Do best practices keep you from being innovative and disruptive?

Sever recent articles I have read bring out some interesting things to think about.  Woody Bendle wrote about best practices. Jeffrey Phillips wrote about filling the gap.  And Mike Brown wrote about strategic planning and using a technique called "What its like".

Being innovative means that one needs to think outside the box.  Best practices focus you into following someone else and their ideas.  What makes them best practices?  Someone developed these practices by thinking outside the box and noticing that they had a gap that was not being filled.  By generating a process that filled their gap, it became their best practice - for the moment.  We have talked about process improvement before, and if you implement what others are calling best practices, they have probably moved on to their next best practices and you are left playing catch up, once again.

Filling the gap is a key to innovation.  First you have to see the gap, then you have to generate ideas to fill the gap.  If you use best practices to fill the gap, you may still have gaps left.  You have to fill your gaps, not someone else's gap. You may want to use best practices as an idea generator, but by definition, a best practices means that it is the best - there is only one of them.  For you they may not be best.  Your practices may be best.

If you have problems generating ideas, you may want to look into the What its like concept.  How does a similar company in a different field do what you are trying to do.  It may surprise you that someone in a completely different filed may have just the trigger you need to generate your own ideas to fill your own gaps.

Do you leapfrog?

Innovation is sometimes thought of as leapfrogging, jumping over the current processes to get in front of the latest and greatest.  Soren Kaplen wrote a book called Leapfrogging in which he talks about how to embrace uncertainty and invite surprises to obtain the breakthroughs that the business desires.

Kaplan talks about 4 leapfrogging strategies for 2013 in a recent blog:
1. Define your leapfrogging opportunity
2. Leverage data and then go with your gut
3. Test the waters with your pinky toe
4. Savor surprise

In effect, what Kaplan is say, plan your innovation, where you want to be.  What breakthroughs do you want in your business.  Item 2 talks about recent research that indicates that one's best decisions are often made with little supporting data, especially when you are in uncharted territory that disruptive innovation brings.  Item 3 talks about doing a little to gain a lot.  And item 4 talks about is that we should not resist surprise, but embrace it.

With these 4 strategies, innovation can be explored and directed to where you want it to go, but be prepared to embrace the idea that where you want to go is not always where the innovation will end up taking you.

Is the way you think keeping you from being disruptive?

A recent article I read got me to thinking that the way we think may hinder or encourage us to develop disruptive innovations.  All this ties in to change management and resistance to change.  We all are familiar with people who resist change no matter what, even if they would benefit from it.  So, how do we break out of this way of thinking and find a new way that allows to follow the "what ifs"?

Dr Ellen Weber has developed something called Mindguiding base on practical applications of neuro discoveries.  The idea in Mindguiding is to use working memory to cultivate new ideas and rely less on long term memory of how things used to be done.  The idea is to question things in a way that allows others to see possibilities through another person's viewpoint.  Similar to the 5 Whys of root cause analysis, Mindguiding says to ask What if questions.  In a group setting this can bring about extraordinary results.

What to you think?  Would this work for you?  Try it an let me know if you find it easier to come up with disruptive innovations by using your brain in a different way.