The Key to Innovation …

I was very fortunate as a youngster, in that my father always encouraged my natural tendency for innovation. 

But how to do this? How do we become more innovative? Questions I have thought about over the years …. and today, I would have to say that practicing a little intellectual humility might be the most important step to take on this most-awesome quest.

Intellectual humility is being open to the (likely) possibility that we don’t know everything about a given subject. Further, we might even (on occasion) be called upon to admit that what we believe about a thing, might actually be wrong. Yikes.

By opening up to the, very real, possibility that we don’t know everything there is to know about a thing - we create opportunities to see that thing in a new light. This, get’s us out of our ‘thought rut’ - we begin to build more and more ‘outside of the box’ perspectives … which leads to innovation.

It al begins with a simple mix of intellectual humility and curiosity.