Why innovative thinking is critical in uncertain times

Today, businesses must evolve quickly—and specific methods of employee training can help.

During economically challenging times, forward-thinking executives know that innovation is critical for progress. The catch, of course, is that implementing new ideas can take time—a luxury that’s largely unavailable in an ever-evolving world of work hit by labor shortages, digital disruption, and mass resignations, along with a looming recession. Knowing that stagnation isn’t an option, the most effective leaders act quickly, changing company practices to encourage efficiency, iterate improvements, and open ideation.

“The future of work is changing faster than we can predict,” says Dave Garrett, chief strategy and growth officer at Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI is monitoring global megatrends, such as digital transformation and a volatile labor market, while advising businesses on how they can prioritize organizational agility and invest in constant innovation to stay competitive. Garrett notes that organizations must implement new ideas swiftly to meet client expectations, and he’s advocating for two major actions to help make that happen: tech upskilling and design thinking.

Upskilling opportunities in citizen development 

The first step toward rapid innovation, Garrett notes, is ensuring that employees and teams are well-equipped to work efficiently and leverage new technology. “It’s not as simple as snapping your fingers and expecting people to ‘just get faster,’” he says. “That’s demoralizing and counterproductive. It’s an organization’s responsibility to create an environment where team members have the mindset and customer understanding to innovate, plus the technical skills and tools to remove bottlenecks.”

Strategic upskilling is one significant way businesses can gain productivity, and accordingly, better prepare teams to adeptly help customers and weather the next big challenge—without sacrificing quality, Garrett adds. Recent research shows that the top barrier to combining speed and agility is a lack of strategic prioritization of learning and development (L&D). 

These L&D programs must focus on upgraded technological skills, Garrett urges. “Given the pace of work today, people must be able to leverage technology, including custom apps that help boost effectiveness,” he says. His organization has seen success with PMI Citizen Developer™, a product suite that leans on the citizen development movement—a process for non-IT staff to create low-code or no-code digital platforms to save time and money. “By having the ability to produce custom apps for unique needs or specific workstreams, individuals and project teams can streamline processes and provide value to customers at an expedited pace, with the right guardrails,” Garrett explains. “Citizen development can also be a bridge to applying A.I. technologies that can quickly become gamechangers from a productivity perspective.”

Using design thinking to grow and adapt

Besides encouraging teams to employ new technology, Garrett relays the importance of utilizing new methodologies to boost creativity and encourage free-flowing thought. Specifically, he emphasizes the value of design thinking—an approach that starts with empathy for customer problems and is followed by rounds of shaping the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing before implementing a solution. Often, these approaches don’t just lead to better answers, but to better questions—with answers that are far more impactful than the solution to the original challenge.

Rather than being rigidly oriented toward one immediate solution, design thinking encourages more imaginative, outside-the-box ideation, exploring “how might we”-style questions about what’s possible, as opposed to only what’s immediately practical. Employees can get creative and take chances with ideas, see them succeed or fail quickly, and then adapt, explains Garrett. 

“This style of working can promote wider thinking that helps organizations solve recurring customer problems more quickly,” Garrett says. Because it balances divergent and convergent thinking, teams can reach imaginative, yet realistic, solutions—leading to organizational change that keeps both management and clients happy while using resources efficiently. 

To foster impactful design thinking, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce is imperative. Teams of employees with varied backgrounds and experiences offer diverse thought processes and perspectives. As a result, these teams are more likely to avoid traditional thinking patterns and already-tried solutions. By reducing the tendency toward “group think” and minimizing the impact of biases, more diverse units can better understand a variety of customer needs, shake up ways of solving problems, and create more ideas to test on the job. 

In such a disruptive economic environment, calling on companies to get more inventive—and to do so promptly—might seem like a tall order. But Garrett maintains that the adoption of technology and the finessing of workflows are strategic answers. “There are necessary skills that are inherently human-centric,” he says. “Moving big ideas and projects forward is all about merging employee creativity and technological abilities. The end goal is that we can all work smarter and faster.”