Ingenui-key © mofox

Ingenuity is essentially the sticky bit of creativity.   Unlike creative formulas, Ingenuity is by definition an ad hoc process, since what makes ideas stick is their specificity – their relevance to a particular scenario in a particular context.

In business jargon, you would define Ingenuity is the ability to recognise resources and leverage them to solve problems and create outcomes in specific circumstances. In plain English, it’s how you achieve what you need to achieve with what you’ve already got.  Which would be a no-brainer if people actually used it. Unfortunately, because Ingenuity tends to be unorthodox, because it ignores flow charts, timelines and formulas, and because it’s focus is on getting an effective outcome rather than having a controlled tidy process, the majority of organisations (and education systems) quash it.

The other reason it gets quashed is that Ingenuity is as individual to each person or organisation as their thumbprint, and we live in a culture where the pressure to conform is overwhelming. It is understood that there is a right and a wrong way to achieve the right and the wrong result, and that these are externally determined benchmarks.  A lone voice crying ‘there must be a better way’ is as often as not crushed as a risk-taking heretic threatening the status quo of ‘how we do things around here’ or ‘how things work’.  Which is ironic, given that CEO magazine lists the top management challenges for 2009 as being things like Managing Change, Creating an Engaged Workforce and Reducing Costs, down to Increasing Innovation (#9) and so on: all of which would be significantly less challenging if dealt with ingeniously.

And the best thing about Ingenuity is that it is an asset that already exists – in abundance – in every single person, team and organisation.  It’s just not being either utilised or leveraged.

Which is why Ingenuity is without doubt the most valuable untapped resource in business today.

What outcomes would you achieve if you could harness yours?