Innovation is a messy endeavour. You never know whether you are heading in the right direction and you fail all the time. A lot, if not most, of your ideas are useless, impractical and just fluff. To an outsider, it looks like you are wasting a lot of resources and meandering around aimlessly. In an organization, the sense that innovation is just a giant waste of time and a drag on the rest of the organization can feel acute.
Innovation is also necessary, both in our personal lives and the organizations we work in. How else would one break new ground? How can an organization solve problems better, faster and cheaper in ways that they don't already know? How can we discover new green fields to play in if we don't lift our heads up and look around and beyond?
The question is, how do we manage the tension between the chaos of creative forces and the orderly march towards realizing real world benefits, both in our personal lives and our organizations? How do we meander effectively?
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