💯 Innovation

One of the things that really gets up my nose in the fancy pants world of business is how people think about, and action, the idea of innovation.

People seem to treat innovation as this golden god, a holy grail, the secret sauce of how to be successful.

Well, I’m here to tell you otherwise. Take a look out of your window. What do you see? You see the world and in that world are things that exist. They don’t need improving, they don’t need replacing.

They need maintaining.

The industries we work in are constantly looking for the next big thing, the leap that will help them go faster, do better, be stronger. Instead we should be looking for ways to maintain our existing systems, to make small, incremental improvements to the things we know already work.

🤏 Small things

For example, instead of trying to find a new tool or service to make your recruitment quicker try and find where your existing process isn’t working and make minor improvements. Perhaps you need to digitize one of the steps, or re-word a form to make it less confusing. Perhaps you can strip something out that you could do much, much later.

Innovation, for all it’s incubators and facilitators is really just a fancy way of saying “improving things”. Some companies (big, lumbering, sea freighters sized ones usually, but not always) think the best way of getting ahead, is to create an incubator, or an innovation division or a hothouse or whatever you want to call a group of people who get together to work out what the next Big Thing is.

*Sigh*

What we really need is for everyone to innovate all the time. Instead of making innovation this big, shiny thing, it should be an every day thing. Instead of anointing people innovators, just agree that everyone should be innovating and offer the time, space and tools to do so.

🤔 Who knows? You do

What we know for a fact is that the people closest to the work, know the best way to do the work. They also know how to improve the way the work is done, but either don’t have the autonomy, authority or knowledge to improve the work - give them those things. Explain that innovation ISN’T big bang, it’s small changes that add up.

You’ll soon have innovation coming out of your ears as well as a faster, more accurate process and much, much happier people.

🗣 The #people channel

This section is part request, part gripe and part grovel.

I’ve noticed that often, someone will post a question, “Hey, does anyone have a template for a thing?” and someone else will reply, “Yeah, I’ll DM you.”

Which is nice, as it’s one person helping out another. The thing that could make that interaction better is if the person helping shared the template for a thing with the whole channel.

Then everyone benefits.

So, my ask/gripe/grovel is that we all behave a little more “open source” - if someone asks a question and you can help, please help my reply, or in the channel, then everyone benefits and we could even have a conversation about the thing!

📪 End #post

Thanks for reading. Any feedback is warmly received, hit me up mike@hashtagpeople.co.uk.

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