Pairing strategic planning with creative problem-solving illuminates a clear path between good ideas and
innovative solutions that enable project management to deliver value.
Innovation is a very popular word for marketing, strategic plans, and mission and vision statements. But while most organizations claim to value innovation, they lack the infrastructure and culture to be truly innovative.
“They have the appetite, but they lack the stomach” – Harry Vardis
True innovation requires more than good ideas. The ABCs of innovation are:
- Acceptance by leadership and in the marketplace
- Breaking or disrupting existing business models (or the current way of doing things)
- Creative ideas that add value
To be truly innovative any strategy must include all three.
Implementing strategy depends on good project management. Formally, project management is “the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people” (PMI). Informally, project management is the art of herding busy, opinionated cats with agendas so they can coordinate their time and resources to accomplish a goal they once thought was good enough to include in a strategic plan but have since lost focus on. Project management is not for the faint of heart.
The steps of the creative problem-solving process, 1) clarifying, 2) ideating, 3) developing, and 4) implementing, add value to strategic planning and enable innovation by building a bridge between good ideas, project management, and implementation of innovative solutions.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will end up someplace else” – Yogi Berra
Clarification helps teams identify the real problem. The problem we think we have identified is usually not the problem we need to address. For example, a recent client group came to us with the challenge of attracting more people to their existing offering of programs. After diverging by generating ideas on how they might attract more participants, then converging those ideas into categories it became clear to them that the problem they were solving was not “attracting more participants”, but about making the events more accessible virtually and face-to-face in a post-COVID world.
Ideation done right is great for generating new and divergent strategies. However, a paradox of visionary leadership is the tendency to identify volumes of worthy projects and finish none of them. Organizational capacity always lags behind opportunities to improve and innovate. Using criteria like impact, ease of implementation, and interest, will help converge on those strategies that hold the most promise for innovation, while preserving resources from being spent on ideas that have a lower return on investment.
Pairing strategic planning with creative problem-solving illuminates a clear path between good ideas and innovative solutions that enable project management to deliver value. In brief, divergence in creative problem-solving generates valuable ideas, while convergence, using the right criteria, focuses on the most promising to move forward with.
Development of ideas and the discipline of good project management are where strategy is translated into concrete actions. This necessary move from general ideas to concrete plans is required for any successful change. Ideas gain a rationale by identifying what is good about them now (plusses), what could be good in the future (opportunities), and potential risks (obstacles). Pairing the answers for “what might go wrong?” with answers for “how might we overcome obstacles?” lowers risk and increases acceptance in a “shark-tank” environment where only the best ideas are approved and granted resources.
A well-developed plan also creates clear expectations for committing the time and resources to successfully implement plans. Yet, even the best designed and managed, are no exception to the following universal rule:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson
Project teams gain agility and the capacity to adapt to challenges by knowing and practicing the fundamental skills of creative problem-solving. A few examples include:
- Sharing a common language and tools to address challenges as they emerge while avoiding unnecessary conflict
- Knowing personal preferences for problem-solving and how they influence team effectiveness when creating solutions.
- Using tools and developing divergence skills to generate possible solutions on the fly, and convergence skills to select the best ones.
If you want to avoid the pitfalls of the typical strategic planning process, empower your project teams, and truly innovate, try getting a little creative!
For more information on how Creative Focus can help you design and facilitate an effective, creative, and ultimately innovative organizational strategy: