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One of the challenges of assembling an effective innovation team is to make sure that the people you select have the right combination of personality types. According to innovation consultant Alan Rostain, too often innovation teams attract only one personality type - explorers, who enjoy discovering new perspectives, assumptions and territories. These people tend to be very good at developing breakthrough ideas, but struggle when it comes to the more analytical and functional business aspects of bringing a new idea to fruition.
To overcome this tendency, Alain has developed a web-based application that he calls Innovation Styles Online. This new tool enables employees to take a personality type assessment, based on the model of four innovation styles, and then visually map the personality types of a group of your team members based on this data.
How can you use the Innovation Styles tool? Alain recommends these applications:
- Selecting the right people - and mix of people - to serve on a new innovation team.
- Problem solving and "fixing" problems with existing innovation teams
- When recruiting new employees, to help ensure that your hires will support your organization's culture and leadership style
- For consultants, to help design effective brainstorming sessions
Alain was motivated to use the Innovation Styles (developed by William C. Miller) because he found other existing personality profiles, such as Meyers-Briggs, to be somewhat limiting. "They give you some useful information, but always left me asking, 'How can you create real business value from those profiles?'" he explains.
Early feedback from Alain's corporate clients has been very encouraging. He anticipates that innovation team leaders and human resource professionals will likely have the greatest interest in this innovative "team design" tool.
Here's the good news: Alain has set up a demonstration site where you can play around with InnovationStyles. Here are the links:
Alain demonstrated Innovation Styles to me last week, and I think it's a well-designed, intuitive tool. The visual representations of team members' profiles does give you a very clear picture of how your team's personality types are distributed and what it's overall "balance point" is. This enables you to analyze and solve team design issues. It also enables you to conduct "what if" analyses (if we added these people to the team, would that make it more balanced?). That's powerful! |
