What's that "chocolate & peanut butter" blend that fuels innovation?
The sweet and salty combo of Chocolate & Peanut Butter is a big part of why many love this unique duo. The Peanut Butter brings texture and substance, while the sugar and caffeine in Chocolate generates energy and happy optimistic feelings. It’s about the balance in how they come together and enhance the other to deliver this novel flavor!
When creating something new or innovative, the emphasis is often on ideation to generate many possible options in finding that big disruptive idea or breakthrough insight that solves a customer’s unmet need. Generating and selecting the right idea is definitely critical in igniting innovation. Other approaches emphasize it’s all about learning and failing fast, building an MVP, getting into the market with customer feedback, and tuning and pivoting from what you learn. If you want to create or change something, you definitely have to take action!
Ideas are the Chocolate, and Actions are the Peanut Butter
So which is more important when innovating, creating, or transforming … the Idea or the Actions? Just like chocolate and peanut butter, the magic is in the balance. I like to think Ideas are the Chocolate, and Actions are the Peanut Butter.
When we brainstorm ideas and set our mindset on the “art of the possible”, like chocolate it generates energy, inspiration, and optimism of what could be? Like peanut butter, putting ideas into action drives substance and results, while building healthy tension or texture to validate assumptions.
Ideas plus Actions generate a reinforcing system where ideas get tuned and honed by taking action and adjusting course or strategy. And Actions help to shape and focus the idea by getting real feedback and results whether as expected or unexpected.
New value gets created when ideas and actions are integrated in an upward spiral, building on each other and being refined through cycles-of-learning.
Creating Culture That Values Ideas as Much As Actions
Building a culture that values that sweet and salty balance of Ideas and Actions is not trivial. There are innovation methods to create company ideation challenges or competitions to generate idea pipelines. There are also methods like Agile development, Rapid Proto-typing, and Go-To-Market A/B testing to drive actions and fast learning.
However, culture is more related to what is valued than methods applied. Corporate cultures often include aspects of meritocracy that highly value results or actions, as they can be readily measured. How do you measure the value of generating ideas? The challenge is creating a culture that comparably values the idea generators along with the people who take action and drive results. Corporate systems can tend to weed out the idea people without having intentional metrics for valuing the tangible and intangible contributions of ideation.
Here are some considerations for valuing Ideas:
Pair-up or build small teams of idea generators plus results drivers, and measure team outcomes rather than individual contributions.
Measure and value the idea generation process such as the volume and ripple effect of ideas, rather than the merit of an individual idea. Ideas create more ideas – similar to brainstorming, focus on capture and quantity rather than assigning value to idea quality.
Value those who are skilled in creatively generating ideas similar to how you might value someone who is skilled as a rigorous problem solver.
Fuel your innovative or creative endeavors with that sweet and salty balance of Ideas plus Actions and you’ll be on your way to cycles-of-learning that will open new value!
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