endeavors
• Coherence of purpose
• A dedication to elevating the performance of every team member
• Connections to human and social networks of influence

Do these qualities sound different from the ones valued by your team? Do they draw upon ideas that feel new or seem broader than your current concept of what teamwork embraces?

Based on experience, the answer would be yes.

So what are you going to do about it?

Caldicott has developed a series of 12 worksheets so your team can integrate its project work with true collaboration concepts in her new book, Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success, from Thomas Edison’s Lab.

Why not integrate these worksheets into a weekly learning exercise with your team?

Download all the worksheets here:

Week 1: The Roots of the 4 Phases of Collaboration

Week 2: Global Forces Impacting Collaboration

Week 3: Phase 1 – Capacity – Diversity

Week 4: Phase 2 – Capacity – Small Teams Foster Collegiality

Week 5: Phase 2 – Context – Solo Meld Expands Individual Creative Efforts

Week 6: Phase 3 – Context – The Pathway to Breakthroughs

Week 7: Phase 3 – Coherence: Deepening Bonds Through Inspiration

Week 8: Phase 3 – Coherence: Fostering Debate and Progress

Week 9: Phase 4 – Complexity: Spotting and Leveraging Complex Systems

Week 10: Phase 4 – Complexity: Social Media and Viral Networks

Week 11: Phase 4 – Complexity: Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Week 12: Facing the Future: The Long-Term Impacts of Collaboration

Read more from Sarah Miller Caldicott here.

Purchase Midnight Lunch here or as a Kindle version here.

Read our Sums book summary of Midnight Lunch here. Go here to register for our biweekly release of future Sums.

Tags: Collaboration, Innovation, Sarah Miller Caldicott, Team, TeamRead Worksheets, Thomas Edison

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Recognizing Obstacles as Open Doors for Ministry Innovation and Greater Impact

by: Mac Lake

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What’s stopping you?  Are there barriers blocking the path to your dream?  What’s hindering the forward progress of your mission?  What’s deterring the realization of your vision?  And more importantly what’s your attitude about your situation?

Your whole attitude can be transformed when you recognize that obstacles can be open doors for innovation and greater impact.  Pause, and ask yourself a few important questions and see if you gain a new perspective.

• What’s the real problem I face?  Sometimes the perceived problem is not our real problem.  Skilled leaders learn to identify the problem behind the problem.
• Is there a field expert I know that can help me process my challenge?  If you don’t know someone personally simply ask yourself “What would __________ (known specialist) do in my situation?”  Opening your imagination this way may give you a fresh perspective.
• What are 5 options for overcoming my challenge?  Write them down and reflect on them.   Remember some of the best ideas are born out of bad ideas.
• Is there another approach God is prompting me to take?  Perhaps He allowed the obstacle in order to help you find a better direction.
• What are the hidden resources I have access to that I’ve not thought about?  This is one of my favorite questions and has helped produce solutions for me on many occasions.  Sometimes the things that are closest to us are the hardest things to see.

Don’t wait for your obstacle to be removed…God put it there to grow you as a leader and to open new doors of opportunity.

Read more from Mac here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Mac Lake, Staff Development

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Tracking an Emerging Role in Church Leadership: Pastor of Innovation

by: D.J. Chuang

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What may be emerging is a new role in the church: pastor of innovation. (Granted this may not become mainstream where every church would have one, since most churches have more pressing operational day-to-day needs.) I’ll do my part to keep this list updated. (Please do add to this list.)

• Bobby Gruenwald, Pastor, Innovation Leader of LifeChurch.tv
• Kenny Jahng, Pastor of Media & Innovation of Liquid Church
• Shamichael Hallman, Collierville Campus Pastor/Pastor of Innovation at New Direction Christian Church
• Edward H. Stephens III, Pastor of Innovation at Golden Gate Catherdral
• Stan Durham, Creative Innovation Pastor at Grace Fellowship
• Amanda Weaver, Innovation Pastor at Remedy Church
• Stephen Parris, Arts & Innovation Pastor of River Church [cf. prospectus]
• Chris Ryan, Executive Pastor of Innovation at Fellowship of the Woodlands [cf. Linkedin]
• Matt Arnold, Worship & Creative Pastor aka Worship & Innovation Pastor at Momentum Church
• Josh Lazar, Creative Arts Pastor aka Experience & Innovation Pastor at LifePoint Church [cf. Linkedin]
• Lucy Arellano, Director of Innovation & Creativity at Courageous Church

How much of their job is pure innovation and experimentation? Would you like to know? Me too!

There are over 30+ definitions of innovation and over 6000+ definitions of leadership. Organizations, especially organized churches in the 21st century, need more innovation and more leadership, not less. What’s worked in the past is not working as well as it used to, so we as the Church capital-C must make room to develop new ways of doing things.

Peter Drucker has said, “Any time an organization fails to change at the rate of the world around it, that organization is doomed to failure.” and ”innovation is change that creates a new level of performance” and ”All organizations require one core competency: Innovation.“

The chart below (from Leadership Network) illustrates how church innovations get adopted over time. As an experimenter, I’ve had very limited resources to experiment in developing innovations; I’m praying for more resources to do more. [disclosure: I do contract work with Leadership Network]

Rob Rynders makes a case for innovation in his denomination – Why The UMC Needs an Era of Innovation –

We need an intentional, grassroots, movement of innovators willing to put new ideas into action, fully realizing that many of those ideas will fail, but some will be successful. Even the failures will allow for immense learning, evaluation, further experimentation and adaption, ultimately leading to success. As successes and failures build, over time, we must apply those learnings from those models to other contexts and allow easy ways for others to learn, model, and adapt.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, there are 4 levels of innovation, so not all innovation has to be risky and be revolutionary game-changers. Pastor Karl Vaters provides a helpful list for key questions to consider when preparing a church for change (and innovation) @ 10 Questions Every Innovative Small Church Pastor Needs to Ask.

Read more from DJ here.

Tags: D.J. Chuang, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Staff Leadership Roles

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Understanding How Culture Drives Your Ministry

by: Tim Kastelle

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In organizations, it is the culture that provides the beat.  This means that the same idea will perform differently in different organizations, even if nearly everything around it appears to be the same.

In an excellent post on culture, Dave Snowden  says:

Culture arises from actions in the world, ways of doing things which may never be articulated, and which may not be capable of articulation.  In effect culture is always complex, never complicated.  So it follows that cultural change is an evolutionary process from the present, not an idealised future state design.

So the most singularly stupid meaningless thing you can ever do is to define what culture you want.  At best it’s a set of platitudes, at worst its a set of pious platitudes that trigger negative and hostile accusations of hypocrisy from your employees and customers alike.  Culture is an emergent property of interactions over time so the first and most important thing is to map your culture.

Snowden has a good system for mapping cultures, and great recommendations for trying to shift them.  When we think about the culture that supports innovation, his three recommendations will also work.  They are:

• Focus on actions. Snowden argues that actions tell us a lot more about your organization’s culture than rhetoric.  This is true.  If we are trying to build innovation, this means that being able to experiment is much more important than including innovation in your list of corporate values.  The best way to build an innovation culture is to innovate, not to talk about it.  Do this by building the capability to test ideas quickly and cheaply, and in such a way that you learn from the outcomes.
• Manage through constraints. Constraints are the things that determine current actions.  They also drive creativity.
• Manage interactions and connections. In complex systems, emergent properties arise through networks of interactions.  Building an understanding of your networks is crucial to improving innovation outcomes.  Network weaving is a more effective management tool than organizational restructuring.

A common mistake that I see from organizations is taking an idea from somewhere else and trying to just bolt it on to an incompatible culture.  Google’s 20% is a great idea, but it will only work if your people are empowered to make their own decisions, their regular work is rewarding, and you have the resources and desire to implement the ideas that they develop.

If your culture doesn’t include these qualities, then 20% will end up looking more like it does in this post by Shanley:

20% of the time, or all of the time, people can work on whatever they want to

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have enough venture funding to pay people to work on non-core parts of the business. We are not under that much pressure to make money. The normal work of the business is not sufficiently rewarding so we bribe employees with pet projects. We’re not entirely sure what our business objectives and vision are, so we are trying to discover it by letting employee passions take root.

The difference between that picture of 20% time and Google’s is culture.

Culture drives your ministry.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Organizational Culture, Tim Kastelle

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More Collaboration is Better for Your Ministry – Until It’s Not

by: Tim Kastelle

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Collaboration is an important part of innovation.  The days of the lone genius are gone (if they ever really existed at all) – now, it takes a network to innovate.

But how much collaboration do we need?

In his new book To Sell is Human, Dan Pink talks about some interesting findings in the research of Adam Grant.  Grant looks at sales results relative to a person’s level of extraversion.  Everyone knows that extraverts make the best salespeople, right?  Well, wrong, actually.  Check this out:

Pink says:

As you can see from the chart, the folks who fared the best — by a wide margin — were the in the modulated middle. They’re called “ambiverts,” a term that has been in the literature since the 1920s. They’re not overly extraverted. They’re not overly introverted. They’re a little of both.

He adds more detail in this post, and also has a test where you can test whether or not you’re an ambivert too.

The key question is why does it turn back down?  This upside-down U shape is actually a very common research finding.   You frequently see it in systems that require attention.  Usually, it means that if you have too many team members involved, you can’t pay enough attention to each, and your results start to get worse.

This is interesting for a three reasons.

• We often search for black and white answers – but life rarely offers them.
• Is collaboration good?  Yes, but only up to a point.
• Is extraversion good if you’re a salesperson (and all leaders are “selling” something)?  Yes, but only up to a point.

Figuring out where that point lies is part of the art of managing.  And being comfortable with the ambiguity in this is an even bigger part being a leader.

So just remember: more is better, but only until it’s not.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership Engine, Staff, Staff Leadership Roles, Tim Kastelle

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Working Through the Obstacles to Innovation in Your Church

by: Tim Kastelle

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Providing leadership in a church setting always necessitates change. Change implies something is going to be different in the future. While change and innovation are not always synonymous, they can often be used interchangeably – like in the following post by Innovation Expert Tim Kastelle. He encourages leaders to first recognize the obstacles to innovation, and then gives four ideas to help overcome these obstacles.

Obstacle 1: Competition

Probably the most common question I get about this blog is “how do you find time to write it?”

It’s the same question that I used to get about reading – where do I find time to read books?

The answer to both is the same – I make time.  One of the ways that I make time is that I don’t watch much television anymore.

You wouldn’t think that writing a blog has competition, but it does.  In order to write a post, I have to not be doing other things with my time.  So as I’m writing this, I’m not watching The Wire, even though nearly every single person I know has told me that I must.  And I’m not reading either.

If something as simple as writing a blog post has competition, then clearly you will always have competition for something as significant as moving forward with a new idea.

So that’s one big obstacle to getting your great new ideas to spread – even if there is no obvious competition, you’re competing for time, or attention, or money, or…

Obstacle 2: People that are hurt by your idea

No matter how great our idea is, or how beneficial, some people will be made worse off when it’s executed.

We like to think that our new ideas are benign, or only beneficial.

There are always innovation winners and losers.  Just as it’s important to think broadly about competition, it also pays to think broadly about who might lose when your innovative idea is executed.

Obstacle 3: Time

The first two obstacles both contribute to the third one: new ideas always spread more slowly than we expect.  New ideas always spread though an S-Curve:

The time it takes to work through the innovation takes time – and that often takes people by surprise.  It is a slow process because it takes time for people to hear about new ideas, it takes time to evaluate them, and it takes time to decide to adopt them.  Once all that happens, it often appears as though successful ideas are overnight successes, but that’s only because they’ve finally hit a tipping point.

How to work through these obstacles

The first issue is that you need to be aware of them.  The idea diffusion s-surve is a research finding that has been consistently supported for 60 years now – it’s is one of the most robust ideas in management research.  Yet it is still often misunderstood – just ask Kodak.

Here are four ideas for addressing this issue:

• Think about timing.  You have to think about the timing of your idea.  If you are still at an early stage in the diffusion process, all of your attention must go to getting your idea to spread.  The right idea at the wrong time is still wrong.  This means that you need to think about things like your network of supporters, and how to best take advantage of them to spread your idea.
• Early ideas need little bets, not big ones.  When we face an uncertain future, as we do at the start of the innovation diffusion curve, then we need to try to influence the future through experimenting.  The problem with big bets at this point in time is that they assume that we know how everything needs to work.  When we’re in time X, we don’t know this – we have to discover it.
• Think about competition. And think about it broadly.  Competition for time, attention and money will all slow the spread of a new idea.  If people aren’t using your idea, what are they using instead?
• Think about who loses. This is another source of resistance.  The competitors that we just considered are one source.  But also, whose routine does the new idea disrupt? People trying to maintain their current routines are a powerful force preventing the diffusion of new ideas.  You need to overcome this as well.

People often think that having a great idea is the hard part of innovating.  Most of the time, this isn’t the problem.  Getting the new idea to spread is.

If you’re serious about innovating, you will recognize – and work to overcome – the obstacles in front of you.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

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Hurdles to Established Church Innovation

by: Sam Rainer III

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Does the established nature of some churches hinder innovation? Is an established structure antithetical to quick, nimble changes? For most established churches, yes, but it does not mean established churches cannot innovate.

A church plant is an innovation. Innovation is the process of successfully establishing something new. To introduce something new—and to get it to work longer than a month—is innovation. Perhaps some luck into the right change at the right time. Perhaps some churches land on the right demographic with the right leadership. Not all innovations are intentional or well-planned. But an effective church plant should be noted as innovation.

As organizations become more established, they tend to be less prone to change. By its nature, an established organization has a system in place that pushes against change. To establish is to create firm stability. Churches need stability. For example, a discipleship process that is not rooted into the culture of the church (or established) is not likely to last long. And it’s only a matter of time before the innovative church plant begins to feel the pull of becoming established. Everything is new only once, after all.

While stability is necessary, every church should also innovate. Established churches, in particular, can take comfort in the establishment. Traditions and history can easily become a guise for complacency. Innovation can take a back seat to the entrenched processes that help create the stability. While most church planters will admit to having many of the same people problems as established churches, church plants do innovate more easily. They have no history pulling them in a certain direction. Everyone is new. The church is new. Each decision is new. In the early days of a church plant, everything feels like an innovation even if it’s not.

So what hurdles to innovation exist in the established church? Here are four examples.

• Lack of intentionality. Generally, established churches have more resources than new churches. When resources are limited, churches must be more intentional about innovation. Failure—especially one that is expensive—can quickly derail a church with limited resources. When resources are plentiful, the temptation is to be less intentional. Established churches can generally absorb more failures. But a practice of spaghetti-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks is not true innovation. It’s haphazard chaos. Give it a month and see how many people get annoyed.
• Lack of originality. Build on your foundation, but don’t slap a new logo on an existing program and call it innovation. Innovation is introducing something new, not introducing something with the façade of newness.
• The wrong metrics. What gets measured gets done, and what you measure is typically an indicator of what you value. A mature church will measure different things than a new church. Most church plants are not attempting to track down meeting minutes from a dozen committees for next week’s business meeting. And established churches don’t have to worry about the retention ratio of people from a launch service. However, an overemphasis on the metrics sustaining the establishment will inevitably deemphasize innovation and dissuade team members from attempting innovation.
• The ease of appeasement. In an established church some leaders prefer the ease of appeasing members rather than innovating to reach new people. Obviously, a long-term member may not desire to be appeased, but rather challenged. However, most churches have a segment of people who would rather rest in the stability of the establishment. It’s not necessarily a sin issue, and leaders should care about all members whatever their spiritual maturity. Appeasing existing members, however, is much easier than challenging a church to innovate and reach new people. Even in a healthy established church, one ready to reach outward, innovation is a challenge. The typical established church has several groups of people who joined during different seasons of the church for different reasons. Even when people agree to reach outward, getting them to agree on timing, direction, budgeting, and pace is a challenge. It’s easier to appease. But appeasement is never innovation.

Though established churches are not new, they can still introduce new things. They can innovate. Hurdles exist. These hurdles, however, are surmountable.

Read more from Sam here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Sam Rainer

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Mind the Gaps: Build Basic Innovation Skills First

by: Tim Kastelle

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What are the connections between these three things?

First: Comics – the magic happens in the gaps between panels

In his terrific book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains that comics are special because all of the real action occurs in the gaps between panels – this is the part that readers fill in using their imagination.

A huge amount of effort and creativity goes into making the comic, but then the reader finishes the story in her head.

Second: Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do

Here’s an apocryphal story making the rounds of various photography sites:

A well known New York photographer goes to a socialite party. On his way in the hostess says to him, ‘Oh I love your photos, you must have an amazing camera!’. They have dinner and at the end of the night, on his way out, the photographer comments to the hostess, ‘I really loved the food, you must have an amazing stove.

Third: Seth Godin on helping people be more perfect

Check this out from Seth Godin:

Most people in the US can’t cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.

In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you’re way better off helping the perfect improve. You’ll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.

The Story: Creativity Happens in the Gaps

I see the same story in all three pieces: Creativity happens in the gaps.

I’m a lousy cook.  So if I go out and buy The Fat Duck Cookbook, and follow each recipe as closely as possible, I still won’t be cooking like Heston Blumenthal.

Why not?  Because I don’t know enough to fill in the gaps.  As much as I love Scott McCloud’s book, I disagree with him when he says that “what happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create.”  I actually think that applying creativity and imagination in the gaps also explains the other two stories.

We can only sell cookbooks to people that are already great cooks because they have the skills needed to be able to fill in the gaps in a recipe creatively and with imagination.  And this is why, as in the case of the photographer and the cook, focusing on tools can be incredibly misleading.

Innovation Happens in the Gaps

A couple of years ago, I met with the senior management team from a really large organisation in Brisbane.  They wanted to talk to me about being more innovative.  We started by talking about what innovation is, and then quickly went through managing innovation as a process, and a few other key ideas.

Then one of them said: “We tried a big innovation initiative a few years ago and it didn’t work.”

There were nods around the table.  I said something like:

“Let me guess.  You asked everyone for their ideas.  Lots of people submitted innovation ideas, but there was no mechanism in place for choosing the best ones.  You didn’t have any budget attached for execution either, so nothing much came out of it.  And in the end, everyone that put an idea in ended up feeling disillusioned and morale actually went down.”

As I talked, there were sheepish nods around the table.

They didn’t know enough about innovation to fill in the gaps.  They wanted to buy the innovation version of the expensive camera, or the great stove.

They had the same problem that Seth Godin outlines: they’re actually not good enough innovators to benefit from the tools that are available to them.

What Should You do If You’re Just Starting Out?

Forget about tools.  You have to build your basic innovation skills.

• You need to get everyone on the same page in terms of defining innovation – and your definition might be different from everyone else.
• Connect innovation to your overall strategy.  They are two different things, and innovation needs to support your strategy.
• Build your capability to experiment.  Here is a seven-step process for starting to innovate quickly.
• Start thinking about innovation as a process, not as an event (just ideas).

Once you’ve done these things, then you can go out and start buying expensive tools to support innovation.  But only then.

There are no innovation short cuts.  You have to build your skills first.

Once you have, then you’ll have enough knowledge to really use your imagination.  Then you’ll know that innovation happens in the gaps.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

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Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success

by: VRcurator

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According to Sarah Miller Caldicott, great grand niece of Thomas Edison, Edison viewed true collaboration as a value creation continuum. If one were to find a single notebook entry capturing Edison’s definition of true collaboration, Caldicott believes it would read something like this:

Applying discovery learning within a context of complexity, inspired by a common goal or a shared purpose.

True collaboration for Edison operated like an invisible glue that fused learning, insight, purpose, complexity and results together in one continuous effort.

Translating Edison’s decades of groundbreaking practices into language for the 21^st Century leader, Caldicott has developed a four-phase model of the collaboration process.

• How do we create the foundation for true collaboration to flourish?

Phase 1 – Capacity: Select small, diverse teams of two to eight people who will thrive in an environment of discovery learning and collegiality.

• How can our collaboration team reframe the problem at hand, driving the greatest range of creativity and breakthrough solutions?

Phase 2 – Context: Focus the outlook of the team toward development of new context that broadly frames the problem or challenge under consideration. Use a combination of individual learning plus hands-on activities to drive perspectives for potential solutions.

• Can the collaboration team stay the course and continue forward despite disagreements?

Phase 3 – Coherence: Maintain collaboration momentum, creating frameworks for progress through inspiration, and inspirational leadership even though disagreements may exist. Newly discover, or re-emphasize, the shared purpose that binds the team together.

• How can our collaboration team leverage internal and external networked resources nimbly and with speed?

Phase 4 – Complexity: Equip and reskill teams to implement new ideas or new solutions using internally and externally networked resources, rapidly accessing or managing complex data streams the team must navigate. Leave a footprint that contributes to a broader collective intelligence.

Caldicott has developed a series of worksheets so your team can integrate its project work with true collaboration concepts in her new book, Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success, from Thomas Edison’s Lab.

Why not integrate these worksheets into a weekly learning exercise with your team?

In honor of Edison’s achievements not only through his inventions but also in the area of collaboration, today begins a 12 week series of downloads you can use with your team. Each Monday beginning today and continuing for 12 weeks, a new download will be available for your team’s use.

You can download worksheet #1 here.

Edison leaves us a legacy we can return to over and over again as we newly shape a future that embraces the highest and best of our collaborative spirit.

If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.    –Thomas Edison

Go Ahead – astound yourself…

Tags: Innovation, Sarah Miller Caldicott, Team, Thomas Edison

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