Scott Berkun

How to diagnose creative failures

One part of my full day seminar on leading breakthrough projects is about diagnosing creative failures. One of the traps of the word innovation is how vague it is: you have to break down where ideas die in your organization to understand where the problems are.

One idea lifecycle I’ve used is the one below. Ask yourself where your own ideas, ideas from your team, or ideas anywhere in your organization tend to die. That’s the point where work needs to be done to improve the number of ideas that survive to the next stage:

• Idea
• Pitch
• Proof of concept
• Prototypes
• Plan
• Acceptance of risk
• Commitment
• Execution
• Innovation
• Commodification

For example, in many organizations ideas die at the pitch. People fail to convince others to support their own ideas. There’s no reason to worry about risk taking and prototyping if people have poor skills at pitching.

Or perhaps ideas die at the prototype phase. Few people are able to convince management, or themselves, that the prototype has enough promise to write a proposed plan.

In some organizations I’ve found the real failure is in the individual. No one stopped them from pushing hard to move their own idea to the next phase, they just gave up on their own.

There are certainly other good lifecycles for ideas: but you should pick one. Only then can you ask your team where they feel their ideas die, giving you a sense of where the real creative roadblocks are.

• Posted Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 9:55 am


• in Innovation, Management, creative thinking | 2 Comments » |