Rex Miller

Do you produce better under pressure? Are you more creative with a deadline? When you suddenly find out you don’t have the ingredients you thought, the personnel who were planned or the tool you were looking for are you still able to find a creative spark to carry forward?

If so, you already know some secrets to innovation. This video by Dave Snowden will provide three key ingredients to innovation.

1. Creativity is a symptom of innovation, not a cause.
2. The situation needs a starvation of resources, pressure of time and a shift in perspective.

The economy has provided two of these three essential ingredients (scarcity and time pressure). For some, there will be a burst of innovation. Warren Buffet has said that the next great fortunes will arise from this time.

There are three directions a team can head when adversity (starvation of resources) hit.

• They can retrench and by doing so accelerate their crisis. This is the drowning victim scenario – their thrashing and panic hasten their fate.
• A team can hunker down and wait it out; pull back, run silent and hope circumstances change. This is the ostrich scenario – by hoping things will get back to normal ensures that when the NEW normal arrives it will be too late to adapt.
• The third options engages key stakeholders, looks at the brutal facts head on, provides no escape or sense of a white knight riding in with a solution and then lets that pressure cook until a breakthrough is reached.