What are the next steps when you have an idea for a quality improvement project, a business case or an entrepreneurial opportunity? We can all be that person who changes things for the good.

I love this video that shows if children can come up with great ideas: we can too!

Many of us feel that we are not able to identify new solutions or turn an idea into action.

You may be interested to know the burden of a creative thinker is that we will fail if we try to do it alone.

The misconception of project management is that it is all about setting goals and identifying actions and everyone is busy completing their lists but we need to be much more thoughtful.

Every idea and project needs to consider who are the individuals and groups that are intrinsic to the solution. This is stakeholder mapping. We need to consider how we can connect and enable everyone to be heard.

These will be our champions and influencers of the future.

Our role as leader is to understand how we can hear wider viewpoints, empower talents and amplify self expression alongside noticing achievement in individuals, teams and wider systems. This is really important and often forgotten.

 We need to explore and understand the problem (market research).

When we have a challenge or are considering wider issues, our brains will look at the subject with our own lens of experience and we will believe we understand the problem (cognitive bias). My personal experience is we rarely fully understand.

Being able to use your senses to explore the problem will make a difference.

Focus in and what you will realise is that there is a lack of granularity. You need to dissect the problem from all angles – see it, feel it, move it around, touch it and listen.

When looking at the problem – consider it free from the system it exists within.

• The high numbers of young people who have committed suicide is not about waiting lists or IAPT but the reasons some-one does not want to be alive.
• The increasing numbers of those who die from overdose of addictive substances becomes about why people are addicted to substances and not how many detoxification services we have.
• Why our professionals are leaving our health and social care world as a career becomes about the individuals and their experiences of being in work and not a focus on recruiting more students.

Ensure you are listening to all the voices and be aware of the power people hold.

• I know people tell me what I want to hear because they want to show respect.
• Professionals especially doctors often limit conversation as we hold power through professional status and being considered experts in our field.
• Systems hold power so health, social care and the criminal justice system can often dominate conversations – this is through our own societal hierarchies and is not because they do not care.
• Individuals and wider groups must be heard and the body of lived experience should be visible and mechanisms in place to amplify those voices.

By creating neutral safe spaces, we can hear peoples truths and limit interpretation through our own lens of experience. Then we will ensure that we identify all the data that can inform our solution.

Use our data sets, they are huge and by utilising all the information available, we will be able to analyse and use as part of our creative thinking.

Finally, be kind with the time frame!

We should always give ourselves longer than we anticipate.

My personal experience is that although local improvements can be delivered in a few months, every project has to embed and if we are not careful your new idea will rapidly return to the previous status quo.

In addition to the exploration phase, project design and implementation, the team need to embed and champion the change and it will takes two or three years of constant reinforcement to ensure that your great idea becomes part of the fabric of our service.

In the next blogs, we will consider how we use critical thinking skills to come up with our new solutions, the team you will need to implement these changes and how we can have fun when tackling some difficult challenges.