{"id":3969,"date":"2017-05-08T08:52:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T08:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/pecked-to-death\/"},"modified":"2017-05-08T08:52:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-08T08:52:00","slug":"pecked-to-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/pecked-to-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t let our crazy orthogonal ideas be pecked to death by negativity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to spend some time talking with the head of IT of a large transportation company – and we talked about the future of his job and the most important things impacting his role. When I asked him what was the main issue getting in the way of him adding value to his business, he said it was a cloying inertia brought about by a thick soup of negative thinking.<\/p>\n
The number of people in his organization that focus on the way things have been done in the past<\/em> and the reasons why things can’t change, were a source of incredible frustration to him. Incremental change was possible, colleagues understand how processes evolve, so innovation could be staged, but it was very hard to implement anything totally new<\/em>. We joked that original thinking was being pecked to death by negativity, like a flock of miserable seagulls.<\/p>\n As an analyst, this is something really close to my heart – if we are to produce anything that approaches original thinking, we need an environment where ideas are cherished and even the craziest thought is welcome – although it will ultimately need to stand up to scrutiny, the original thought can’t be wrong. It’s only when you make cerebral room to nurture some crazy, orthogonal thinking do you create inspirational work like the Digital OneOffice<\/a>.<\/p>\n So what needs to happen, how can this change? How can we get people to take leaps of thought rather than increments?<\/p>\n