Lately I’ve been working with a group of students at a progressive high school in Fort Wayne called Amp Lab. One of their features is to thread the values of innovation and entrepreneurship through everything they ask of their students. They do that by presenting the students with challenges that the students can work on in groups or individually. Sometimes people from the community (like me) can present challenges.
A group of students accepted my challenge to help me design the vision for a student-designed, student operated think tank intended to help create a better future community, the community that they will grow up in. I gave them a broad challenge, showed them my vision for the think tank as an example, then said I would sit back and give them free rein to invent it as they liked.
I gave them free rein for two reasons. First, it is their community and their future, so they should have the foremost say in how it is built. Second, I wanted more thoughts than mine to go into the design of the think tank.
The first iteration I saw from them looked a lot like my example vision. The categories of issues to understand and address were nearly identical to my example. When I saw that, I asked them to make it their own. The next iteration I saw was entirely different. I started to see the issues that were important to THEM (not me), an entirely different set of issues than I had envisioned. Now we talk about how to define a category of issues - how broad, how narrow, not too broad, not too narrow - but all based on their thoughts.
This isn’t rocket science. It probably doesn’t surprise you.
I mention it just to reinforce the point that an easy way to unearth new and different ideas (which is the point of innovation after all) is to engage other minds than yours.
If you are an individual like me, form a team and collaborate.
If you are a team, add new members with very different backgrounds, interests, or skills.
If you are a team, hold events that engage a diverse set of people and empower them to freely create new ideas.
Individual or team, just have open deep conversations with a diverse cross section of people who have some sort of stake in the issue you are addressing. Learn about the issues THEY are concerned with.
Just engage more minds than yours. Get out of YOUR mind!