We’ve been trained to be unoriginal. We are highly attuned to the possibility of risk, and throughout our lives, we’ve been rewarded for homogeneous thinking. By recognizing our own limitations, we open a whole lot of room for growth. Look to create distance for your people and to create distance from your processes and your industry. This will improve your creativity, innovation, and drive to do things differently.
We wanted to include one more exercise in the conclusion that ties together a few different sections from this book. When you are struggling to break free from your own barriers, your competition, or even your customers or partners, you can try this quick change-the-game exercise. It doesn’t need to take long or be too official, but try filling out the table below.
In the “Current state” column, outline your team, processes, competition, audience, and offering in the rows provided. Then, fill out the “Radical change ideas” column and include an out-there or crazy-different idea for how you could change each of the things you outlined in the rows under “Current state.” Once you’re done, take some time to brainstorm the happy medium between “Current state” and “Radical change.” What is one innovation or idea that is easy to implement and points your team or company in a more radical direction? Capture the results of that brainstorm under the column “Incremental change ideas.”
Try this exercise every couple of months — you can select one audience or one process to focus on each time. Don’t tackle it all at once!
|
Innovation |
Current state |
Incremental change ideas |
Radical change ideas |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Change the team (internal management or project team) |
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Change the rules (process, delivery, operation, production) |
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Change the competition |
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Change the players (audience) |
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Change the ball (product, offering) |
Ultimately, we are often our own biggest barriers. Far too often, we get stuck in our own world. We forget to look outside of our situation, our market, or our email account and see the interesting things people are doing all around us. When we do look outside, we can quickly feel defeated and start comparing ourselves to those closest to us. It’s human instinct, but it’s not doing any of us any favors.
We hope that this book has helped you spot the areas where the Proximity Paradox is impacting your team and your work. We also hope the strategies we shared in each chapter will help you do business in a new way (or at least think about it in a new way).
We encourage you to try even a couple of the exercises in this book. And to remind you to check your proximity. It can pop up where we least expect, and once we are conscious it’s incredible to see how many of our decisions it drives.
Happy collaborating, happy distance making and happy innovating! Peace and love, we out. ☺