Idea work is important because it forms the very core of everyday value creating activity and underpins all innovative efforts in organisations.
Idea work is also important because it forms some of the very basis for being human. Ideas are deep sources of inspiration and road openers for those passionate pursuits that energise work and bring hope to people’s lives.
More specifically, our early research results promise to yield improvement into practices such as:
Fast time:
Practices for rapid prototyping of ideas in cycles of generation, combination, testing and selection, whether in workshops, projects or more informal scaled down formats.
Slow time:
Practices for stone on stone knowledge accumulation, ensuring a necessary co-existence of continuity and variation, keeping a repository of ideas alive for future combinatory use, cultivating openness.
Practices for assisting colleagues in idea generation, within and across groups, typically serving threefold functions of expressing recognition, providing challenge and fostering cross pollination.
Task forcing:
Practices for pacing idea work that takes place in distributed teams (across domains, geographical areas and borders) to ensure sufficient concentration of attention, goal alignment and quality of interaction.
Energizing:
Practices for energizing behavior in idea work processes, ranging from communicating recognition to inquiring with invitation, use of active listening, respectful challenging and demonstrating presence.
Zooming in and out:
Practices for moving back and forth between detailed analysis, singular data and isolated ideas on one hand and holistic understanding of integrated concepts and idea clusters on the other.