Have you ever thought about the fact that innovation is an open access, equal opportunity? If not, think about it now. Is there anything about the innovation process that personally prevents you from coming up with a new idea? Whether you or anyone else takes action on the ideas might be another question, but to dream up new ideas is a totally open access venue in which anyone can participate! This is an equal opportunity invitation for diversity at its best. No ideas can be barred. How many other venues do you know that can make this claim? We often fight so hard to make sure we do not create artificial barriers that limited access to various situations that it is hard to comprehend that there is a venue where participation is not restricted by one's personal characteristics. One's race, sex, religion, financial status, etc, make no difference. All one needs is the desire to create something new, the imagination to create it, and then the determination to make it happen. The simplicity of that concept is outstanding!
Having extensively traveled throughout the Third World, I always marvel at the ingenuity of whose bed may be the ground, whose "house" may be a crude platform, perhaps a foot off the ground, with a "roof" of tattered cloth, plastic, or tin, and whose diet may only be rice or corn. Yet, these people survive, maybe not well, but they survive. This is an imaginative feat in and of itself! The movie Slumdog Millionaire (2009).1 will help you visually understand some of these survival skills. These people wander the streets and the land seeking whatever to enable them to eat. They pick the trash outside the walls of homes and businesses for any morsel to fill their stomachs. They travel from place to place, looking for handouts, by hanging off the sides or tops of the various trains that traverse the tracks. They can see a traffic jam, assume the role of a policeman, direct traffic, and then ask for a handout. They are willing to guard your car in a busy marketplace where there are no parking lots ... and charge you a fee. They use stopped traffic to solicit cash from the occupants of motionless vehicles. They scurry under the bleachers of sports arenas, looking for the change that falls out of the pockets or hands of spectators. They search drainage pipes for stray coins. They will exchange your money for the local currency without a service charge on sidewalks, but they might not have all the "exact" change-their service fee that you pay for the convenience of the transaction, especially after banking hours. The bottom line is that they have a need, can identify opportunity, exercise personal initiative to take advantage of the opportunity, and are willing to take risks to achieve their objectives. They are entrepreneurial!
Many times those in these destitute, and some in not so destitute states, revert to less than legal mechanisms to meet their needs. Some of the older movies classically portray this. The Sting (1973), starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, et al,2 is a good example of this, as well as Ocean's Eleven (2001),3 with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and Matt Damon. Both of these movies revolve around the gambling scene and the extraordinary and clever efforts that are taken to fulfill the thieves' objectives. For example, how many people would think of using a nimble acrobat to vault the laser alarm beams in a casino, money storage area? These clever strategies do open up new solutions, but thankfully most of us do no use such strategies toward illegal ends. But if you could put aside the legal issue for a moment and recognize the ingenuous nature of some of the schemes that are portrayed in these movies, you will appreciate that innovation is a fundamental ability that is accessible to all. How well one takes advantage of that accessibility is up to the individual. Understanding the principle of personal responsibility to use the innovative process to solve problems will begin to unlock a treasure of nondiscriminatory opportunity ... to be pursued within the law and applied to health care!
To have all your needs met is not a stimulus for innovation. Such situations do not precipitate the questioning that is so fundamental to the innovation process. Need and curiosity make one search and "think outside the box."4 There is a quest for new solutions, and one is pushed beyond one's comfort zone to think in new dimensions. Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America (United States) between 1801 and 1809,5 commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition because he was curious. Jefferson was keenly interested in finding a water route linking the Columbia and Missouri rivers; he was curious about the territory that lay beyond what was known during his presidency and he had a strong interest in botany and agriculture.6 He was looking for answers to his questions. So he sent out an exploration party to gather information. The gathered information became a new "lens" in terms of understanding the potential for the United States. The new knowledge created a fertile environment for the development of never before conceived ideas. Horizons expanded, literally and organizationally, disrupting paradigms that, heretofore, had been considered indestructible. There was new land to colonize, water routes to explore, unknown plants and countless natural resources to exploit, and there were many concepts from the Indians that needed to be learned and understood.
If anyone can participate in the innovative process, for instance, the Lewis and Clark Expedition showcased the value of an uneducated Indian woman called Pocahontas, why is it that more people do not take advantage of such an unparalleled, nondiscriminatory, equal opportunity process? This is a good question for which there are many complex responses. Let's only examine one that can impact the health care arena, and more specifically, holistic nursing, the need for personal initiative.
The innovative process requires personal initiative.7 Having a leader who is supportive of an innovative environment is helpful, but the bottom-line principle is that the responsibility for creating new ideas comes from within each individual. Some people may have the ability to create change but are lazy and do not want to do the work. Some people can be in less than advantageous situations and lack the stamina to intervene. They have other "fires" to fight and so modulate there participation in a solution by giving higher priority to the demands for their time to other areas of their life. Some people need more time to process situations. They intrinsically do not have the ability to work quickly, so do not even recognize the fact that they can be a part of the solution. Some people get so beaten down by never having their ideas recognized or are so severely criticized for articulating their ideas that they become discouraged and defeated; they lose the motivation to even try. Have you ever seen any of these situations in your place of workplace that block the execution of personal initiative? How is it that in the day and age when we forcefully promote the concept of equal opportunity that the innovation process still is not being fully exploited on every level to create a more effective health care system? What is your role, as a holistic nurse, in supporting the innovation process in your respective area of work?
Solutions that promote personal initiative are as complex as the reasons people give for not taking advantage of the innovation process. Space precludes an elaborate answer to the posed question. But the concept of positioning/marketing the innovation process as an equal opportunity venue within health care will help people to see their responsibility to identify needs and to be curious about the environment in which they work. Not taking advantage of an equal opportunity venue that one strives so hard to create reminds people of the freedoms they have, regardless of circumstances. It also strikes at a guilty chord of complacency within the hearts of those who only see problems through the lens of circumstances that inhibit creative problem solving. A free land is not free because one does not fight for the principles in which one believes. Government officials will not change unless one exercises one's voting privilege. A work environment will never improve unless one fights for the ideas in which one believes and takes personal initiative to effect a change.
What is the lens through which you see change? Are you really stymied in terms of not being able to create/imagine new solutions? Or have you taken advantage of a nondiscriminatory process called innovation, which will allow you to dynamically design new paradigms that better meet the needs of the persons/systems you serve? Have you taken the concept of the innovation process being an equal opportunity, nondiscriminatory process that promotes diverse ideas in the market place? Market this concept; promote it. Encourage one another on a "grassroots" level to better understanding their personal potential to continually mold holistic nursing into an inspiring profession that better meets the needs of those it serves.
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