Ideas Abounding

I’m in Dallas for the next couple of days participating in an event called the Ideation Experience put on by my friends at Leadership Network.  The Ideation Experience is defined to help church leaders “amplify, refine and generate new Kingdom ideas.”  For the next couple of days I’ll be hanging out with some great thinkers.  Can’t wait to see what happens!

Our speaker/thought leader for this experience is John Handy.  John was formerly the Sr. VP of Product Design at Mattel, Inc.  He has also built a unique resort in Big Sur, CA called Treebones Resort and is the now the President of Red Stilts, Inc.  John’s a brilliant thinker… he’s already stretching me.

Here are some notes I took from today:

The 3 “I”s of Innovation:

• Inspiration
• Ideation
• Implementation

Inspiration is a call to adventure. It’s specific, bold, challenging, risk of failure, capturing the imagination, brings out the best, visible goals.

• “Someday” dreams don’t mean anything.
• Live in the world of possibilities.
• “No”, does not mean no; there’s usually a way around it.  (Don’t tell my staff this 🙂 )
• “Can’t”, usually means it hasn’t been done yet.

Take your ideas to the Edge:

• scare me/thrill me
• let the “how to” be subservient to “the greatness”
• seek “pent-up demand”
• revolution (brand new) not evolution (evolved)
• make it newsworthy

Take “inspirational” tours:

• take a fresh unbiased look
• everybody you meet can hold the keys to inspiration
• look deeper – What’s the rest of the story?  What’s the story behind what I see?
• explore the bigger meaning
• go inside the mind of the creators
• understand the cultural significance
• relate your learning to your project

What’s the last thing that you did that stretched your thinking?