Addicted to Innovation
Leaders, thinkers, and creatives tend to love the art of innovation: let’s try this thing or what if we did x or simply hey, what if…?
And there’s nothing wrong with innovation. God created us to be creative people: to reason, to design, to build, to be artists and scientists and authors and inventors. When an eternally innovative God gives us innovative wiring, we should innovate.
The problem is innovation for innovation’s sake. I fear that too many times, we invent because we can, not because it’s necessary. In leadership, we fail to give the old system time to settle before we toss it out in favor of a new system. We look towards all the problems that the new invention will solve, rather than looking at the problems that the dissolving of the old system will create.
I’m certainly not immune to this. While my personality tends to lean towards tweaking systems rather than inventing or overhauling systems, I can easily be lured by this new software or that new methodology that’s going to simplify everything. The problem is, it usually simplifies very little and quite often just adds complexity or confusion that wasn’t there before.
If you’re in leadership, it can be hard to draw the line between innovation that actually helps others and innovation that simply serves ourselves. In the next post, we’ll look at some key indicators that may reveal that we’re addicted to the art of innovation.
