Byron's Babbles

I don’t watch a lot of television, but tonight I have scheduled time to watch the new episode of MacGyver. I love the old, original show that ran from 1985-1992, but also really like the remake version. I can’t wait for the 8:00 start time for the show. MacGyver is the poster child of resourcefulness and core values. There really needs to be a little MacGyver in every leader.

There are times in our leadership careers when we are faced with unforeseen circumstances that don’t fit the usual textbook solutions. What we do at those times will go a long way to determine our success or failure. So, what can we do? We need to be be like MacGyver and look for the solutions, not look at the problem. I love watching him look around for what’s available and really out of context to the problem till he uses his knowledge and skill to put it all together. We need to encourage purposeful efforts to find unusual concept combinations to solve the opportunities we have.

Skills and talents are not labels, they are tools, ‘MacGyver’ tools that allow leaders to improve how their organization functions.  When organizations dare to move from a weakness-fixing organization to a talent-focused organization, they will enjoy improved productivity, greater efficiency, new levels of engagement, higher retention rates, and overwhelming organizational improvement.

Really, people are more likely to bring something new to the organization if they are not recruited to fill an established role. And if they are motivated and engaged, they will be able to find intersections between their skills and the organization’s needs.

If you notice, all the members of the Phoenix Foundation team on MacGyver all have different skills. If we want to generate intersectional ideas, we should seek and provide environments where we and our team members will work with people who are different from us. In The Medici Effect, What Elephants and Epidemics Can Tell Us About Innovation, author Frans Johansson wrote: “A sure path to inhibit your own creativity is to seek out environments where people are just like you.” We all come to the table with with different skills and we need to develop those skills and search for the intersections.

In Cracking Creativity, Michael Michalko describes taking “thought walks” in order to look for random combinations or get new, fresh ideas for solving opportunities. I compare this to how MacGyver walks around and looks for items to put together to form a potential solution. Michalko tells this story about a group that did a successful thought walk: “A few months back, a group of engineers were looking for ways to safely and efficiently remove ice from power lines during ice storms, but they were stonewalled. They decided to take a “thought walk” around the hotel. One of the engineers came back with a jar of honey he purchased in a gift shop. He suggested putting honey pots on top of each pole. He said this would attract bears. The bears would climb the pole to get the honey, and their climbing would cause the poles to sway and the ice would vibrate off the wires. Working with the principle of vibration, they got the idea of bringing in helicopters to hover over the lines. Their hovering vibrated the ice off the lines.” All of that from a jar of honey. Amazing, right?

We need to learn from MacGyver and step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, and combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. So let’s stop looking at the problem and use our skills and talents to search for solutions.