Are you relying on people moving into new waters, without oars to move? For instance, people in toxic workplaces may need help to interface with innovation.
Infighting results in shutdowns or shotguns that eliminate the innovation many value and still crave.
One newly introduced skill –mindguiding – draws from right and left brains to convert infights into inventions. How so?
From Infights to Innovation with Mindguiding
Mindguiding, or mutual mentoring builds the impetus for new insights that replace old assumptions. It’s quite simple yet it works wonders.
Experienced mentors and hot-out-of-college zealots, mindguide one another into new possibilities for both.
See progress past gridlocks or compromise?
Infighting sparks when people point out blunders, or ignore upstarts’ insights. Innovation stirs passion for risks across differences. Rather than damn the dumb mindguides, stir passion for new talent.
Infighting zeros in on facts that appear wrong or missing to critics who feel compelled to set folks straight. Innovation favors ambiguity as mindguides engage widely diverse perspectives toward new understandings together.
Infighting comes from stagnated pools at work, where experts refuse to be outwitted by newbies they see as misinformed plebs or underlings. Innovation spikes as mindguides look at problems together – with solutions more in mind.
Infighting offers platforms for seasoned cynics to seize positions of power, while avoiding reflection on growth opportunities. Innovation steps beyond blame by developing the mental capacity to combine multiple intelligences as tools for finer solutions.
Infighting comes from the demand for one way. Even demands for one experts’ newly minted way, comes with dangers of flawed assumptions about what works best and why. Innovation focuses on less familiar talents that infighters tend to miss, and mindguides emulate. How so? 
Mindguiding – will soon be a full Chapter in Wiley Press new International Textbook! As illustrated above, mindguiding offers human exchanges that generate wisdom across differences by respectful debates where all listen, all learn, all teach with humility that values ALL. Worth a try ?
To focus more on talent and offer intelligent innovation that critics miss – mindguides:
1. Look for more linguistic intelligence. Want words to come easier, poetry to mean more, speeches to ring truer, or books to yield more wealth? Then play with words, do crosswords, compete in scrabble, debate, or offer to speak to a local club. Search for new ideas on the internet, write a blog, or tell your best idea in 140 letters or less, and and that too will boost your linguistic brainpower. What could you improve today alongside a person who masters language?
2. See more musical intelligence. Want music to move and shake your creative projects? Pop on Gregorian Chant to pop you out of stress. Play Bach or Handel to plan your next creative project. Toss tunes from Shumann, Chopin or Liszt into your romance and watch it grow. Or gain inspiration from Soul, Blues or Calypso. Imagine mindguiding with Don Campbell who uses musical intelligence to jack up productivity, and improve innovative moods on a bad day. What would you learn-teach in such a setting?
3. Spot intrapersonal intelligence. Need intuition 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 this intelligence too will grow 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? If so, you’d enjoy a heaping dose of intrapersonal smarts to add contentment and turn those tougher days around. Plan a lunch alone at your favorite digs, practice smiling to improve a mood, ask a question to your day, or plan a risk today that would ratchet up contentment. With personal intelligence, you mindguide with personal reflections – so that your brain rewires for a more clever you.
4. Highlight bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Would you like to dance, better? Then step and move beside a person who dances well. Want to move with coordinated grace? Then shuffle and stretch in ways you hope to grow more memory within body muscles themselves. It’s much the same for skills intelligence to smack a tennis ball with greater ease, or put together furniture with finer flare. Do it to grow it. Then expect new wonders as the brain kicks into kinesthetic mode alongside movers and shakers.
5. Check for mathematical or logical intelligence. Why not start a schedule to plan your next week, since sequencing and patterning is at math smart’s core. So’s organization at the heart of math IQ as is seeing the bigger picture. Like other intelligences mathematical genius grows more through math ideas that take you feet first, and then on new flights – with use. Mistakes add growth in math, yet schools use errors as arrows to kill a brain’s best. Even Einstein said that Education’s what remains after one’s forgotten everything learned in school. Have you found a mindguide to use and grow logical mathematical alongside, in spite of limitations learned at school?
6. Observe visual or spatial intelligence. Grab a paper alongside an artist and sketch your funniest memory in the last few weeks. Or attend an art class together, and learn to paint. Visit galleries, surround yourself with images that teach you more about life, or create an avatar to show your thoughts to an online community. Graph ideas, select visuals to explain life, or take photographs with people you value for their spatial intelligence – and you’ll invent more through use.
7. Find interpersonal intelligence. Interview a person you know to discover what makes that person smart? Ask, “How are you smart?” rather than the more traditional question “How smart are you? Narrow that person’s narrative about personal intelligence into one or two words, and you have already grown intelligence interpersonally. Would you agree that people high in interpersonal intelligence will come away with amazing insights here? Or can you see how the exchange itself offers opportunity to expand one’s interpersonal acumen?
8. Draw on naturalistic intelligence. If you spend excessive time breathing in refreshing scents of spring, surrounded by sounds of brooks running, or captivated by natures’ change for different seasons, you likely possess good amounts of naturalistic intelligence. You’ll gain more though, by using patterns and designs found outside to solve problems faced in any situation. People who compare soil types, animal or tree patterns, or rock formations – all hold nature’s wisdom for mindguiding possibilities.
For better balance than infighting, why not take brainpower to new levels through mindguiding. First, survey your own multiple intelligences to see what’s stronger and what acumen you’d like to expand with a co-teacher/learner. Then, plan one activity a week with a person who differs from you – yet includes a strength you most enjoy. Watch for infighters though, because they tend to ambush innovation and shut down risks for the sake of personal power problems.
How could you move from move from infighting to innovation through mindguiding?
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How can a leader with so many patents and award-winning inventions remain vanilla, Taffy? Are you sure it’s either plain or vanilla? LOL
On a serious note – you make some interesting points here Taffy, about moving this idea into practice.
Mindguiding (or mutual mentoring )practices would be especially useful across your professional teams who build and grow medical and technical companies – from multi-talented approaches for a new era.
Love the fact that your work involves so many innovations, for instance.
What if you were to seek out one reciprocal novel opportunity with one of your upstarts (or professional from a different discipline – to develop a winning idea together.
Rather than “see the bench to bedside in any company you help,” ask 2-footed questions such as What if… and you are already on your way:-)
Perfect place to start is as folks develop teams. In mid-Jan I will be teaching a graduate leadership course where I will help leaders join teams to address a shared workplace problem with shared goals, and clearly stated milestones.
Taffy, small companies with limited resources are the flavor of the day, would you agree? They (and the technology they design) are shaping the future.
To the mandate: “They need to advance their technology and raise capital,” what about a question such as: How will your innovation advance technology and sustain itself financially?
How do you see an opening question help to draw on people who differ and can therefore act as both teacher and learner with others on the team?
I take this approach with even my grandson with will be 2 in June, and it works wonders for all I am learning from him every time we are together.
Your turn…
OK. You got my attention. I am a plain vanilla person and thinking in psychological terms is up to my youngest that has a Psy.D. degree.
I see the ideas, but reduction to practice is not so clear. I invent stuff. I have to always see the bench to bedside in any company I help. The people need to develop teams and I help with this. Setting up project planning is essential and having defined goals and milestones on a time line are a must if you want to raise funds.
When I see the language above, I have issues with converting this to practice. I deal with small companies with limited resources. They need to advance their technology and raise capital.
How do you see this approach fitting with such activities?