The Paradox of Innovation: Slowing Down to Foster Creativity and Focus (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If you want a focused organization, you may consider going counter, raising the barriers rather than lowering them, slowing down the pace rather than speeding it up. We associate innovation with collaboration, with brainstorming. You can't innovate if you don't have a team that's doing it together. And so then the risk there is that you create a workspace that actually ensures innovation can occur. Now, I'm aware that this is going to be controversial. That in a world where space is seen as a cost center and open office collaborative spaces are cheaper, it's really easy to say and justify it by saying that's where innovation takes place. And what that fails to understand is that the requirement of innovation is isolated time before collaborative time. We have to have the ability for our brain to connect unrelated ideas, to pause, to process, to prepare, before we can have any productive collaborative time that would result in innovative ideas. It's so easy. The faster we go, we lose sight and lose the capacity to differentiate what matters, to differentiate importance. And version next becomes the goal rather than version right. And there's no stops. There's no points where we pull back and say, have we achieved our objectives? Or are we making progress? The only aim and evidence of work and evidence of growth. But the problem with that is that truly creative, innovative ideas, they require space and time. And when we speed up, what we do is we might fill more ideas, might take action faster. But very rarely do we drive the momentum towards a cohesive focus direction that would allow us to innovate in a way that transforms the future of the organization.