Be Less Zombie

40Innovation Fight Club

What it takes to fight for bold ideas in a culture that wants to kill them.

Ideas often find an early grave because of the emotional chain reactions that they provoke.

By definition, a disruptive idea means inevitable change, which in turn stirs up fear and fights.

Want your idea to survive? Don't get drawn into the fight. It's often how you respond to other people's defensive reactions that determines the success of your idea.

This is Innovation Fight Club, the norm inside most organisations.

Membership isn't inevitable though, especially if there is a clear line of sight between strategy, progress and ideas, and if those ideas are validated with objective data from well-designed experiments.

That said, we all know that innovation isn't simply a matter of following logic. In many cases, subjectivity, feeling, mood, energy, agendas, and different priorities can cause someone to push back against something with an unfamiliar whiff.

And sometimes that reaction comes from simply not connecting properly with the idea because it was badly presented, badly timed, or the recipient didn't have the time or bandwidth to adequately process it.

Good stakeholder management can help here. But ultimately, the better prepared we are for the different stages of battle that we will probably face, the more likely we are to succeed.

So how do we do that?

Be More Greek ...