Stop Sabotaging Your Ability to Innovate

Innovation is rarely smooth sailing, especially when leaping from planning to implementation. Not only will there be external obstacles, but we often need to face our own inner physiological shortcomings.

Starting from zero is hard, especially when you already have a great job and a comfortable life. The prospect of future failures is terrifying - humans are biologically wired to avoid risks after all. Jeff Bezos was rejected when he pitched the idea of selling books online to his then-manager and was told that it ‘would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job’. After days of imagining his future self, Bezos concluded that he would regret it if he didn’t give the idea a try. This resonates with my own recent interviews with News UK. If I hadn’t applied for the Director of Engineering role and done all the preparation, the interview with Imperial College London wouldn’t have been so smooth. The experience not only led to a scholarship from Imperial but also helped in securing the Head of Product Platforms role later.

We are often told to conquer our fear and press on when it comes to risks. The fact that we have fear is a sign of being under-equipped and perhaps under-informed. We should listen to our fear, analyse our shortcomings, and take appropriate actions to compensate for the areas we are not so confident with - for example, finding an expert salesman to pitch the idea if we ourselves are not in the best position to do so.

Learning from mistakes is not always straightforward. We often let our negative emotions get in the way when faced with setbacks: the anger and disappointment from failures, the despair from rejections and criticism, the discouragement from doubting our own abilities - the list goes on. One way to counteract the effects of these negative feelings is to think objectively and see yourself from a distance, analysing mistakes to truly understand what went wrong. You need to face your grief head-on and reframe the failures from different angles. One example the article gave is how Dyson framed the reason behind the rejections of his bagless vacuum cleaner idea - the same as why Kodak stakeholders dismissed the film-less digital photography innovation. Their ideas were seen as the opposite of the raison d’être of the established business models.

Going into overdrive, fuelled by our unbridled passion and unbounded creativity, could be a curse for innovation. It often blinds us entirely from seeing otherwise obvious obstacles, and we may become stubborn and unreasonable. To overcome this, we need good self-awareness, a support network that is not afraid of playing devil’s advocate, and planned regular breaks to ensure we are on course.

References

Harvard Business Review, Volume 99, Issue 6