How To Be Innovative – Day 22 – Be Selective With Scarcity

In order to encourage innovation, you must be willing to be selective with scarcity. So, what does this mean? In short, you need to have limits on things which, when present in large quantities, can destroy your attempts at innovation. There are three main factors where you must limit wasted resources upon.

• The first is time. Wasted time can absolutely destroy projects and by extension innovation. A key restraint to put into place is how much time you allocate to a project or task before it is time to abandon it. This is similar to investing whereby you must put stop/losses in place to limit wasted spend on a bad investment. A stop/loss essentially is the point at which an investment losing money is sold in order to limit how much is lost. In a similar way you need a process whereby you know when to stop a particular activity before it starts costing too much time or money. A simple way of doing this is setting tight deadlines to encourage progress.
• The second is about where to focus. Be very clear about what tasks are most important to focus on. Other more simplifies tasks can be outsourced. By having clear goals, tasks and where team members should be spending their time allows them to focus on innovation and the task at hand rather than worrying about what they should be doing.
• Finally the number of decision makers should not be too large. Having too many decision makers will result in something which is acceptable to many but fantastic to no one. Realistically you want maximum one or two key decision makers for overall big decisions and then sub team leaders who can make the smaller day to day decisions based on following the big decisions that have already been made.