Diving into Innovation…
Andrew Jones
Sometimes you just need to take the leap…
Last week, during a spell of hot weather, my two daughters asked if I could take them to a local open-air Sea pool.
We arrived at the pool and my girls insisted that we went to the deep end where the diving boards were. No sooner had we put the bags down, the girls had leaped off the boardwalk into the water with loud shrills of excitement.
It wasn’t long before the pestering started for me to jump in. Now, sitting on the side of the board walk looking down at the girls treading water below looked a very long way down. It became even more daunting when I stood up and looked down again.
A million thoughts were going through my mind… “how cold is the water?” “How deep is the water?” “I’m tall, will I hit the bottom?” “What is on the bottom…weed, rocks, broken glass?” My mind was racing with all the things that could go wrong, and I was not getting any closer to jumping.
Then a bigger fear kicked in, …the fear of humiliation! My two little girls did not think twice about it and other people were sat watching what I was going to do. A quick assessment of data told me it was unlikely I would hurt myself, so I took a deep breath and jumped!
As I plunged into the deep blue water, my feet never hit anything, and the cool feeling was bliss. I surfaced to see the faces of delight on my girls as they screamed with excitement and laughed as I told them that it was a little scary and how do they just jump in. “We just do Dad, it’s fun!” they said. It was a lot of fun, and the afternoon was magical.
My experience on the boardwalk is similar to that of teams looking to innovate.
While I was standing on the boardwalk thinking about jumping in my brain was running through all the possible things that could go wrong. This is our natural human protection system kicking in. The Brain has a 5 x higher propensity for negativity than positivity. This is often called our negativity bias and is part of our evolutionary survival system. It should not be ignored, but it should be acknowledged that it can blow things out of proportion. My brain was telling me not to jump as you will die, but with some quick data analysis (i.e. other people have done this, it’s a designated jumping area, there are lifeguards on duty) we can appease those fears with data and put them into perspective.
The same needs to happen with innovation. – What is the data telling you? What examples or experiments can you use as a guide? We need to balance the doomsday voice of the amygdala with the rational and positive message of data.
However, I could have been stood on that boardwalk for a lot longer assessing all the possible parameters. Paralysis by analysis. At some point, enough is enough and you just need to take the leap! The journey of discovery can only really begin with that first step… or leap!
Dive in and see what happens. Have confidence in yourself and those around you, that whatever happens you can deal with it. And when you do, that’s when the magic happens, and the fun begins!
Here’s to diving in and exploring the results.
