What is Innovation? with Serious Play

On Monday we spent the afternoon with some very influential people who have, or could have, considerable investment in the directions of the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre in the next three years. It was a deliberate attempt to begin to collaborate with them to develop a shared strategic plan. The wonderful power of this session was that almost instantly the participants were willing to play with Lego seriously. We built towers, we made modifications to them, told stories about what they symbolised then started to develop metaphors.
One of the next instructions was to build a model of what innovation could look like. It really is a concept that holds so many perspectives and needs some clarity with respect to the Centre. I am guilty of assuming ,at times, that everyone agrees with, or has a common understanding about what innovation means but amazingly (not) we hold very different views about what that is and what it looks like. The metaphors really started to germinate in this session. The creative juices were flowing. It was amazing how we started to reflect on similar thoughts and ideas. The commonalities were becoming more and more evident and the differentiation was able to be appreciated and valued.