Embed Innovation Systematically – Eric’s Story

I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will begin creating a Personal Transformation Log. With this, we will know how to track our actual behaviors toward our goals, measure progress, and compare them to expected behaviors and progress. As always, my responses are in italics, which you can use to strengthen your understanding of the question. The next part of this post will give you real-world application suggestions.

Real World Application: Expect the Unexpected & Fail Fast

While it’s important to focus on what’s in front of you in the present, it’s also important to consider the future. As you progress on your current goals and you’re in a good rhythm, take a few moments occasionally to consider what goals you could set. Consider upcoming events, such as job hunting or graduate school programs. What kind of skills and behaviors would you like to develop by then? Another important thing is to take unpredictable events into account.

One thing guaranteed is that some completely unexpected and uncontrollable events will happen in your life, which could greatly impact your short- and long-term goals. Due to this, it may be worth considering strengthening your resilience and problem-solving skills/behaviors when setting goals in the future.

Remember, failure is natural, and no one is perfect. View mistakes and failure as an opportunity to learn. After all, the only true failure is failure to try.  Remember to think like a scientist and use experiments or constant trial-and-error. We like to use the term “fail fast”, meaning the faster you figure out what does not work, the faster you can determine what does.

In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to systematically strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation.  

Photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua