Strategies to Achieve a State of Innovative Flow

Innovation—like surviving—requires sustaining a state of flow. Think of blood flowing to the heart and brain signals flowing across neurons as ideas challenging what is and seeking what can be.

How can you enhance the state of flow in your organization to improve innovation capital?

In engineering, flow (of fluids or particles) is proportional to the difference between potential (driving force) and resistance. Comparatively, to enhance a state of innovative organizational flow, maximize learning potential and minimize resistance of mental locks or cultural barriers at an individual level.

Beginning with resistance, there are three effective strategies you can implement:

1. Seek another “right” answer. Many problems have multiple solutions. Fixating on one right answer denies you the opportunity to examine other possibilities for solutions with milder side effects or potential for new discoveries.

2. Examine the rules with a critical mind. When possible, consider proposing changes to the rules of the game. More often than not, the rules of today were crafted to deal with situations that existed in the past.

3. Tolerate the ambiguous. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But traveling down the path of shortest distance may not be the safest nor most optimal choice.

As for optimizing learning potential, I recommend three additional strategies:

1. Learn about ideas outside of your specialty. Speaking with intelligent outsiders (people from different fields) can help you challenge both the “conventional industry wisdom” and your own bias. Cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts from other fields or specialties can add much momentum to innovative thinking.

2. Play like a kid. If necessity is the mother of invention, play is the father. Play and exercise help you to relax and feel good, often keeping burn-out at bay and enhancing blood (and oxygen) flow to the brain.

3. Believe you can do it. If you don’t truly believe you can achieve something, your brain will subconsciously withhold resources. Believing is a momentum booster for achieving. But without believing, there is absolutely no achieving.

Innovation is the currency of success for business organizations in this knowledge-based economy because it holds the key to enhancing competitive advantage, controlling uncontested market space, and attaining higher market share and higher profit margins. To survive and thrive, invest in enhancing the flow of innovation in your organization.