What distinguish great innovators from all the others? What makes one person more creative than the other? How innovators think?

These kind of questions were subject of a six-year study survey involving about 3500 executives and innovative entrepreneurs conducted by Hal B. Gregersen (INSEAD), Jeffrey H. Dyer (Brigham Young University) and Clayton M. Christensen (Harvard). One of the main outcomes was identification of 5 discovery skills that creative executives posses and use regularly to create disruptive innovations.

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These 5 discovery skills are…

Observing: Innovators can observe others and detect small details in the behavior of customers, suppliers and other companies. From those observations they create new methods of practice.

Questioning: Innovators ask often “how”, “why”, “why not”, “what if” in order to challenge status quo and understand the bigger picture.

Experimenting: Innovators are experimental in nature and they are constantly trying new experiences, testing hypothesis and exploring new ideas.

Networking: Innovators can gain radically different perspectives by networking with individuals from diverse backgrounds. This helps them to discover new methods, customs, practices or industries.

Associating: Innovators can associate seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas and cultivate new insights. They combine all various inputs they gained thanks to all other skills.

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Just knowing what makes the difference is NOT enough! When it comes to practice, it is not so obvious and natural. Therefore we prepared for you serial of 3 articles with tips and tricks on how to develop these magic skills☺. It is important to understand that nobody from surveyed people dominated in all 5 skills. Each of them had few that they were excellent, so we suggest you to try all and find out which one will become your creative mark!

Today we will focus on the skill that we practice more or less since we were little babies – OBSERVING. Observing means learning. There are 2 important things to keep in mind: we need to make effort to observe and learn more about what we observe. Observing occurs whenever a learner watches or listens to someone/something else “Doing” something. The act of observing may be direct or indirect. (e.g. Direct observation of cooking might be for the learner to spend time with the cook in the kitchen. Indirect could be to watch a movie about cooking or to read recipes. Here you can find 5 tips on developing observation skills. The best is to try them all within limited duration of time (for example 3 days) and adapt them to your needs.

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Spot the difference: If we give you 2 apples, can you tell us what the difference is? Easy right, one is red and another green ☺. In order to master your observation skills, we propose to play ‘Spot a difference’ games (2 pictures that seems identical and objective is to spot a difference). To start find 5 differences between ‘difference games‘ and ‘spot the difference‘

Learn new card game: Have you ever played poker, bridge or canasta? When learning new card game, first you get instructions from somebody, and then you have to observe group playing and only after you are allowed to join and try yourself. During few rounds you observe people’s behaviour, you detect small details like their face expressions, their game tricks, their strategy and after you ask questions to clarify your understanding and you try to copy!

Become Sherlock Holmes: have you even gone for a coffee alone? Does not seem so much fun to you? Well, try again but this time, sit in the corner where you have great view on the whole coffee shop and observe people around you. See what kind of coffee they order, check if the waitress smiles, find out how many girls wear skirt, note down what is the most favourite colour of peoples’ clothes, count how much espresso you can buy with money in your wallet, count the interval when door opens, etc. Best is to take notes of what you detect (like real investigator).

Play PEXESO: are there any kids around? If not, propose your friend or husband to play with you. Concentration and memory practise are getting stretched when playing this game. Of course, the winner gets a sweet price!

Watch movie you don’t understand: when you went abroad, you had to watch foreign TV at least once in your life. Try it again. When we don’t understand what they say, our mind start to focus on all the rest: suddenly you detect the voice intonation, you observe background and action around the main character, you spot little details like shape of the vase on the table or actors’ shoes.

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Obviously there exist many ways how to practice observation. Important is that you learn, discover, see new things around you that others miss and have fun doing that! Next step is to use results of your observation and combine it questioning, experimenting, networking and associating to create new ideas and original solutions.