There is plenty of content about innovation out on the web, plenty of books on the business shelves of book stores, on Amazon – it’s everywhere you look. The problem with most of it, is that it is an attempt to sell people on methodologies that will lead them right back into their most habitual modes of thinking: where innovation is least likely to happen. They often include step-by-step procedures, with arbitrary cause-effect justifications, the sort of things that have gotten you blocked to begin with.
You’re a natural. You just need to get out of your way, and should be able to reel off ideas endlessly and effortlessly, in kaleidoscopal meshes and varieties, and never be caught without a solution. The problem is we have been expertly taught, programmed may be a better term, to rigidify our thinking along the lines of countless structures that have been sold to us, either by the education systems we’ve encountered, or the processes we have in place at work. Many of these methodologies are created with the best intentions, and they were themselves innovations. But after a while their sole function is to allow for the creation of cottage industries, opportunities for income for the trainers and owners who have trademarked their own versions of them. People will pay for certifications and to have the acronyms dangling off the end of their names, but everything these programs teach, if not used wisely, will just become more grit in the gears and make your intelligence go bye-bye.
You shouldn’t need certifications. It’s okay to have them, but they are really made up of the parts of things you already have access to from a rudimentary public education, and from living. And most of what these programs teach are structures that need to be taken apart, piece by piece, and adapted to your purposes, anyway, so you really end up with the parts you started with, perhaps with a new set of connections to refer to, at best. Sure, to a certain extent, more grist for the mill is always a good thing, but there is an endless supply of resources outside the business toolkit bookshelf. You have the entire Western Canon, for one thing, and every other foolish thing that’s ever been written.
You shouldn’t need certifications because everything they teach is something you can make up, with a little ingenuity, utilizing the things you’ve learned from observation, books, from having accomplished things, with perhaps the experience of having to have endured working with people who have been OCD about making sure you have followed the correct procedures.
We are hypnotized by “process.” I’m not saying that things like the Waterfall and Scrum methodologies you’re using are wrong. In fact, you are not likely using them 100%, more likely a blend, with elements of other things, conditions that have been imposed upon you, contractual obligations, a particular sales strategy, the leadership styles within the organization. It is not the structured methodologies you have been trained in that define your value, however, but how you veer from the playbook, adapt, and apply everything you know, whether it is a well-identified business strategy, a habit you picked up when you were young, or something gleaned from a movie you most recently viewed.
The certifications each imply a story about how things get done, and that’s fine because stories are how we learn things best, from the time you were getting indoctrinated with a work-ethic via The Three Little Pigs, to how the founding fathers envisioned the US constitution, and how the graphical user interface evolved residually, in part, as a battle between the egos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
You don’t innovate by telling the same story you told about every other project you’ve done in the past, only changing the name of one of the characters to Innovation, expecting the word to somehow yield a magical vibratory effect over the behavior of your team and the results of your efforts. You don’t innovate by scheduling innovation sessions into the tried and true, fixed narrative of your project methodology. You innovate by writing a completely different story altogether.