Making Stone Soup

In the 45 minutes I spent on the elliptical trainer this morning, I read Jeff DeGraff’s Making Stone Soup: How to Jumpstart Innovation Teams.

The title of the book caught my attention right away, and I was happy to learn what the significance of stone soup was to the practice of innovation early in the prologue.

Rather than spoiling the brew, I’ll leave it to you to discover the meaning behind this clever metaphor should you decide to read the book.

To whet your appetite, here are five key points I came away with this morning after digesting this clever little read.

First, innovation is a team sport.

While some think that it takes a genius working alone to bring new ideas to market, actually it is the ability to connect the dots among various players on a team that produces the ultimate value for an organization.

Second, connecting the dots is made possible through collaboration among team members where each individual brings different “dominant logics”.

The tension among these competing styles creates protection against any single logic from being over applied.

Third, everyone is an expert at something and no one is an expert at everything. Embracing others who are not just like us is crucial to avoid doing the same things over and over again.

Attracting others who see and do things differently than we do allows us to overcome our own shortcomings and limited perspectives.

Fourth, it often takes a lot of shots to finally score. Just like in the world of sports, where the more shots we take the more chance we have of scoring, innovation requires experimentation.

These experiments reveal what is working and what is not.

Fifth, once we know what is working and what is not, we can fine-tune our efforts, build upon what is working and cut our losses.

This of course requires an ability to stop doing certain things so that we can make the time to focus on the things that are actually working.

Easier said than done!

Enjoy your soup!