We are living in a time when innovation is no longer an option. Whether you are involved in business, the service sector, or the church, you must learn to be innovative or accept the path of decline, irrelevancy, and death.
While I encourage leaders to get people with different personalities and perspectives together to come up with solutions, The Innovation Code takes this a step further. Authors Jeff and Staney DeGraff argue, ”When it comes to any innovation initiative . . . disharmony is crucial. The only way to create new hybrid solutions is to clash.”
If we are going to be innovative, we have to embrace difference and learn from it. They challenge their readers to “do things that make you feel uncomfortable. Talk to people with whom you have nothing in common. Remember that the ideal solutions to the most complicated problems will never involve just one mode of thinking.”
In this book, the authors identify four basic modes of thinking and, thus, four basic approaches to innovation: the Artist, who loves radical innovation; the Engineer, who constantly improves everything; the Athlete, who competes to develop the best innovation; and the Sage, who innovates through collaboration. They observe, “These approaches come together to produce a positive tension, a constructive conflict that promotes sustainable and scalable growth.”
The book provides a quick test to help the reader identify his or he own preferred style as well as providing a link to an online assessment that provides additional insights. The book explains each style in depth as well presenting the value of interaction between the various styles.
Of course, they note that “beneath your dominant worldview [innovation style] lies all of the other Innovation Code archetypes: we all have an inner Artist, Engineer, Athlete, and Sage, pushing and pulling each other as different threads of our characters.” We can take advantage of that inner tension “to create something powerful.”
The concept presented here is very helpful. There are a number of exercises to stimulate innovative thinking and planning among people with the four innovation styles. I plan to use this book in a class that I am teaching this semester and look forward to hearing the students’ response to this approach.
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