My current creativity project is the Woodland Kitchen. I started it with a blank slate-which is my favorite way to start a project. I will admit it takes a lot more time and research- but it really gets your mind working on ideas and innovations to make this project work.
I have learned to surround myself with a variety of personalities and talents. I have one of my employees who thinks a lot like I do, but loves to follow the rules. She keeps me from getting into too much trouble. Another worker is very task oriented, which is someone who I can assign tasks to that need to be completed in a timely and orderly manner. She also sees the glass half full- so I need that perspective also.
I used to have an employee that was a person who was in touch with other people's feelings. She never wanted to hurt any ones feelings and she was the exact opposite of me. So, she would be the one that would give me clues about avoiding hurting someones feeling instead of rolling over them. My team of coordinators also come with great innovation and we become a very strong team when we work together on projects.
Back to the kitchen...We were trying to model our kitchen from the famous Farm Market Kitchen of Algoma. As you may know, it is a huge success but also took many years to get to its current state. I had to take a road trip to see what was so special about this kitchen. Well, it's obvious that the director is a genius and is a wealth of knowledge. She would feed me a little information at a time, but I had to remind myself that not only do we need to make this kitchen be self-sustaining, we had to get our educational piece entangled in the process.
The kitchen we are renting had sat idle for years. It was from a school district that closed over 7 years ago and they took any equipment that was still salvageable. I knew that I needed to hire an assistant that knew about commercial kitchens and could feed me information so I could make some educated decisions. Thank God I found one!
One project that I had to complete was to make a "processors manual" with all of the forms and information they would need to get started.I had a variety of information that I found on the web, or someone handed to me and I filed it away. It was like a giant puzzle! So I had to sit down and actually go through the process of becoming a kitchen processor. I had to also be the person watching out for any legalities that could get us(NWTC) in hot water, such as lease agreements. If that isn't innovation , I don't know what is!
What did we ever do before we had the Internet? I can hardly remember. To think that most of the information that we received was outdated by the time it hit newspaper print and imagine how little information could be printed in a newspaper or shown on the nightly news. It still amazes me!
(Sorry for getting side tracked)
So the question is "how am I becoming more innovative?" I will have to admit that there have been many times in the past few weeks that little lessons of innovation have popped into my head. One that really stands out to me is the "wait for it" part. I choose the fastest decision and I don't get a chance to look at it in a different light. So if anything, I guess I have taken more time to just sit back and take a second look before jumping to a conclusion.
You know the saying...
If you need something done right away, do it yourself
If you have time, delegate it
If you have forever, form a committee
I'm afraid these are words that I've lived by most of my life.
I had a supervisor in a past life that taught me the value of that saying. We had to rely on decisions being made by a county board. Now, in their defense, this group of people that get together once a month, for very little pay, and they have to make decisions on only the information that is given to them. That pretty much stifles innovation of any kind. When we (my supervisor and I) would prepare presentations to the board we would give them as much information as we could possibly give them so they could make an educated decision and not table the decision until next month.
Just when you thought they had all come to a decision based on good facts there came what my supervisor called "the clown factor". This was the board member who showed up late, slept through most of the meeting and would say something so "out there" that the decision would get tabled again. After reading the Whack book this week I can look at the clown in a different light. Maybe it was a good thing for the jester to come in and make the members rethink a decision. That was an ah-ha moment for me!
So, what is on the horizon for the kitchen? I do believe there is a grass roots movement to bring the small entrepreneur back into the picture and move away from the large commercial chain stores. But what is so exciting about this venture is that some of these little entrepreneurs can actually become a supplier to one of these large chain stores! They just need to find their little niche. Go for the natural, healthy, and good for you movement. Put your product in recyclable packaging before the larger companies figure it out! They could be the next success story if they play their cards right. And we are going to be there to help them through the entire process.
Now for our project...
Today one of my team members stopped in my office with an update on the project. He said that when he was working on the project this weekend it dawned on him to add a drawer so that we could accommodate different shaped containers. That was very cool because he was pretty sure his original design was perfect and didn't need anything else. I was giving them a hard time when we were working on Friday by being the devils advocate- which I could tell really annoyed one of them, but I am not a conformist, so it's my job to ask the questions and really fun to annoy people at times.
My final words- Patients is a virtue
Interesting project to say the least!
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