SWE08 Recap Part 3 - Tips for being an Innovator

This year, I was really drawn to sessions on change an innovation. The Art of Engineering session (see previous post) certainly fit this category. A later session on Innovation in Organizations also had a few interesting items. The presenter, Nirmala Krishnan, talked about the concept of the “Zero Gravity Thinker”, or the person that is not weighed down and brings new ideas and perspective to the team. Generally, this person’s primary expertise in is a related area to the topic for innovation or is a person new to the area. Also, this is often someone who is well-rounded and open to new ideas, and is willing and able to speak up. As the details of this individual were defined, I realized that this is the role that I have been filling in my own group for the past few months. She also mentioned that similar to the issue of “Group think”, an obstacle to innovation can be “Expert think”. This is when the team is antagonistic to new concepts and falls back on automatic answers and “good enough” solutions. The “Zero gravity thinker” is there to push the team to explore new concepts and push the experts to think out of the box. For a culture of innovation, the environment should be one that embraces playfulness, supports risk taking and allows for flexibility. It has to be okay to try new things and find out that they don’t work.

Friday's first event was a panel of Technical leaders on "Women Engineers as Change" agents. The panelists offered their own approaches to initiating change, dealing with difficult times, and facilitating support for innovative solutions. Amber Huffman, a principal engineer at Intel, was highly entertaining in her own right and said several things that will stick with me for a while. My favorite was "Not everyone has to like you. In fact, it's a good thing if the right people hate you." I'm still working out exactly what she meant, but I know am always focused on making other people happy and keeping the peace and so I'm taking it into consideration. My best interpretation is that if you are pushing the boundaries of what people are comfortable with, some people aren't going to like it. If you don't get some push back, you may not be driving change.

The last session I attended was on "Six Thinking Hats". My gut reaction to this title is that this sounds like a kind of gimmicky technique and we already have plenty of those. I changed my mind when Rachel Hutter described what it actually is in her session. The Six Hats are different styles of thinking, and in a group problem-solving session they are used to facilitate "parallel" thinking. What really intrigued me about this was the contrast between my experience of brainstorming sessions, which often seem to go in circles, and the idea that a groups thinking could be harnessed in one direction. In the session, we did a quick trial run which was fun, and also a nice way to get to know others who attended. This is definitely a tool I can use and bring back to GE and I took the first opportunity to try it out with my team already this week.