“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson
There is an exercise I do with colleagues that helps me articulate the problem ‘Fear’ creates when teams are trying to create new products or services. This exercise starts with the group receiving a pencil and a piece of paper and are asked to get into pairs. The pairs then have 30 seconds to draw a portrait of each other. Inevitably you begin to hear lots of apologies and real sense of awkwardness. I came across this exercise while watching a TED talk by Tim Brown (CEO & President of IDEO) and it really resonated with me and highlighted the negative impactive ‘‘Fear’ has on what we do every day.
‘Fear’ is the biggest killer of innovation. If a team starts the innovation process with a conservative mindset they will only ever create conservative ideas as this will be through ‘Fear’ of what others will think of your ideas.
This article talks about ‘emotion’ being the key to successful innovation and the extract below perfectly describes the problem we have today when trying to create innovative solutions in any industry.
“Innovation is not just a cognitive process. It’s emotional. It requires doing something new or novel, and that can be scary because it requires the courage to enter the unknown and it involves learning from experimental failures. Many of us learned as children that success comes from making the fewest mistakes. We learned to avoid making mistakes and looking stupid. We also developed emotional defences to protect our views of ourselves — to protect our ego. Protecting our ego and fear are the two big emotional inhibitors of innovation.”
To overcome this it is vital to encourage and reward fearless thinking and doing. This doesn’t mean taking unnecessary risks but to get the starting point right, open minds and think unbounded. In a world full of science and algorithms emotional intelligence and creativity play a big part in how we create innovations of true value.
