September 21, 2015
By Tami Rubino, BioSpace Hiring and Branding Guru
Where do your best creative ideas come from?
Look back at any given point in time and think about all the amazing innovations that happen on a daily basis. Inventions and discoveries that change how we live, work, play and communicate—impacting the most basic everyday activities to complexities that seem unimaginable.
Consider the “aglet” for example. Do you know what an aglet is? It’s the plastic or metal tip on the end of a shoe lace or draw string. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to lace up your shoes without that simple solution that created massive efficiency in the shoe-tying process? What about GPS? Talk about a complex innovation, but do you know anyone who carries a Rand McNally atlas these days?
So where do all these brilliant ideas come from? The answer might surprise you.
Don’t slow down at the finish line...
I believe the most impactful innovations are born from a state of dissatisfaction. So often we focus on trying to fix what’s broken instead of making what already “works” work even better. Think about how often we do this. We set goals and objectives to advance some initiative and once we reach our target, we move on to the next thing on our list. Innovation rarely occurs in this type of robotic act of acceptance.
In order to move the innovation needle, you have to embrace the belief that what happened yesterday is no longer good enough and live in a constant state what I call creative controversy. You have to be the person who looks at your frayed shoe laces with displeasure and say, “There must be a better way and I’m going to figure it out.”
This attitude of creative controversy is not discriminatory—it applies to every human being and every situation regardless of who you are, what you know or what you do for a living. The basic premise is to not look at goals and metrics as if they are a finish line, but rather an invitation to push even harder to go to the next level. What if, in the 1970s, everyone accepted the typewriter as the pinnacle of written communication? Why reach for anything above and beyond? Seems silly, huh? But two people—Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs—had to think creatively and caused a lot of controversy with peers and associates who simply couldn’t envision an alternative.
If you scroll through your mental rolodex right now, you can make a list of people in your network who are better at this idea of creative controversy than others. However, it is a skill that can be learned. You simply have to tell yourself there is no summit and believe that everything can be improved. Observe what you do in your everyday life and look for those tinges of frustration or inefficiency. Better yet, spend some time analyzing the processes that everyone else accepts as “standard operating procedure” and find a way to make it better. But here’s where most wanna-be innovators fall short...they fail to have the courage to go head-to-head with the status quo. As an innovator, you will ruffle feathers and put targets on the backs of sacred cows. If winning the popularity contest is important to you, being an innovator is going to be a stretch, because you have to challenge what is accepted as the norm. Lack of courage to speak up is the single greatest factor that prevents innovation from happening.
Opportunities for creative recruiting
So what’s my biggest area of discontent? Well, that seems to change daily, but as of right now it’s the recruiting process. Finding and hiring great talent is a source of serious frustration for me and many others, yet we all begrudgingly accept the current process and continue to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money posting jobs, sifting through resumes, interviewing countless people, conducting background checks and so on.
There have certainly been improvements to the recruitment process over the past several decades, such as resume databases, social networking and application tracking systems—but let’s be honest—it’s still a painful undertaking that is overflowing with opportunities for innovation.
So if I look at the current recruitment process through a lens of creative controversy, I begin to have all sorts of wild ideas. Perhaps there will be a world where finding great talent is like ordering a hand-crafted coffee just the way you like it.
Or what if the roles were reversed and candidates marketed their talents and abilities like a wholesale supplier? Instead of trying to find the perfect candidate with an impossible array of attributes, perhaps you “purchase” the exact list of skills, knowledge and behaviors from a group of people.
And do we really think resumes will be around five to 10 years from now? The Internet holds a complete catalog of everything we’ve done and accomplished.
What about culture fit or leadership abilities? This is one of the biggest areas impacting our employee turnover rates, but most of us shoot from the hip every time we make a hire and hope it’s the right decision. But hope is not an efficient hiring practice and there is more than enough data about your work history, friends and acquaintances, attitudes and beliefs that perhaps there will be a simple algorithm that can proactively identify—with certainty—the people who have all the right stuff to thrive in your organization.
So what is the process, product or service in your life that seems to work just fine for everyone else, but secretly drives you crazy? Explore that emotion and think of radical ways to make it better. Then, find your voice and go create some controversy.
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