Three Questions to Get into Innovative Thinking Mode
To be competitive as a business, we know we need to constantly be innovating—having the best product, the best experience, the most up-to-date processes—and that can be hard. What's more, businesses shape the realities that people live in and what kinds of futures they can imagine, so innovating responsibly becomes even more important.
The problem is that it's really easy to get stuck in narrow thinking patterns. We can feel the pressure to innovate and lose sight of all the good it can bring—innovation is meant to be an expansive experience.
There are a lot of ways to get into an innovative mindset (reading new books, going for a walk in the woods, talking to people outside your field), but this piece is specifically about the questions I like to ask myself to get there quickly.
Three Questions that Get You Thinking Expansively
One paper I turn to when I'm feeling stuck is "The Deep Adaptation Agenda" by Jem Bendell, a former professor at the University of Cumbria. In the paper, Bendell writes about preparing for an uncertain future and poses three questions to consider so that we can best prepare and even thrive:
Resilience: What are the valued norms and behaviors that we will wish to maintain? How do we keep what we really want to keep?
Relinquishment: What assets, behaviors, and beliefs exist where keeping them will make the situation worse? What do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?
Restoration: What attitudes and approaches to life and organization has our current civilization eroded? What can we bring back to help us through upcoming difficulties?
While intended for consideration on a societal level, I've found these questions really expansive—they get me out of my normal ways of thinking about problems. Within a business context, these questions can help us understand our values and incorporate those ideas into how we conduct business.
Here's how this works in practice: at Hickory Town Gardens, we have a fundamental belief that restoring local connections enriches people's lives and makes the community more resilient. So we decided to partner with local businesses for pop-up sales and donate a portion of our proceeds to causes people care about. It solved a fundamental problem we had as a young business (no money, audience, or physical location) and gave us an opportunity to make our ideal world a reality.
Take 15 minutes to think through the world you want to live in and write down 10 things your business could do to make that a reality. Even if only one of those things is realistic and easily implemented, you've already made your business contribute to a better world—and I bet that's also a competitive advantage.
