“Imagineering,” a portmanteau combining imagination and engineering, enabled Walt Disney to make fiction come to life. And it is a method that helps the dreamer, realist and critic—the three roles you will take on when imagineering—on innovation projects.
A dreamer engenders ideas with no boundaries. A realist assesses idea feasibility. And a critic pinpoints potential risks that may threaten the concept. Wearing all three hats on a project increases your innovation quotient, gives a surge to your creative-thinking capabilities and helps you pursue the best ideas. Here's how to embody those roles and imagineer.
THE ROLE: DREAMER
Everyone is born a dreamer, but constraints such as budget or human resource limitations can push us toward a habit of never imagining infinite possibilities. You must disregard constraints and visualize new ideas in a perfect world.
To do so, set aside time before the project's kickoff meeting to brainstorm ideas with the sponsor and team members. Boost your creativity by engaging in artistic and physical activities.
Let's say your project deliverable is a new smart pen that records what a user handwrites directly into a cloud database. By taking time to dream, you can improve the deliverable. Maybe the smart pen also records a voice memo, can translate it to text and can take a snapshot of the papers a person signs.
THE ROLE: REALIST
Without the realist, dreams may never come true. This role should come more naturally to you. A project manager transforms the dreamer's idea into tangible results by building work breakdown structures, features and all the processes you are familiar with.
The realist questions how the ultimate idea will work to practically develop an implementation plan, carve an end result and assess the idea feasibility. As a realist, you need to unleash the power of the left side of the brain, which is responsible for analytical thinking.
For example, after the brainstorm session, you should ask questions such as, How feasible is it to fit an electronic board with multiple connectivity options like a camera, microphone and speaker-to-text transformer inside a pen? A realist has an eye to the constraints the dreamer might have overlooked.
THE ROLE: CRITIC
Many organizations prematurely abandon great ideas due to poor idea evaluation or embark on ideas that ultimately fail due to shallow risk assessment. But your role as critic can be a boon to the organization's bottom line. And this role taps into your risk management responsibilities.
The critic scrutinizes the idea and its workable solution by performing a comprehensive risk assessment. Some organizations adopt a murder-board technique by forming a committee whose task is killing ideas with too many risks. You can adapt the same approach during your team's initial brainstorming sessions. A critic may think consumers would not buy the smart pen gadget due to the wide range of note-taking applications available on smart devices.
All project practitioners should strive to imagineer. It allows you to think of the ideas that deserve to mature enough to be adopted and determine the ones bad enough to get killed. PM
Kareem Shaker, PMI-RMP, PMP, is a senior manager, project and enterprise risk at Dubai World, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He can be followed on Twitter at @kareemshaker.