Diversity, Risk and Innovation Growth

Brain Leaders and Learners is a consistently interesting and challenging blog that is worth a visit…if not subscription. Simply because it is very easy to just get on and do rather than to think, question and create. The following is an extract from a recent article.

My interest is two-fold.Firstly, who doesn’t want to develop their intelligence!? Secondly, complexity is often referred to as problem-solving capability…

Originator of multiple intelligences, Harvard’s Howard Gardner,  defines intelligence as … “the ability to solve real-life problems, to generate new problems, and to create something meaningful or offer a service that is valued within a person’s culture or community.”

Are you moving in the direction of innovative renewal? It takes a plan that’s rarely easy, and sometimes suffers heat from others’ risks.

Risk-taking tactics, open segues to filing work digitally across departments, as a way to avoid paper piles, open more access to organizational goals and save time.  Can help the old guard to leap over a few routines and ruts that hold back innovative growth.

Let your brain lead you past limitations and ruts

If you believe IQ is fixed and business is stuck in recession without options, then stagnation may be ensured at work, because brains either fuel or limit growth through mental plasticity. More intelligence at work relies on multiple intelligences, and leaders who expect dendrite brain cells to reconfigure for higher IQ in multiple domains. MITA brain based approaches facilitate originality through many mental and technological portals, such as multiple intelligences, built into strategies online.  How so?

1. Looking for more linguistic intelligence? Want words to come easier, ads to mean more, speeches to ring truer, or books to yield innovative action? Then play with words, do crosswords, join a list serve discussion, compete in scrabble, debate, or offer to speak to leadership conference. Search for new ideas on the internet, write a blog.  Or tell your best idea in a Tweet of 140 letters or less.  To develop words and language daily is to boost your linguistic brainpower, which includes mastery over language.

2. Interested in more musical intelligence? Want music to move and shake workplace creative designs? Listen to Gregorian Chant to move you out of stress. Play Bach or Handel to plan your next team project. Toss tunes from Shumann, Chopin or Liszt into your romance and watch it grow. Or gain inspiration from Soul, Blues or Calypso. Don Campbell shows how to gain musical intelligence to jack up workplace productivity, or to improve moods on a bad day.

3. Want more intrapersonal intelligence? Leaders need intuitive brainpower for better decisions, common sense for keen insights, contentment in your own company, simple ability to laugh more on a busy day.  Thanks to neurogenesis, we now know these intrapersonal traits (that grow novel leadership) also increase with use. Panic a bit too fast? Feel side-lined a bit too much? Run from risks or new adventures? Grow sad when others celebrate family ties without you? Leaders who enjoy a heaping dose of intrapersonal smarts,  add contentment and turn tough challenges (such as attack from another)  into opportunities to move forward without sinking.

4. Need more bodily kinaesthetic intelligence? Would you like to exercise better? Then step and move beside a person who stays fit. Leaders who make deals and share insights on the  golf course, simply learn to shuffle and stretch in ways that grow more memory within body muscles themselves. It’s much the same for building websites or moving to Wii tasks, where the brain kicks into kinaesthetic mode.  With daily acts leaders shift into movement.  Gears rev to  zap innovation alive when you act on ideas. New research also shows how it depends less on age or physical limitations,  that limit too many traditional workplaces.

5. Dream of more mathematical or logical intelligence? Leaders who create organized schedules to plan the next week, develop more of this intelligence with each schedule that advances them to targets.  Since sequencing and patterning is at math smart’s core, so’s organization at the heart of math IQ and seeing the bigger picture through numbers or patterns. Unlike other intelligences, mathematical leaders lead more through math ideas that move people and profit forward. Highly successful leaders who are strong in this IQ, model how mistakes add growth.  In contrast rigid workplaces use errors in math thinking, as arrows to kill a brain’s best. It works well to increase novelty that fits all, and it differs from the way we tend to do business. Einstein’s words that learning’s what remains after one’s forgotten everything learned in school, are relevant to innovation growth, that requires different leadership skills.

6. After more visual or spatial intelligence? Ask any marketing team to grab a paper along with anything that writes – and sketch their funniest marketing memory in the last few weeks. There is no need to attend an art class, or learn to paint, to grow spatial IQ at work. It’s true that highly spatial leaders may visit galleries, surround their offices with images that teach more about leadership, or create an avatar to show their novel thoughts to an online community. But most leaders graph ideas, select visuals to explain life, or take photographs to record the work of experts.  Like the other intelligences, spatially intelligent leaders  can facilitate others to develop more visual intelligence through use.

7. Into higher interpersonal intelligence? A leader who interview a person in order to discover what makes that person successful, is growing interpersonal IQ? It also comes to those who ask of peers, How are you smart?” rather than the passé question How smart are you? Most leaders agree that people high in interpersonal intelligence will come away from conflict with solutions in mind, rather than retribution.  Because they let go of the need to be liked by all, even controversial exchanges offer opportunity to expand innovative approaches through a leader’s interpersonal acumen.

8. Long for more naturalistic intelligence? Leaders who take time to breathe in refreshing scents of spring, surround themselves by sounds of brooks running, model high naturalistic IQ.  At work they may captivate changes in design as nature changes for different seasons, or show naturalistic intelligence, by the way they use patterns in nature to address problems at work. Naturalistically strong leaders gain more by using patterns and designs found outside to solve problem faced in any situation. Soil types, animal or tree patterns, or rock formations – all amount to nature’s wisdom that converts into novel business approaches.

MITA  facilitates workers to value multiple talents developed for innovative workplaces. To illustrate strengths that could renew a workplace, for instance  – use a flip video camera – to record 3 minutes of each intelligence in action.

It may be far too simple to say use it or lose it, when you consider that people possess more than one or two intelligences. For better balance innovative leaders take brainpower to new levels.

http://www.brainleadersandlearners.com/multiple-intelligences/diversity-risk-and-innovation-gowth/