Brain Leaders and Learners » renewal

Focus on Funds for Downfall – Focus on Innovation for Growth

eweber — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:22:57 +0000

Does your organization speak more about innovation than money matters? Do leaders where you work encourage risk-taking for the sake of invention? Or do people slip into lockdown mode – where change initiatives get imprisoned by hard-line barriers of fear or stress?

Focus on Funds for Downfall

When recession first hit my area, most leaders demanded lower expenses from their employees and then tossed higher prices at clients to cover any loss. Wegmans food chain did the opposite.

Food prices lowered to help struggling customers, and new stores opened to satisfy unique needs of new markets. The result?

People flocked to Wegmans because they recognized risks taken to advance customers outranked cautions taken to save money. The human brain builds neuron pathways toward attaining more of what you focus on, while leaders who focus on money, often act against real riches that come with risking innovation, as Wegmans discovered.

Would you take more risks to advance past recession’s ruts, if you discovered brain facts that supported why money makes you unhappy anyway?

5 Vital Connections to Innovative Brainpower

eweber — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:45:28 +0000

You likely know that links between what people crave and what you can offer, requires you to connect the dots between your current position and creative prosperity. But have you ever considered how vital connections also boost innovative brainpower?

5 Vital Connections to Innovative Brainpower

The opposite is also true. Cut out your connections and by default you diminish brainpower to invent.

Rather than pack your brain with links that go nowhere, why not jettison your life and leadership forward with 5 essential connections.

Jumpstart brainpower found in highly innovative minds only, when you:

Join what you already know to what you wish to know in order to invent something new. Human brains come equipped to latch onto new facts faster if they hook to what you already know and do. How could that open new opportunities for you to start with your current talents and learn what it takes to fill an innovative niche you see – yes, even in an economic downturn.
Connect skills you are learning to insights others offer, by linking your facts to their interests. While delivering information works against the human brain, teaching others as we learn ourselves pays back 90% more in retention. Intelligent people also build prosperous alliances in this way.
Link solution possibilities to every problem encountered. Einstein constantly cultivated curiosity, for example, by linking suggested solutions to problems. While others passed over, complained about, and whined about what could be – he connected himself to the problem of relativity by imagining he rode the curve of the arc. When you look at problems with solutions in mind, the human brain builds neuron pathways to create answers you seek.
Draw together diverse people and welcome opposing views. I’ve learned during a lifetime in renewal work that to connect opposing views is to spot nuances that others miss on both sides of issues. It requires being less opinionated about most everything, and pays wonderful dividends to those who stay open-minded. For instance tradition insists on the separation of hard and soft skills, and then places these in silly hierarchies. Here at MITA we combine the best of both into what we term smart skills with the brain in mind for 21^st Century leadership strategies that work for a new era.
Join science to art and use imagination as innovative glue to intergrate. You have two well equipped sides to the human brain, and both play a keen role in highly sustainable innovation. To kindle and design ideas such as these top creative moments that hit new heights in the last decade, takes connecting the art and science from your left and right brain.

Pair these essentials together and you’ll increase neuron connections come with brainpower for new innovative heights. Make fewer connections, on the other hand, and you’ll limit your mental ability to create. Simply put, your daily connections determine your IQ growth, since increased neural connections equal higher intelligence.

Did you know that babies are born with 20 times more neural connections than adults? Why so? Experiences you have in a day - either create or diminish neural connections for creativity. Schools tend to teach by delivery and that kills connections that come from doing as people learn. Luckily it’s not all bad news.

Thanks to plasticity however, the human brain rewires new neural connections daily – based on what you do. Or you can lose connections by ruts, routines, and passivity. Does that challenge you to step outside of comfort zones, connect what has yet to fit together in your world, and spark the innovation ability in your brain and organization?

Blame it on the Brain

eweber — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:40:10 +0000

Find yourself working against growth in your career? Standing still while others ride new waves of innovation?

Rewire your Brain for Growth

If you face financial problems, relationship struggles, or workplace inertia – you can blame it on your brain. The brain’s proclivity to default to harmful ruts can cause you to work against triumph.

Luckily, that same brain offers you tools to win mind-bending breaks, even in the toughest times. How so?

Here are 25 ways to reboot brainpower and zap innovative growth plans with a few jolts from brain sciences:

1. Invent and share a refreshing solution to a stubborn work problem – solve a difficulty that leaves you bored or in a rut at work. Brain fact: Boredom is more a habit formed in brains, and shaped by daily choices, then stored in brain as a reality.

2. Uplift your work area with natural lighting. Brain fact: Environments influence brainpower, and a healthy workplace inspires people to transform problems into solutions.

3. Thank a fellow worker for a personal accomplishment. Brain fact: Well being comes partially from and is fueled by serotonin chemical hormones that accompany acts of kindness.

4. Give somebody the gift of forgiveness, and let go of a grudge. Brain fact: Anger, fear, and frustration are fueled by harmful cortisol chemical hormones that come with rancor.

5. Propose alternatives to an annoying habit or flawed practice. Brain fact: Venting is bad for the brain and creates new neuron pathways to many more complaints.

6. Act like the person you want others to see in you, and that person you’ll become. Brain fact: Dendrite brain cells use the outside world to take their shapes, and grow new connections based on what you do each day.

7. Vary your background sounds so that you add music for more motivation. Brain fact: Music changes brain wave speeds in ways that impact moods and alter your productivity.

8. Stir curiosity and engage others around you. Brain fact: Lectures and talks work against listener brains, and benefit speaker intelligence only, while failing to benefit from listener insights.

9. Shift routines up daily with lived diversity. Brain fact: Hebbian workers rewire daily for ruts and routines that kill incentives, limit focus or even shrink their brains from stress.

10. Include differences as assets. Brain fact: Common diversity training tends to fail participants mentally, by painting inclusion as a deficit model – rather than as assets added through differences.

11. Sleep well in order to perform well. Brain fact: Brain waves can bring either sleep or peak performance, based on how you activate and manage them.

12. Research and open mentally to new and different ideas daily. Brain fact: Hook even difficult facts onto one thing you know and learning increases in less time.

13. Change on regular basis. Brain fact: Your brain’s basal ganglia stores old facts and creates ruts, while working memory holds few new facts and leads change.

14. Survey and engage more strengths. Brain fact: Multiple intelligences are common to all, used by few, and can be cultivated daily with regular use as mental tools.

15. Create rather than criticize. Brain fact: Cynical or critical mindsets literally block creativity, limit talent in you or others, and stomp out innovation.

16. List key facts as guides and reminders. Brain fact: Memory can be outsourced to help you remember more, and to free your mind to focus fully on tasks in the moment.

17. Inspire novel young ideas. Brain fact: Plasticity enables people of all ages and backgrounds to rewire their brains in ways that prosper from young and agile acumen.

19. Encourage yourself and others often. Brain fact: Encouragement changes the chemistry of a brain through raised serotonin, and ratchets up tone for profitability.

19. Communicate with care, openness and honesty. Brain fact: Meta messages destroy relationships through implications that differ from actual messages spoken.

20. Integrate projects from ideas and people across many fields. Brain fact: It often takes an integration of hard and soft skills to solve problems with the brain in mind.

21. Relax and practice letting worries go. Brain fact: Stress literally shrinks the brain, and anxious tones in communication act as silent brainpower killers.

22. Seek genuine and lasting relationships at work. Brain fact: Greet colleagues through speaking people’s names, to offer spike in well being or awareness in person’s brain.

23. Risk innovative progress, one step at a time. Brain fact: Inspire creativity and invention through teaching others cutting edge approaches, at the same time you develop them.

24. Collaborate for stellar solutions. Brain fact: Create new neuron pathways through collective brainpower, to facilitate democratic solutions to workplace problems.

25. Celebrate gender proclivities. Brain fact: Women’s and men’s brain differ biologically and intellectually, for instance, in ways that few optimize.

How could these few applications from facts about your brain increase workplace brainpower and toss more innovation into your 2010?

This post appeared in SmartBrief on your Career on June 3, 2010. Thanks for your kind mention SmartBrief Editors!

Government Support for Innovation?

eweber — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:44:15 +0000

The government supports social innovation through grants that could count if it reaches your community or innovative project.

It will take strong support to move this nation’s overwhelmingly broken systems – that default daily into ruts and routines toward solutions for a finer future.

Have you felt supported in innovative business projects you lead?

Tell us how you found or still need genuine support to make a difference in leading change.

Organizational Brainpower for Innovation

eweber — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:54:37 +0000

What if you took one risk to lead a change that would improve a core practice where you work? Could that move set innovation in motion across an entire organization?

On Saturday at an RIT annual event, I spotted 5 questions about innovation that could transform indifference and lead organizational growth. At the Innovation Festival, novelty appeared to spring up at several junctures, and I captured a few snapshots while moving among young innovators.

Interestingly, I’d just read Seth Godin’s popular post on why higher education organizations meet with inevitable melt downs. Over a lifetime working with brain based change, I’ve grown convinced that innovative higher education can still lead us into the next era. But if Seth’s right, and I fear he is correct, what would it take to move more entrepreneurial minds and increase genius opportunities, on a university campus?

Often we hear people speak of innovative possibilities – and the word innovation appears – in some form or other – daily in social media commentaries. Sadly though, on a few occasions only, do we encounter glimpses of intellectual novelty operating within successful organizations.

RIT’s festival pinpointed organizational innovation in 5 missed linchpins:

1). How do successful innovators reach across differences to invent together? Organizations that look to land a fast fix or play politics, rarely bridge isolated silos of discipline, culture, gender or beliefs. It takes involvement from an institute’s top leadership, a willingness to invest time, and talent within teams that come from many sectors of society. Wonderfully creative ventures at RIT could have melded ideas from many departments had the networks been available for more mental cross-pollination. People possess multiple intelligences in different mixes that contribute to collaboration.

2). How do organizations move past lethargy to cultivate curiosity? While tenure or seniority tend toward inertia in some workplaces, innovative leaders sometimes stir interest out of organizational apathy. Using this same format, what if all organizations, in ways that RIT campus engaged in an innovation festival, celebrate innovation annually? At the MITA International Brain Center – participants create an innovative design from lessons learned, and then engage others in a Knowledge Celebration which somewhat resembles the RIT festival.

3). What kind of roadmap does innovation across an organization require? In settings where I see leaders running on treadmills, and many employees gaining no ground, pieces of the organization’s overarching plan appear to be missing or disjointed. The opposite is also true. Wherever you spot people linking new ideas successfully across departments, or producing innovative ventures that draw from differences, you also see an overarching network. Interconnected highways and bridges, clearly marked to welcome new people, and structured to accommodate diverse ideas.

4). How do innovative organizations reboot creativity rather than default to cynicism? Leaders who risk movement forward, also risk criticism that gravitates to most change agents, like iron filings to a magnet. Innovative organizations simply prize risk-taking more than reward people for routine rituals. When innovative plans are created collaboratively and presented as an incremental pathway forward, people tend to jump on board for proven results. That creative leap tends to launch a track record for sustainable innovation. Nothing stops toxins within cynicism from stomping out new ideas, like innovations that spark a finer way forward.

5). Where does innovation fit into sacrosanct organizational structures? The opposite of renewal is to regress, and regression creeps into daily rituals like chaff clings to wheat. In contrast, people find passion to create when they are part of the innovative process of a robust organization. Creative minds rarely toss more talent into the mix by accident though. First, leaders and their reports determine what sacred cows must go, in order to open new segues for an entirely different outcome. Then, a cutting edge vision, transforms new neuron pathways forward for all those involved. Where does such potent innovation start?

Simply risk to change one organizational problem that found you venting recently. Could that movement forward set mind-bending innovation in motion across an entire organization? Or could it trigger an ingenious renewal move across our nation?

The RIT’ Innovation Festival showed brilliantly how aha moments ignite innovative change, as you’ll hear in live interviews below.

1). Listen to Dr. Jon Schull tell how arts and science came together at RIT’s Innovation Festival - on Studio 86.

2). Hear Imagine RIT Festival as RIT President, Dr. William Destler tells his side of the Innovation story, and especially note his strong support for right brain and left brain collaboration.

3). Catch Dr. Barry Culhane, share news about the 35,000 people who stopped by, and the 2000 students and faculty who ran the event. Hear how RIT journalism students caught live news during the event.

Recent Posts for Learning Renewal at Secondary and University:

1. No Brain Left Behind

2. MITA Brain Manifesto for Renewal

3. Death of Education – Dawn of Learning

4. Secondary and University with Brains in Mind

5. Parents’ Brains Belong at Secondary School

6. Renew with the Brain in Mind

7. Move Brainpower into Reconfigured Learning

8. Retention Lost in Lectures

9. Call for Simplicity that Adds Intelligence

10. 2 Footed Questions Lead Change

11. A Brain Based Dream