Barriers

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Workplace Innovation class, especially when informed that it was brand new. The Whack on the Side of the Head, Go Innovate textbooks and the exercises being used were fun and interesting, right up my alley!

In my past jobs, I might not always have been considered innovative. Mostly because I never spoke up or was too afraid of rejection or afraid of “breaking the rules”. It wasn’t until my experience working with a local medical clinic that I finally learned to speak up and that I actually may have had some good ideas. In that job, and the job that followed with a local insurance company – my supervisors/managers would tell me that it was the reason they hired me (can you even imagine that?), to bring new ideas to the table. I think being innovative isn’t just about being creative, but also about being confident and not afraid to try out/speak out/promote new ideas.

A workplace example from the insurance company - I came up with a great idea that would save time and boost production. I brought it to my team "elder" and was told that it just wasn’t what was done, that we needed to stick by the old way, stick by the clearly defined rules and procedures. Instead of taking rejection, I tried it. I had recently read in my Oprah magazine (don’t laugh, I LOVE that magazine! http://www2.oprah.com/index.jhtml) that it’s easier to "ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission" and that made a lot of sense to me – maybe especially because I was a bit intimated by my manager.

She scared me.

I put my idea into production and explained how it would work to the other department involved; they were pleased and excited that they would no longer have to do as much extra work (cutting out the middle man, so to speak) and were thrilled that it cancelled out some of the redundancies of the original procedure. When I presented it to my teammates, they gasped in utmost horror at what I had done and immediately asked me if I had asked the manager about it and made comments that they would never use it, it would never be approved. I finally worked up the courage to talk to my manager (trembling in fright) and she told me that it was a great idea, that we would change our policies and procedures to accommodate this new idea and it would be the new way (angels singing up above, can you hear them?), she told me that this was the reason they had hired me and that you have to make your own judgments about when to bend the rules/procedures!. Pretty exciting.

So far, the Workplace Innovation classroom activities and discussions have been very interesting. I’m a hands-on type of learner and to be able to write out the Personal Impact Questionnaire helped me consider more the breakdown of the insurance industry and to better understand the ideas and direction they’re heading in. I never thought about it that way. I definitely enjoyed the Inventory of Barriers exercise. One interesting thing I discovered about myself was when my classmate looked at my graph and said “yours is pretty even”. When I looked at his, he had many hills and valleys. It was true – mine was pretty even across the board, everything was between 15 and 20.

I didn’t quite understand one of my higher points – C = barriers related to use of the abstract, I’ll need to do more research about that; but I did agree with my other high point – D = barriers related to use of systematic analysis. I know that’s something I need to work on as well.