Introducing novelty

It is somewhat ironic that the introduction of new ideas will benefit and harm the human system. We yield benefits when people truly understand the target outcomes and can work towards them in a self-learning fashion. On the other hand, introducing novelty could risk:

• Misaligning the application of a solution to the problem. Often is met with phrases like “Why did we even do this?” “How is this supposed to make things better? Solution misalignment is prevalent in situations requiring people to think differently about how they approach problem-solving. More often than not, we will try to apply our traditional problem-solving strategies through the novel solution, which leads to frustration, waste, and inevitably rejection - or worse, a less than adequate function positioning, which can cause an organization to suffer exponential losses in productivity.
• Rushing towards a solution without fully understanding the problem and the people around it. We might have a good way of solving a problem, but if the people that need to apply or support it cannot get on board, the organization will struggle to make the progress they initially hoped to achieve.

Exercise

Please take a moment to recognize a time when something new came into your world, and you rejected it.

• Was this change intended to help you in some way?
• What could those that presented this new idea to you have done differently that would have kept you engaged?
    – Did they miss a detail? – Are we already satisfied with our current process? – Did we all agree that the current process needed to change?