Return from Innovation Vacation

Bringing innovation back to the “office.”

This week’s newsletter features Andrew Lebowitz, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Spicebox. Spicebox is a legal innovation consultancy specializing in helping law firms and legal professionals develop the skills and tools they need to enhance their creative and strategic capabilities.

Picture this, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and a few puffy clouds hang in the warm air. You sit on a quiet beach, sipping your favorite beverage. Soothed by the calming sounds of the tide while gentle waves roll up to your feet. The water is pleasant, palm trees bristle behind you.

You are lightyears away from any care or responsibility. You are relaxing, recovering, and replenishing. Taking a well-earned break from the daily grind. In the clarity of your relaxation, you have a million ideas and a renewed energy to take on the world.

You take a moment to envision your last morning on vacation, your transition back to the “real” world. You wake up early, take a shower, and enjoy a slow breakfast. Leaving plenty of time to stroll into the airport and relax before your flight.

Sadly, it isn’t so. You wake up the next morning only to realize that you, in fact, slept through your alarm. The plan of waking up early and enjoying your last day is shot. You jump out of bed, splash some water on your face, rinse your mouth, and shove on whatever clothes you wore the day before. There are still fifteen things to pack and nowhere to put them. Your Uber driver is a minute away, and you are thirty minutes late.

Whatever energy and plans you had yesterday no longer apply. You have one and only one concern, not missing your flight back home.

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The Innovation Vacation

Maybe you’re familiar with the story above, or maybe you’re not, but when you spend time in an innovation workshop, the realities and stresses of the “real” world can feel far away. You’re on vacation.

“Don’t let reality bog you down,” your facilitators say.

“The only way to reach brilliance is to touch madness,” they continue, “don’t worry about budgets, or politics, or time, or skills. If you can dream it, you can do it.”

So you buy in. What’s not to love? It’s amazing how freely and openly we can think when we step out of our day-to-day. Some of the ideas are no-goes, but there’s a couple that you’re really excited about. You leave the workshop inspired and motivated with a plan and a vision for making your organization more effective, more impactful, and more innovative. Then you get back to the office.

Cue an emergency deadline, a sick teammate, and a last-minute meeting to prepare for another meeting. In the scramble to complete the growing pile of work as effectively and efficiently as possible, you burn out. Whatever energy or plans you had before this project are gone.

You relish the calm afterward, using the time to recover, but it doesn’t last long. Just as your energy replenishes, another project drops on your lap.

How is anyone supposed to get anything done around here with all this work!?

The truth is you can’t. As an employee or leader, you have a function, and that function is often very specific. Anything outside of that function is most likely someone else’s purview, if it’s anyone’s at all.

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Bringing Innovation In

Innovation is a conscious pursuit. It requires discipline, collaboration, vision, and purpose. Innovation and innovative moments are not something that just happens. In order to innovate, organizations need to carve out time for skill building, promote inter-departmental collaboration, and provide technical, financial, and psychological support for creative problem-solving. In other words, innovation needs to be built into the structure of the company. It has to be a core value of the organization.

It also requires organizations to recognize and support their employees’ abilities to learn, grow, and work on meaningful challenges. We cannot limit innovation to workshops or specific people, projects, or departments. Innovation needs to be built into the culture.

Building an innovative culture is about appealing to, and supporting our better instincts as human beings: compassion, curiosity, courage, collaboration, and of course, creativity. The future requires these of us, and the present demands it.

And we cannot continue to view organizations as machines. We need to view them as ecosystems of individuals and sub-groups that serve a common purpose. Looking at your organization this way allows you to bring innovation in and spread it throughout.

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Innovation requires change- and risk.

Any organization can innovate, so long as individuals are willing to change and take risks along the way. These don’t have to be huge risks to have an impact. They can be small, and they can be managed. If they are unsuccessful, their damage is limited and contained. If they are successful, they can be scaled and replicated.

Throughout this process, resistance to change can stall or stop innovative initiatives altogether. To help manage resistance, make sure to include your stakeholders in the change process. They are more willing to adopt new tools, processes, or guidelines if they have an active voice in creating them and understand why they are valuable.

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Building Innovation as a Habit.

Creativity has always been paramount to our survival as a species and has allowed us to reach dominance on this planet. However, it has also contributed to some significant challenges of its own. Challenges of our own devising that only we can get ourselves out of. Challenges that require us not only to do things differently but to think differently as well.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

If we want to develop creative organizations, we have to look at the systems — internally and externally — that impact the ways we work and think. We need to move beyond the model of organizations as machines. We can’t look at innovation as an assembly line where good ideas go in, and record profits come out. Innovation is a messy process, but a meaningful one, and it can be cultivated, fostered, and supported by the right culture. Innovation needs to become part of the mindset with which you approach challenges on a daily basis.

Here are a few tips for building creativity and innovation in your organization:

• Start where you are. Take some time to assess yourself and your organization. If you are a leader in your organization, ask yourself, “How am I encouraging or discouraging creativity in my department?” If you are an individual contributor, ask yourself, “What are the opportunities I see to improve outcomes that I have the ability to take action on?”
• Set up dedicated time. Whether it’s five minutes or an hour, put time on your calendar that is blocked off for creativity. It doesn’t even have to be for work — in fact, bonus points if it’s not. Many times carving out time to actively step away from work is what allows for creativity to flow. Much like how all our brilliant ideas come to us in the shower.
• Introduce play. As adults, we tend to look at play as something frivolous, but play is, in fact, quite useful. It allows us to enter spaces where we can imagine different rules, different outcomes, and different scenarios. It allows us the freedom and the safety to explore different possibilities without real-world consequences.
• Take on a different perspective. It can be all too easy to get stuck in our own heads and unable to see solutions that might be right in front of us. Sometimes all you need is to look at the challenge from a different perspective. Try looking at a challenge from someone else’s perspective, or even just looking at it from a different physical perspective.
• Make a mistake. Sometimes mistakes are exactly what you need to move forward. What may seem like a random brush stroke may in fact, be a “happy accident” that adds just the flourish you needed. A typo might lead to the word you’ve been searching for. The point is not to bring in your inner editor too soon. Let yourself be imperfect for a moment or two, then you can bring back the editor to decide if there’s something to it. Like any journey worth taking, innovation isn’t easy, but the value and satisfaction you get from making a real impact far exceeds the bumps and hurdles along the way.

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This week’s newsletter features Andrew Lebowitz, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Spicebox. Spicebox is a legal innovation consultancy specializing in helping law firms and legal professionals develop the skills and tools they need to enhance their creative and strategic capabilities. Learn more about Spicebox at Spicebox.nyc or follow them on Medium: https://medium.com/@spicebox.nyc

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