Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!

How do new ideas happen?

Have you ever had a new idea? Happens all the time? Used to happen more? Been happening more lately? What do you do with new ideas? Do you remember them? Forget them? Do you think you’ll remember them and then end up forgetting them? Do you write them down in a notepad or something like that, or on your phone or tablet?

Idea management is a complex process, and it doesn’t come easily. With a little discipline and attention the ideas can be captured during the brief period that they’re resting on your shoulder, before they fly off again to be forgotten forever.

But what about the nature and mechanism of innovation itself? How does innovation occur in the first place? The structure of innovation is rarely neat and tidy, and rarely in whole units of what one might consider to be an innovation. Anything new that has been thought of has almost certainly not been thought of in one entire chunk of innovating. Starting from a clean slate and ending up with a fully formed idea ready to implement. Oh no, not like that. Maybe in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t happen like that in reality anyway.

In most cases, a person coming up with what others might classify as an innovation have been exposed to the problem space for some time. Working in the world of that particular problem. Struggling with defining what the problem is, how big it is, what it is, what it isn’t, what it should be or could be or must be. The problem’s territory or world is what I might term the problem space, in which the innovator resides, often for some time, and the solution is the eventual target. In other words, things rarely happen overnight. They might seem like it from the outside, but to the person innovating, they’ve probably been within the problem space for years, even before they realised that there’s even a problem to solve.

The other interesting structural characteristic of innovation is that, again, it doesn’t occur as a whole unit, it almost always consists of mostly stuff that you already knew, or stuff you already have, or stuff that is already in place. The moment of inspiration isn’t to have the entire idea from scratch, the moment of inspiration is more usually to suddenly realise that what you already have, already know and already did can fit together in a way that you simply hadn’t seen before. A new arrangement. An arrangement that allows an advantage or solves a problem or enables something further to happen. You look around, there’s nothing magically novel that wasn’t there a minute ago, except yes there is - a new configuration, a new way of putting it together, a new way of utilising or processing or perceiving it all. You had what was necessary all along.

In fact, it’s even more surprising than that. Not only did the innovation spend a long while cooking in the problem space before it surfaces, and not only did the innovation consist of a new way of looking at what you already have, but in most cases, the solution that’s staring you in the face isn’t even a new one. Chances are, you’ve even had this idea before. Several times over, in fact. You had it, forgot it, later you had it again under a new configuration, forgot it again, and so on. Finally, it persists and at the moment of insight you suddenly see it for the value it really offers. (This time you write it down). That’s insight. It’s called insight because it points in. A sight that points inward. Inward at what you already know, already have and already do. The realisation of a sudden clarity in sight. Yet, you had it all along!