A few weeks ago I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

One of the standout presentations was by Gentry Underwood of IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm.

In his presentation, Gentry spoke about the concept of Design Thinking. According to Gentry, Design Thinking is the overlap of business need, technological ability, and a user’s needs and desires.

Far too often in HR, we ignore our two most important markets – the business and the people who user our products.

Let’s fix that.

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It’s kind of a joke, but we’re proudly “without business plan” in our 13th year. We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, “What is your greatest failure?” I always have the same answer – We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!

- Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners

To be an HR rockstar, you need to do great things. And to do great things, you need to you need to be comfortable with failure.

Because you can’t do and create awesome stuff if you’re afraid to try new things. And if you try new things, you absolutely will fail. Often. You need to be ok with that.

Coudal Partners makes these awesome notebooks, Field Notes. People who follow me on Twitter know that I’m pretty obsessed with them right now. They’re small, which forces me to boil my ideas down to the most essential, core elements. And they’re made of cardboard, so I don’t feel bad beating them up a bit.

But I digress.

Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners was interviewed by Design Glut last year. In the interview, Jim talks about their successes, their failures, and living without a business plan.

It’s a great interview. Go check it out!

(Hat tip to Nick Cernis of Modern Nerd for letting me know about it.)

Click Here to Read the Full Interview

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I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

- Thomas Edison

Being innovative doesn’t mean coming up with lots of great ideas. It means failing – over and over again – until you find a great idea that actually works.

That’s not to say that failure always leads to innovation. But innovation can’t happen if you’re not ok with failing – a lot.

If you want to create an innovative workforce, create a culture that celebrates failure as often as it celebrates success. Brilliant failure is the key to innovation.

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Image by Paul Hocksenar

This article is part of the Renegade Manifesto Series.

“That’s how we’ve always done it” isn’t a good reason to do anything. Sure, the way you’ve always done it may actually be the best way to do something. But often, it’s not.

Let’s be honest: HR is not really an “ahead of the curve” profession. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be!

Keep reading…

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It seems counter-intuitive, but limiting yourself can actually increase your productivity and innovation. Mark McGuiness of Lateral Action has an awesome article on how thinking inside the box can increase your creativity.

To underscore the point, Mark walks you through a short exercise where you’re provided an increasing set of limitations. Head over there, try it out for yourself, and see what you learn. (It’s ok – I’ll wait)

Welcome back! Does this give you any insight into how you develop HR programs? As an HR pro, I’ve often been frustrated with the limitations that many organizations put on HR that other departments (like Sales) don’t always have to deal with: smaller staff, smaller budgets, less strategic involvement.

In a way, these limitations may be a blessing in disguise. They free you to be more creative and innovative about the programs you create and implement.

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Social media is moving from the dorm room to the office. Today, I’m going to show you how you can leverage this powerful medium to increase productivity, improve communication, and create a culture that promotes innovation and collaboration.

Keep reading…

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Fast Company has a great article on how innovation led to the creation of the first phone to run a Google-based operating system. A quick teaser:

Inside Magic Labs there are people from a diversity of different backgrounds. We of course have software magicians, hardware magicians, electrical people, people with mechanical engineering backgrounds, graphic designers, usability experts. One of the magicians used to design jewelry in New York. The whole organization is designed to fail.

Fast Company: What do you mean by designed to fail?

The way to get a great idea is to have many ideas. By definition, most of your ideas will fail. You want to be able to generate ideas very fast, very cheaply and fail very often but at very low cost. Magic Labs is optimized for the efficiency of failure. Among the many ideas, there will be great ideas that bubble up and then we will invest R&D efforts to cultivate the great ideas.

Definitely a worthwhile read, with some interesting ideas on how innovation becomes part of a culture. Check it out, and let me know what you think – leave a comment below.

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