Three Surefire Ways to Keep You and Your Teams Innovating When Working From Home

Even in normal circumstances, innovation is hard. Coming up with, socializing, and testing theories takes patience, space, and, most importantly, community. Over the years companies have invested heavily in creating workplaces that promote the casual-collisions that generate innovative ideas.

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to surge; more and more people are working from home, and those in the office are being required to wear masks and socially distance. The simple drop-by conversations and forced-collisions aren’t happening nearly as often. Video calls need to be scheduled killing happenstance and the opportunity to “bump” into each other.

With fewer random “wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversations it’s likely that our next year of innovation is going to take a hit. I’d suspect that the innovation we will see will be in reactionary areas, related to the discomfort of being at home, or socially distanced, and focused on “at-home health” and supply chain.

But that doesn’t mean it has to be this way. For most of humanity, innovators worked in far less social circumstances to develop world-changing ideas. In this article, I will show you three tried and true ways to instantly think more innovatively.

1. “Idea Smashing” (i.e. “Westonize it”)

Stanley Weston, the innovator of the G.I. Joe action figure (way back in the 1960s), was notorious for keeping lists of popular products and connecting them together. In this case, on his list, Stanley listed The Barbie Doll as being the most popular toy for girls. He also noted that those little plastic Army Men were notoriously popular with boys. His idea for G.I Joe struck when he drew a line connecting the Barbie to the Army Men. He knew that (in that era) boys would be less inclined to play with a “doll”, but they just might play with an “Action Figure”. The rest was history.

“Truly groundbreaking ideas are rare, but you don’t necessarily need one to make a career out of creativity. My definition of creativity is the logical combination of two or more existing elements that result in a new concept. The best way to make a living with your imagination is to develop innovative applications, not imagine completely new concepts.”

— Stanley Weston (creator of GI Joe)

We are surrounded by products that were derived this way. By simply taking the time to understand the popularity of one thing and sizing it up against something else you could be creating the next groundbreaking innovation.

2. Focus on the “right” problem, not necessarily the problem your competitors are focusing on.

Throughout the world, there are communities that don’t have access to modern luxuries like electricity. It’s been a focus of countless innovators to figure out how to extend infrastructure and technology to affordably supply these regions.

Alfred Moser, a mechanic, and inventor thought a bit differently. Was bringing electricity to these homes the critical need? Or rather, would it be wonderfully beneficial to bring light? After all, homes sat dark all day and night, schools didn’t exist because dark buildings wouldn’t be conducive to learning.

Moser, through his life experiences, picked up the knowledge that light refracted from a half-filled water bottle could shine as brightly as a 60-watt lightbulb.

Moser experimented and created this:

He was able to install these Coke bottle “lights” into ceilings for less than $1 (USD). At that moment, homes became useful during the day. A school could be built to shelter children during their learning, warehouses could be built to house supplies and create jobs.

The thinking here wasn’t revolutionary (although the invention was). Moser changed lives by focusing on the “right” problem, light not electricity, and found a low-cost way to solve it.

When faced with a problem, understand what the real problem is. How is what you are building solving the real tangible problem that people have? How is it making lives better?

3. Is the data telling you the truth or the story you want to hear?

Having accurate data is critical to making good decisions. What data doesn’t do is give you the right headspace and perspective in which to apply it. Your own biases can give you false positives and lead you down an incorrect path.

For example, during WWII the US military brought in Abraham Wald, a famous polish scientist to help them to understand how they could be reinforcing their planes to decrease the likelihood that they would be shot down.

Wald and his assistants explored the airplane graveyard where the military stored the planes that had been shot at and returned home. They created a diagram of a plane with all of the bullet holes marked. What they delivered looked something like this:

The military leaders immediately began discussing how to reinforce the areas with the bullet holes. Wald had to step in. The airplanes the team had audited had made it back to the base, they weren’t shot down. Since very few of the audited planes had bullet holes in the cockpit or tail, Wald concluded that if a plane was shot in those areas, they weren’t coming back.

Therefore, the reinforcements needed to be made at the cockpit and tail sections.

To sum up, the data is just that, data. The data itself isn’t a conclusion and your biases play an important role in how it’s interpreted. Make sure you are thinking 360 degrees or using the “child’s mind” when asking questions of your data.

Conclusion

Workplaces have become more and more work-from-home friendly. Permanent WFH situations are likely to be a very real part of how companies work beyond the pandemic into the future. If that’s the case, the chances for the collisions that lead to breakthrough innovations can be really tough to come by.

Try these ideas to challenge yourself and your teams to think differently, but never forget the need to socialize. Innovation only works if you fully understand the problem/opportunity, what is currently being done, and what has been done in the past. You always need to get other perspectives on your ideas to make them stronger and more effective.

Let me know your thoughts and some tricks you and your teams use to keep the creativity flowing for ground-breaking ideas.