MAKING DISRUPTIVE THINKING HAPPEN IN A BUSINESS

Staying competitive demands organizations continually question status quos and assumptions to envision better solutions. While innovators naturally disrupt paradigms, leaders can spur more creative thinking across all teams, not just formal R&D groups. Here are 10 tactics for sparking wider disruptive reflections.

1. Allocate meeting time for wondering not just planning. Let imaginations run wild before assessing feasibility. Separate divergent creative thinking from practical execution.

2. Assign designated contrarians to argue against prevailing ideas or habitual workflows. Force defending orthodoxy. The clash stretches mental models.

3. Offer classes on critical thinking, design principles and meditative reflection to build skills for probing deeper perspectives beyond surface interpretations. Train cognitive muscles.

4. Schedule site visits to pioneering companies, laboratories, and startups in different industries. Exposure to radical projects provides inspiration to envision without limits back home.

5. Incentivize market research reports on customer irritations and emerging substitutes that undermine current products. Understanding pain points and competition creates urgency to act differently.

6. Reward intelligent failures from experimentation and testing new concepts that did not pan out as hoped. All innovations begin with stepping stones. Ask what was learned.

7. Mix-up teams across specialty silos that normally do not intermingle to spur cross-pollination of insights from other fields. Multidisciplinary collaboration breaks either/or constraints.

8. Celebrate user-focused improvements and iterations as much as net new products. Continual refinement also requires creativity and listening that unlocks bigger innovations down the road through building trust and reciprocity with customers.

9. Encourage sabbaticals for restless talents to explore alternate spaces apart from daily demands that may inspire fresh connections rising upon returning. Detachment fuels future reattachment.

10. Most importantly, model relentless curiosity yourself by welcoming criticism, reconsidering past decisions with humility, and verbalizing wonderings out loud to issue permission for teams to similarly express unfinished ideas that departure from convention.