Sowing Seeds of Insight and Innovation

Digital transformations are actually transformations of mindset, business model, culture, and operations. These are people problems, in the main, not technology issues. Unless you have an ambitious and articulated strategy and a map for aligning all of the people who make up the culture, sorry, but the effort will drown in the quicksand of company politics, quagmired in a lack of hands-on, enterprise-wide change management training.

You can see the rise of whiteboards and bean bags instead of desks, maker spaces, flex areas, collaboration zones, as well as more media-editing suites. Some of these schools look like a Design Studio or Architecture firm. Even a big educational book publisher, like Pearson, offer a suite of products with such transformational taglines as “Learning Without Limits” these products and services include helping school systems change their approach to education from the classroom layout to their entire orientation to curriculum.

Innovators need to be driven by purpose, spend some quiet time deeply thinking each day, and be afflicted with an undying curiosity to thrive.

As you start a strategic process or an innovation discipline, bring in those who will force you to confront your own blind spots, get off your old soapboxes, and generate some new thinking.

For a little more than a year, I’ve been involved with ECHO, an organization that helps people start charitable clinics based on the model of Church Health in Memphis. ECHO has ambitions to make a huge positive affect on creating access to high-quality healthcare for the underserved.

It will be a big deal if we reach our goals. Getting there will be difficult. In trying, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about what it takes to make a big difference. But I think it ultimately comes down to one thing:

Courage.

Ask a nonprofit professional how her work is going, and you will likely be met with a passionate conversation about the difference she is making in the lives of her clients. Ask her how she is evaluating her program and the response will probably be less enthusiastic. You may hear about how many clients were served by the agency in a given time period or a dispassionate recounting of statistical information. Worse still, she may not have an answer at all!