A Primer on the Creation of the New

What does it take to bring innovations to market?

Praise for Routines

Habits and routines are an incredible helpful tool.

• Routines enable us not to have to learn the same things over and over. This is what makes us humans unique. Just think of fetching your newspaper or news website every day. You don’t want to have to relearn this every day. We have not even stated talking about having to relearn the language to read it.

• Routines also help us reduce the number of decisions we have to take. After all we don’t want to spend our energy on reflecting which Starbucks coffee variation to order every morning. Barack Obama’s White House closet consisted of similar blue and gray suits. Steve Jobs’ closet has displayed a similar lack of variety. Both limited their wardrobe to reduce distractions that drain energy from the more important decisions they had to take every day. The decisions we face may not have the impact of Mr. Obama’s and Jobs’ decision, but likewise, most of the many decisions we face every day can be handled by routines and by the pattern recognition abilities of our brains. Conservation of brain energy has become even more crucial in times when social media businesses are paid for distracting us.

Now think of some of the routines that help you make it through your work-day without spending too much energy. What prevents you from having to reinvent the wheel every day?

Sorry for the Disruption

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Steve Jobs

 

Let’s take it from the master. Mr Jobs did his fair share of dot-connecting.

What feeds you with new dots to connect? What types of experiences can you draw on? Choose all that apply.

The Force of Repetition

As much as we seek new influences – new dots -, we are also subject to being fed the same dots over and over.

Think about situations, where routines keep you stuck in the past. How hard was it to unlearn the old?

Think about how much of what you ‘consume‘ is repetition. Think about who and what feeds you your repeating dots, that keep you from moving into new territory.

Where does your wilderness start?

For each of us the sweet spot between habit and routine is located at a different spot.

For an extreme climber it is different than for a government official. Most of us will be located somewhere in between. And sometimes the government employee spends his free time with extreme climbing.

All right, so where is your sweet spot between habit and routine?

Where does your wilderness extend?

This sweet spot becomes even more crucial when it comes to our work ‘processes’. Here, finding the Balance between habit and disruption, or in other words between Process vs Creativity is utmost crucial.

While we need certain processes, an overload of processes can hinder innovations. Corporations have shown this over and over, taking the fruits of inspiration and grinding them into a diluted hot-potch.

To dive in a bit deeper, let’s think about such strategies and tactics like Lean Startup, Getting Things Done and the likes. Where are they located? Do they create new routines or are they disruptions of the old?

What is the connection between the following images?