Are you an Ambidextrous Thinker?

[Boats]

Are you an ambidextrous thinker?
Re: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20121...vative%20ideas.

One of the top skills showing up in study after study is the ability to innovate. A study from Harvard Business Review titled, How Do Innovators Think? shed some light on what this skill might look like.

The article is based on the "innovator's DNA" and was based on interviews with some of the top innovators in the last few years - Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Steve Jobs at Apple, A.G. Laffley at P&G, Margaret Whitman and Pierre Omidyar at Ebay.

Here is my take on the top five skills of innovative leaders:

1. Associating - The ability make connections across boundaries and disciplines

2. Questioning - The ability to ask powerful questions that open up dialog like "what if", "why" and "why not"

3. Sight and Insight - The ability to "see" and observe situations and people (especially people's behaviors) and make sense of them

4. Experimenting - A willingness to try new experiences and ideas

Network leadership -

5. The ability to "travel" across multiple networks to expose you to more people and ideas.

If you distill those traits down to their essence, I think you get to the idea of an ambidextrous thinker. One who is curious and can think creatively and critically, able to access both sides of their brain.

However the study also found that "80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas. Unless of course, they work for a company like Apple or Google." That means even if we are successful at developing these curious ambidextrous thinkers, we will still not see much innovation unless we give them time for thinking.

This is where concepts like Google's 20% time, 3Ms 15% solution, Atlassian's ShipIt (FedEx) days, and Innovation Tournaments are showing up as many companies are realizing their need to create innovation "spaces" and time for their people to think and create.

Which brings me to a final point from the study, they busted the "lone genius" myth. Less than 15% of executives are "deeply innovative", meaning most of the "big ideas" that turned into breakthrough products and services actually came from collaboration with others. They used their thinking with others to create the innovative ideas.

This leaves me with two powerful questions to consider:

A. How can we develop these "curious and collaborative, ambidextrous thinkers in our organizations?;

B. And, how can we make time and space for the deep reflective thinking and collaboration to encourage innovation to happen more frequently?