Using the IDEA Approach to Initiate Change

The first sentence in my LinkedIn profile starts off with IDEA. Not an idea, as in a thought or a suggestion, rather IDEA, the acronym, which stands for Improve by Developing Efficient Alternatives.

Far more than a thought, IDEA is more of a mindset that, when followed, can help shape the future of your organisation. I came up with the idea (pun intended) for IDEA after seeing the incredibly positive impact that the principles of continuous improvement have had at my place of work.

These principles highlight the importance of seeking out opportunities to make small changes in addition to larger and more significant shifts. They place a great deal of value on employee generated ideas and on getting employees actively involved in initiating change within an organisation. Furthermore, where change is actioned, the principles of continuous improvement encourage us to seek out feedback and to measure the impact of that change to see where else it can be applied.

IDEA speaks to this drive to challenge the status quo and to seek out efficient alternatives to established processes. The world we live in is run by efficiency and the success of organisations like ours is to a large extent dependent on how efficient our existing processes, products and even ideas can be.

All organisations that have managed to sustain long-term success would, at some point, have had to develop efficient alternatives to either a current internal process or an external scale in order to remain competitive. Many of these alternatives also happen to improve the ways in which we live.

Because so many of them exist, with new ones being developed every day, we often take these efficient alternatives and the impact they have on our lives for granted. But the reality is that the vast majority of the tools we use on a daily basis from instant messaging to air transport to hybrid cars and autonomous vehicles, have been improvements upon something else that came before. All of these improvements would have come from an idea that the IDEA mindset brought to life.

What’s more is that, in addition to these large scale improvements, this commitment to developing efficient alternatives can also be applied to your own home and how you go about activities in your daily lives. Through creative thinking and brainstorming with a team, your family or within yourself, there a more opportunities than you might realise to come up with a more efficient approach of an existing process or system.

To get your creative juices flowing, you might want to try this article which offers many of useful skills and techniques to boost your creativity: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/creative-thinking.html

So, what do you think? Do you have an idea? Would you try to Improve by Developing Efficient Alternatives? I’d love to hear from you.