_This article is written by Ed Bernacki, Director, Idea Factory, Canada. _

  • The problem: The way we work is changing. You may work from home or the office, yet the need to create innovative ideas does not change. How can we design new personal tools to help people be more innovative?
  • Why it matters: Organisations succeed or fail based on the quality of solutions staff create to solve complex problems. Primarily, these are analogue processes to create and manage ideas which staff must use individually or in collaboration.
  • The solution: An idea journal and methodology for idea management designed to inspire people to invest the time to innovate for their career success.

I have been writing on innovation since the late 1990s when a Kiwi newspaper asked me to write on managing and leadership for shaping more innovative organisations. Later I became the innovation writer for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise publications.

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I started in public service with New Zealand Post after my MBA. I joined its new Total Quality Service Team charged with improving the design and delivery of services. A skill I honed was turning management concepts into tools, guides, and journals to help people innovate. I later wrote an innovation guide to launch the Singapore public service innovation skills framework.

Inc. Magazine’s editor asked us to solve a problem with Inc. Conferences: why do people go to conferences, take notes, and never look at them again? We created an idea for a notebook with editorial pages to change how people behave at conferences. Inc. ordered 4,000 of these notebooks, and 82% of users said it helped them get more value from conferences. I later produced about 60,000 copies. The Navigator Journal is the newest version.

These theoretical and practical innovation concepts support my new Navigator Journal:

1. The future of work

What organisations need from people are analogue skills to…

  • solve problems
  • make decisions
  • manage change
  • collaborate

These skills applied in 1950 as they will in 2050. People may work on AI, digital, or in-person solutions or services. People may work from home, an office, or a café.

2. Public service innovation has two challenges

  1. To innovate services, processes, and programmes to create public value in new ways.
  2. Building the skills and capacity of people, teams, and organisations to collaborate and innovate to achieve #1.

We want #1 yet we invest too little in #2.

3. People innovate – not organisations

It serves no purpose to say an organisation is innovative. It only produces innovative results if people show up each day and decide to be innovative on that day. Often they do not.

4. Do people think alike?

Collaboration would be easy if people thought alike. They do not. We have research-driven theory that could enhance collaboration and problem-solving if we recognised cognitive diversity as a useful diversity. Implicitly, we design as if people think alike.

5. People need to understand cognitive diversity as a real concept

My Apolitical article How to stop killing the ideas of people who do not think like you introduces the Kirton Adaption-Innovation theory. It suggests a ‘thinking style’ continuum from highly structured and adaptive to highly novel and innovative. The theory has a normally distributed bell curve. Key insights include:

  • Adaptive thinkers prefer structure, understood solutions, and consensus. Time management gives them structure. They like goal setting, milestones, making lists, etc. Most management tools are designed for adaptive thinkers.
  • Innovative thinkers find too much structure repressive. They seek novelty and often solve problems before others see the problem. They focus on ideas and solutions. They need ways to manage the ideas they create.

All people combine both styles. All can create innovative solutions but will do so differently.

Half of the population in any organisation will be innovators yet few management tools are designed for their style of thinking. This is a problem.

6. Innovation takes more than the right attitude

People may suggest innovation requires people to have the right attitude. While true, you would never say that about HR, finance, or accounting. They need special education. Yet do people with innovation jobs have a degree in innovation? This is a problem.

7. What makes ‘innovative organisations innovative’ is not understood

We struggle to answer this question. Innovation is hard to research. For example:

“OECD call for innovations - If you have contributed to a novel approach in designing or providing public services, we want to hear from you!”

Why is something a ‘novel’ innovation? It may be an improvement. It may be mediocre.

The Idea Factory’s Navigator Journal user design challenge

During Covid-19 I explored some questions:

  • What is on the desks of people who work at home or the office that prompts them to be innovative in solving their challenges?
  • What tool do they use to move between home and office that keeps them focused on future challenges and results?
  • How could a journal appeal to people who want to be innovative in their results?

This led to the creation of an idea journal - the Navigator Journal - with 30 pages that fall into five categories supported by a unique design of note pages:

  1. Listening, learning, and note-taking
  2. Improving problem solving
  3. Enhancing teamwork and collaboration
  4. Using idea management to solve your challenges
  5. 12 months, 12 challenges

It’s about analogue innovation

In a previous article for Apolitical - How to tell the story of innovation in government departments - I highlighted an understanding of innovation from a Singapore public service staff innovation guide I wrote: “Innovation is more than improvement. Improvements are important but innovations are like a quantum improvement that breaks new ground to create value in new ways.”

Two concepts seem insightful:

Breaks new ground — too often we use old ideas to solve new problems. This may help by improving the situation. True innovation creates change in processes or behaviours that go beyond improvement.

Creates value in new ways — we need solutions to create meaningful value. True innovations create value in different and often unexpected ways.

Consider how the launch of Apple’s Smartphone stunned the mobile phone market by eliminating the keyboard found in the most popular phone, the Blackberry. In the 2000s, many public servants were wedded to their Blackberry. They offered security. They were elegant. President Obama often expressed his love for his Blackberry. Yet, smartphones quickly replaced the Blackberry as the ‘must have’ tool.

I believe we need idea management to ensure our ideas are worthy of serving the public, and time management to turn these ideas into actions and results.

Most notebooks and journals use time management and goal-setting principles to add more structure to our work. This is useful yet it also fails innovators. A new vision coming from years of studying people and innovation shaped a new focus on idea management in the form of a journal.
Idea management is both a goal and a process to solve challenges with ideas that are created for the end users. They may be internal users or the public. The process may take days or weeks to define challenges properly and seek insights that point toward ideas that can achieve the results we believe are possible. Often we face many challenges at the same time. We need a way to manage this process before we can use digital tools to formalise our results.

In my Apolitical article Manage your ideas as artists manage their paintings I explained how artists manage their art pieces to get results. Most work on more than one painting at a time. We can learn from their experience to model a creative process for managing ideas

For the future, I believe we need idea management to ensure our ideas are worthy of serving the public, and time management to turn these ideas into actions and results. Our analogue tools are as important as our digital tools.

You can find out more about the Navigator Journal in the following PDF.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own thoughts on ideas management and innovation by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)