Story:
Reducing Workplace Toxins with Novelty that Transforms

A). Challenge: Because  research on novelty is still quite recent, some leaders insist that brain facts hold little in common with workplace prosperity. While they constantly demand proofs, naysayers tend to use few brain-compatible discoveries they verify. Leaders such as Gary Hamel, Bill George and others at the MIX, challenge organizations to ask, "Are we changing as fast as the world around us?"

Solution: Engage leaders to discover how novelty advances innovative brainpower and improves performance at work. Illustrate how the brain’s hippocampus releases a shot of dopamine in  response to novelty. Anthony Grace at the University of Pittsburgh describes a feedback loop that involves a chemical and electrical interactions between dopamine and novel or unexpected events, for example. This lively process appears to lock in memory, as it also engages the amygdala where the brain processes emotional information.

B). Challenge: Even after research proves that novelty stokes memory and kick-starts brainpower, why are many workers still so set in their ways? Henry David Thoreau bemoaned a lack of novelty observed daily: “There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.” Was Thoreau describing more here of what we tolerate or inspiring what we can innovate through brain based strategies?

Solution: Illustrate in interactive meetings or staff development sessions, how to override the brain’s default for ruts.

C). Challenge: People bring enormously novel skills to work, yet too few of these unique offerings are integrated across departments. Instead silos are formed and then fortified through jargon or pretentious prose that separates people  who differ. When departments prevent the cross pollonation that ignites innovation, they also limit novelty productions. Rather than default  to broken systems, the challenge is to rid organizations of Thoreau's incredible dullness that predominates.

Solution: Host a Celebration of Innovation, that will entice more people to share highly original insights across departments. Here workers explore new areas together in cross functional teams, in order to develop innovations that draw from multiple talents, and in the celebration events, perfect these inventions with input from people across multiple fields.

D). Challenge:  At times, one kind of leader gets promoted, while other unique leadership talents wait endlessly in wings of an empty stage. Not surpringly, when workers go unappreciated, some resort to spreading destructive toxins such as venting or bullying.  In the process, novelty and risk-taking at work get truncated for a focus on lesser practices of survival and avoidance that shape entire workplace cultures.

Solution: One way to increase novelty is to move innovative IQ up a notch through mindful leadership promotion,  plasticity and multiple intelligences, as illustrated below. Start with the question,  How are they smart? – rather than  the less useful question How smart are they? – and encourage people to develop their talents.

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 sidelined 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 at attack from another)  into opportunities to move forward without sinking.

4. Need more bodily kinesthetic 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 kinesthetic mode.  With daily acts leaders shift into movement gears that zap innovation alive with use. New research also show 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 get them to their 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 an 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.  We start with an online survey of multiple intelligences at work, to determine what to expand on for the next original advancement planned. In MITA brain based programs, leaders start with even one activity planned to involve a strength that leader most enjoys. Another action deliberately dips into a weaker IQ area leaders hope to strengthen, for a smoother ride in one of the areas listed above. It’s through novelty that comes from added intelligence at work, leaders will best facilitate innovation for a new era.