July/August 2005

Innovation Tips

…ideas for building collaborative innovation

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Catalytic Learning—the Spiral of Continual Improvement

 

Catalytic learning makes a difference; it is purposeful and focused. The aim is always the same—innovation.

 

Its clear and specific purpose is to add value—to create more robust organizations that deliver greater value to their constituencies. It is a form of experiential learning that produces continual improvement. Catalytic learning starts simply with being mindful.

 

Peter Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship) has built a framework for mindfulness—seven discreet “windows” of opportunity. Monitoring the cues and clues of experience through those windows delivers important information about needed change.

 

When we remain mindful of the information derived from the full range of experience—intuitive hunches, data, coworkers, clients, customers, stakeholders—we begin an invigorating cycle of productive change. Being fully mindful is a tireless sentinel’s duty; the more sentinels the better.

 

Monitoring cues and clues can be one of the most important functions of a board of directors. A board brings the objective overview that is often lost by those entrenched in operational details. Boards may also bring the discerning experience and knowledge that can make sense of information.

 

Making sense of information is also critical to catalytic learning, for it fills out the relative importance and meaning of partial cues and clues. The great mistake of some in positions of leadership is to learn a fact and take immediate action.

 

Taking time to reflect and view any issue from diverse perspectives is a critical component of quality decision making. If omitted, decisions are more likely to be half-baked—inadequately addressing the full underlying need.

 

Once information is understood from various perspectives and its relative importance evaluated, catalytic learning turns to creative problem solving. Purposeful change is inevitably the act of creation.

 

The creative thinking required to generate purposeful innovation is a key element in the cycle of catalytic learning. Creative thinking occurs best in nonjudgmental settings where fresh ideas can be uncritically heard and considered.

 

As innovations are generated, they are tested through experience and the cycle of learning repeats itself. Catalytic learning started with mindfulness and ends with mindfulness, for purposeful change, too, must be subject to reflective scrutiny.

 

The full cycle of catalytic learning requires diligence and attention. Once in motion, the cycle becomes a spiral of continual improvement that relentlessly generates an increasingly robust organization.

 

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