You want to be innovative these days? Start with kindness! Now there's a good idea!

Idea Champions
Mitch Ditkoff
Storytelling for the Revolution
Illustration: gapingvoid

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)

Here's your comic relief for the day, especially if you are a teacher (or parent) faced with the challenge of transitioning from traditional classroom learning to online, distance learning. I tip my hat to the thousands of dedicated teachers around the world who are making a heroic effort, in a very short amount of time, to make the changes necessary to adapt to these challenging times. Here's to resiliency and adaptability! Here's to creativity and collaboration. And here's to keeping our sense of humor and good cheer all along the way!

A special shout out to the teachers and staff of Al Siraat College, in Epping, Australia, for the extraordinary effort they are making to rise to the occasion!

And big thanks to Mr. Vis for showing this video at Day #1 of Al Siraat's three-day teaching training.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:07 AM | Comments (0)

Here's something I've been noticing lately:

Business leaders and managers tend to respond to the introduction of a new idea not as an imminent solution to be nurtured, but as a new problem to deal with. Ideas, one would think, would be welcomed, especially by an organization's movers and shakers talking the talk about innovation.

But all too often a company's leaders, time-crunched and overloaded as they are, perceive the introduction of a new idea as simply "more work" for them to do, the early warning sign of too many emails to read, more meetings to attend, more requests for funding, and more conflicting opinions.

Perhaps this is why so many managers respond to the articulation of a new idea with knee jerk naysaying instead of heartfelt open-mindedness. And you wonder why innovation in your organization is so sluggish...

What can you do to reframe the way you perceive ideas being pitched to you on the job -- from "problems" to "opportunities?"

MitchDitkoff.com
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:05 AM | Comments (1)

1. "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi

2. "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Lewis Carroll

3. "I'm grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes." - Eckart Tolle

4. "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." - Miguel de Cervantes

5. "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do." - Henry Moore

6. "It's kind of fun to do the impossible!" - Walt Disney

7. "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." - Mark Twain

8. "What is now proved, was once only imagined." - William Blake

9."There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. There are a thousand ways to go home again." - Rumi

10. "The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

11. "Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing." - John Andrew Holmes

12. "Whether you believe you can or not, you're right." - Henry Ford

13. "God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed. That is the meaning of evolution." - Graham Greene

14. "Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision." - V.S. Naipaul

15. "I don't regret a single excess of my responsive youth. I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace." - Henry James

16. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

17. "The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious." - John Sculley

18. "One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king." - Abraham Maslow

19. "When nothing is sure, everything is possible."> - Margaret Drabble

20. "We all have possibilities we don't know about. We can do things we don't even dream we can do." - Dale Carnegie

21. "An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to." - Laurence J. Peter

22. "The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react." - George Bernard Shaw

23. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." - Albert Einstein

24. "I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist." - Max Lerner

25. "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"- Soren Kierkegaard

26. "All things are possible until they are proved impossible. Even the impossible may only be so, as of now." - Pearl S. Buck

27. "Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great." - Cher

28. "This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work." - Bette Davis

29. "You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices."- Deepak Chopra

30. "Some people see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw

31. "The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." - John Lennon

32. "I love those who yearn for the impossible." - Goethe

33. "Every man is an impossibility until he is born." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

34. "If you can't, you must. If you must, you can." - Tony Robbins

35. "A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility." - Aristotle

36. "If someone says can't, that shows you what to do." - John Cage

37. "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

38. "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." - Mark Twain

39. "Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done." - Louis D. Brandeis

40. "The possible's slow fuse is lit by the imagination." - Emily Dickinson

41. "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso

42. "If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." - Thomas Edison

43. "Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart." - Rumi

44. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau

45. "Everything you can imagine in real." - Picasso

46. "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." - Martin Luther

47. "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." - James Dean

48. "I don't dream at night, I dream all day. I dream for a living."
- Steven Spielberg

49. "The shell must break before the bird can fly." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

50. "If not you, who? If not now, when?" - Rabbi Hillel

Al Siraat College
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:11 PM | Comments (2)

ILLUSTRATION gapingvoid

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)

If you are a Team Leader, one of the first things you will need to do (if you haven't done so already) is let your team know the full scope of your roles and responsibilities. You may think they know, but it's very likely that they don't -- at least not at the level of specificity that a high performing team requires. And if team members don't understand what you actually DO -- and WHY you do it -- chances are good that they will resist, rebel, or reject your efforts to play your role.

1. HOW TO PROCEED: As soon as possible, meet with your team and explain the scope of your role. If you happen to be a new team leader (and your team is doubtful of your skills, leadership ability, or authority), let them know, who, specifically, in your organization, has empowered you to BE the Team Leader and that you take your responsibility very seriously.

Be sure to mention that one of your main roles is to be a helpful resource for team members -- to be there for them to help ensure that they enjoy their job, learn, grow, collaborate, and accomplish their ambitious performance goals for the year.

NOTE: Some members of your team probably perceive you as the person who is going to judge, evaluate, correct, criticize, intimidate, and hassle them. Paranoia alert! This is old school thinking. Or more like pre-school thinking. A savvy team leader will quickly dispel this bogus notion. The faster you can let your team know that the essence of your role is be of of major support to them, the better.

2. BE SPECIFIC ABOUT YOUR ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: The term "Team Leader" will mean different things to different people. Unless you explain precisely what your role is (and what it's not), you will be at the mercy of your team members' wide range of concepts, assumptions, and projections. The best way to minimize this kind of background noise is to clearly and confidently describe, one by one, your Team Leader roles and responsibilities.

Towards that end, take a look at the list of your possible roles and responsibilities below. Note the ones that accurately describe your job and add whatever items may be missing.

-- Help your team articulate and fulfill its mission statement
-- Listen non-judgmentally, with the intent to understand
-- Share your expectations for the year
-- Establish and uphold standards of excellence
-- Facilitate the process of establishing team agreements
-- Work with team members to set performance goals
-- Observe and evaluate performance on-the-job
-- Give useful, humane, and timely feedback
-- Coach and mentor
-- Clarify team members' roles and responsibilities
-- Hold people accountable for results
-- Identify, clarify, and communicate team processes
-- Facilitate team meetings
-- Secure resources for the team
-- Ensure that team members create their Learning Plans for the year
-- Promote the teams' successes to Senior Leadership
-- Establish a simple, inspiring ideation process
-- Conduct performance reviews
-- Acknowledge individual and team progress
-- Address team challenges, conflicts, and breakdowns
-- Do everything possible to ensure the team's well-being

NOTE: I am not suggesting that you do ALL of the above. I am just providing you with a trigger list to quicken your process of getting your arms around what the scope of your team leadership role really is.

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PHOTO: Perry Grone, Unsplash

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)