Insight to innovation and back again.

Insight to innovation and back again.

Time to read: 6 minutes.

From insight to innovation and back again, learn how to generate the insights that inspire and propel us towards discovery and innovation in our lives and businesses.

If you think that finding insight is problematic (see our Expert Intuition article), then you’re going to find generating insight interesting. We proposed in Expert Intuition that insight was a significant force in creating unprompted moments of discovery, or events of extended inventive clarity and understanding.

Innovation is everywhere, from ideas to economics, the sciences to public policy, but it has one over-riding connotation to most of us today, big budget tech’ corporations and the commercialisation of technological innovation. Few of us have a place in that world as anything other than consumers of the technological products of their innovation.

In this article we look towards generation rather than discovery or invention, at how we direct our thinking and seek to cultivate our journey from insight to innovation and back again in two different perspectives, cultural and personal. This is a short and greatly simplified introduction to our premise that innovation and insight are entangled in such a way that each stimulates the gains from the other.

Innovation as a concept was abducted and abused throughout the 20^th century, virtually emptied of meaning by mis-use it has since become a buzzword that has long since ceased to buzz. Somewhat ironically reversing two and half thousand years of meaning, and returning innovation to its roots in classical Greek politics, where innovation was widely distrusted, in some cases prohibited, and where practitioners could be punished for practicing their art.

We’re all serial innovators; on one level it’s how each of us gets through the day, we act to combine and apply our own skills as individuals; or co-operate and combine our skills with those of another. We are by nature biased towards co-operation, our disposition is to combine and include others in our endeavours to progress, and this inclusive form of innovation is among the most valuable of human activities.

Our technologically constrained view of us as innovators has harmed our prospects, we appear to have lost faith in our judgement and now reflexively look to technology to solve our problems, many of which we are better suited to deal with on our own terms. Each of us carries within us a toolkit of sophisticated skills and tools, a cognitive potential that evolved to interpret the world and generate the insights necessary to create new possibilities, or put another way, to innovate.

A by-product of our age of information and technological progress is that it excludes, setting a high barrier to entry at the digital frontier of a promised future, while the vast majority of us will continue to live and work in a world of people, objects and events. We’ve become accustomed to associating acts of insight, invention and innovation with academic intelligence, and along with it a tightly defined definition of innovation as hostage to an economic ideology.

In reality intelligence plays only an occasional cameo appearance, the starring role will always go to decision making at the sharp ends of innovation in the analogue world that we live and operate our businesses in. We need to generate insight, imagination and good judgement far more than academic intelligence.

Don’t believe me, then do a little research, and from Einstein to Jobs you’ll find old school innovators who relied on much more than intelligence to grasp the outcomes they had seen within their possibilities. The common attributes you will find in them are within you too; the capacity to generate insight along with the will to act and innovate, but at the core underpinning it all, is a single determining trait – good decision making.

Axios³ is a decision making programme that generates insight and understanding by applying the cognitive tools and skills we all possess, informing and guiding your actions in securing improved outcomes in your life and business.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making. He is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.