Look before you leap.

In the book, "How the Mighty Fall" by Jim Collins, he studied and compared Top-Ranking companies against Top-Tanking companies, and the stages that were identified.  A very insightful read over all, but I wanted to point out how Innovation does not mean Success.  Just because something is new doesn't mean it will work.  

http://www.epicfail.com/2014/12/08/never-stick-your-face-into-unknown-holes/

In the book, Jim talks about how many companies try all sorts of new things, and seldom do they work.  The companies that tended to dive after completely new and unproven strategies did poorly.  As the image shows, look before you leap.  Many of the most successful companies would take small, low risk leaps.  (Testing the water, so to speak) And then after successes, increase their foot print slowly.

Its a valid concept that applies to large businesses, large projects, or even putting your face in a hole. :)  But it also has to do with everyday life, and every day tasks.  We can try completely new things, like skate boarding (for those who haven't skate boarded before) but we don't start by jumping off a 40 foot X-Games Ramp on our first day.  If we do want to get there, we start by just getting on the skate board at all, and then gradually increase the difficulty and danger.  With tasks, start looking at what you can improve.  Try new things.  But don't completely change everything at once, but slowly improve, throwing out things that impede your success and increasing the experiments that improve your capabilities.

Start meetings with Creativity and an Open Mind

If you are worried about a meeting not getting the creative genius you know your team has the potential to be, consider starting it with a funny video.  There are many articles and scientific studies that show how Creativity and Problem Solving skills are increased after humor.  PBS had an article on it.  But you can just search google for "Using Humor to become creative" for all sorts of evidence.





Save the Bros, an incredibly well designed, viral marketing video from Organic Valley.  The first time I saw it was in a meeting at work.  It was going to be a long meeting, stretching late into Friday evening, and we needed to be very mentally active for it.  So we spent the first 3 minutes watching this video.  The rest of the meeting, at least for about 2 hours was very mentally active, showing excellent problem solving and creative skills.

If you are a team leader, and about to start some potentially difficult meeting, and you want your team more attuned to goals, creativity and problem solving, I would recommend to do something out of the box and show some funny video like this at the start of a meeting.  (perhaps not all, but at least the ones anticiped most difficult)