How To Put On Your Cape-abilities

In this blog post, you’ll continue to find strategies that you can use to shake up your thinking and unleash your innovation superpowers. Each post defines a tool you need, gives you a summary of what that tool can do for you, some questions that stir your thinking, and an exercise to get you started using the tool. You can either use the tools from start to finish to understand all the tools in your toolkit or you can pick up any tool — play around, use it, and discover how it works for you. 

The next ability in our Cape-ability series is … Respons-ibility

Vocabulary.com defines Responsibility as:  The social force that binds you to the courses of action demanded by that force.  A form of trustworthiness; the trait of being answerable to someone for something or being responsible for one’s conduct.

Gert defines Responsibility as:  When the moment comes to do something about an idea, taking the steps that develop and implement it.

Responsibility comes from the Latin responsus, which means “to respond.” There are actually a few different definitions of the noun. It can be another word for trustworthiness, as in, "He demonstrated his responsibility by showing up to practice on time." And it can be used to describe the social force that motivates us to take on individual responsibilities, as in, "A sense of responsibility drove him to memorize all of the songs.”

It’s always awesome to come up with breakthrough ideas that people get excited about. Someone, however, has to develop and implement those ideas. They need to poke holes in them and then pet them and polish them. Choices have to be made. So, it’s time to assign some idea champions to do just that. They must converge on the ideas and make an action plan. Taking responsibility for the details is just as important as coming up with the idea itself. What are the moving parts? When and how is each piece getting done and by whom? 

“You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.  Go work with it.”

• Anonymous

Provocative Q’s to ask yourself:

• Great idea! What could go wrong? List issues with the idea. It’s easy to poke holes though, so now think about how you might fill those holes.  How might you make it better? 
• How might you plan for anticipated obstacles or challenges?
• What if the budget doesn’t support this big idea? What are some smaller versions of this idea that might be just as impactful? How might we scale this down a little to make it work for our action plan?

Exercise to help you explore responsibility:

• Think about the stakeholders of this idea. Who might be involved with this idea? How might you make this idea better, stronger for each of those stakeholders?  Who are your assistors (who will want to help you roll this idea out)?  Who are your resistors (who will fight you the whole way)?  How might you win them over?  How can you make the idea even stronger to get their buy-in as well?

--gert--