Using Creative Tension to Integrate Improvement & Innivation

Using Creative Tension to Integrate Improvement and Innovation

The Challenge

As an educator and champion for both innovation and improvement, I recognize the tension between improvement and innovation many people express today. Peter Senge’s concept of Creative Tension (Senge, 1994) epitomizes this dilemma.

It involves formulating a coherent picture of the results people most desire to gain as individuals (the vision), alongside a realistic assessment of the current state of their lives today (the current reality).The challenge is to learn to expand our capacity to use improvement and innovation methods interactively when addressing projects and to avoid compartmentalizing them into mutually exclusive groups.

A Possible Solution

My vision is for an integrated set of methods and tools for improvement and innovation that people can use interchangeably for both improvement and innovation projects. The Current Reality is a fragmented set of tools, one for improvement and the other for innovation.

If we can step out of our traditional comfort zones and learn from best practices in use today, we can learn to integrate improvement and innovation practices to create powerful, unparalleled and sustainable business results.

I am not alone in this vision. The following “Word Cloud” shows prominence to words from a recent workshop on integrating improvement and innovation.

Google Search Trends

In a recent TRIZ conference, the Key Note Speaker, Larry Smith, a retired executive from Ford Motor Company, presented some interesting statistics on current trends from Google with respect to searches about improvement and innovation. In essence trends for use of TRIZ have declined in recent years while trends for use of Six Sigma have increased over the same time period.

To see Mr. Smith’s entire presentation go to the Altshuller Institute’s Community of Practice: https://aitriz.org/groupjive

What’s Next?

Integrating improvement and innovation methods into an overall quality system seems like an approach that could eliminate the potential conflict between improvement and innovation methods. To be effective, we will need to manage improvement and innovation within the Quality Systems and use measures for improvement and innovation, as well as audit the use of both for appropriate use of resources.

In future blogs we will explore whether such a formal approach to innovation is possible. Stay tuned.

All the best,

Visit our blog @ blog.post.edu

President, Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies

Visit our blog @ https://aitriz.org/triz-quality

References

senge, p. (1994). strategies for developing personal mastery. the fifth discipline fieldbook (pp. 195-196). new york: doubleday.