Gregg Fraley

Pack a Lunch Mail-in voting is already problematic. Like many Americans I’m appalled at the use of the Post Office to suppress votes. If you don’t agree this is happening, you can skip the rest of what I say here. In my view, the Post Office and Mail-in voting is already compromised, with some exceptions. For those of you who read my blog for innovation, this blog is not about that, I’ll return soon with more writing on creativity and innovation. But the stability of our elections and our government does impact innovation in the long run, and maybe the short run. Too Late To Fix This It would be great if this problem of mail-in voting could be fixed

The Innovators Monologue with profound apologies to William Shakespeare by Gregg Fraley To innovate or not to innovate — that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to stagnate or create while feeling the slings and arrows of peers and loss of fortune or to take up arms against inaction and seek to disrupt or improve and if I fail to find sweet perfection or green fields, I die — no more to market, sell, deliver, enrich, enable — the end of the enterprise, alas rarely mourned but the heartache, the thousand friends who lose jobs and life stations that families, tribes, regions, spirits, depend on. ‘Tis a grand frustration devoutly we pray to avoid, the death, and

What You Should Be Learning in Innovation Training But you probably are not! Eleven Innovation Bullets to Dodge, in no particular order. Lack of Managment support will effectively kill any innovation program no matter how well conceived. If you don’t have Talent, superior talent, you’ll fail. Design Thinking alone will not guarantee success (or any other framework, Agile, Lean, etc.). Very few organization’s are any good at all at Brainstorming/Idea Generation. If you don’t take calculated risks, and continue to take them, you will fail. Most organization’s don’t have the guts to actually reinvent. Innovation team leaders who avoid conflict are doomed to fail. B to B organization’s need to learn what qualitative research is all about. B to C

Are You Having Fun? Innovation Should Be Fun, Joyful, and About Playing With Concepts The One Question Innovation Culture Assessment A lot of fuss is made over innovation culture. I get it — it’s probably the most important fundamental to put in place if you actually want innovation to happen. Organizations spend a great deal of time and energy investing in training, speakers, communications, systems, frameworks, and assessments. All this is fine. And… I have a simple one question assessment leaders and managers can use to take the pulse of their innovation culture. Ready? “Are you having fun?” If the immediate answer isn’t “yes” — you’ve got a culture problem. If you were planning on doing an 80 question quantitative

Innovation Learning Points From the Great Faucet DIY Fiasco DIY is a Form of Innovation I’m the Abraham Lincoln of home fix-it DIY projects. Like Lincoln, I ultimately win, but painfully fail many, many times before I “git-er done”. (FYI: DIY = Do It Yourself.) As an innovation consultant who is a facilitator, team builder, idea person, and strategist, my need for hands-on engineering skills are minimal. I’m not bad at prototyping and am excellent in concept development, but I’m horrible when it comes to hands-on maker skills. As a home owner, this is really Not Good. But I try. And I learn. So after I finished the bleeding on my latest DIY effort, it strikes me that, on a larger

Creative Effectiveness 2017 What if 2017 turned out to be the most creative year of your life? More than creative, what if 2017 was the most creatively effective year of your life? There’s a difference. You can be incredibly creative in terms of self-expression and ideas — without being creatively effective. What good is creativity if it doesn’t get done? Doesn’t find an audience? Doesn’t get put into play? Let’s make 2017 the year you put projects over the goal line. That is, finish projects. There are a lot of horror stories when it comes to great creativity but no finish. A heart breaking example is that of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the incredible picaresque novel, “A Confederacy of

Nine Ways to Play At Work (see list below) The idea that one should invoke a sense of play around challenges is not a new one. Tim Brown of IDEO did that great TED speech on play, and there have been several more TED play-centric talks (Stuart Brown, John Cohn, Sue Palmer) all variations on the theme. Sunni Brown’s talk on Doodling is a personal favorite because she gets specific about how one can begin to be more creatively playful with problem solving. An emerging trend in business is using improvisation games as the basis for team building and problem solving. The work of Del Close, who shaped the serious play of long form Improv and Viola Spolin, who invented

Death or Kryptonite? I have a  vinyl record with one of those strategic skips that has it repeating — it drives me nuts — but I still play the record because I love the song so much. The song is Jimmy Olsen’s Blues by the Spin Doctors. It’s a hard rocker about the lament of Superman’s pal who has a crush on Superman’s gal. In the song Jimmy Olsen is competing with the man of steel for the affection of Miss Lois Lane. He’s got a secret weapon, a pocketful of Kryptonite. Innovation ca feel a lot like that — your competition is a big tough impossible-to-beat player like Superman. And no matter your size as an organization, you’d better be like

Four Criteria for Hiring an Innovation Keynoter Let this post work as a guide for meeting planners. You don’t have to hire me as your innovation speaker, but if you hire one, you’ll be well served if you pay attention to these four criteria and my comments in bold. Innovation is a complex, wonky topic and it has some special requirements that go beyond the classic things meeting planners look for in a speaker. Let’s keep this simple and as neutral as possible — my shameless personal plug is at the very bottom. I’m even going to suggest my competition here. So here goes, in my view an Innovation Speaker should: 1. Have a background as a successful entrepreneur and/or