Who remembers the story of making stone soup?  Well if you don’t, the basic premise is that a man comes across a small village where food is scarce and the people are all starving.  The traveler builds a fire and starts to boil a pot of water.  After a while the starving villagers start to gather around him to see what he is doing.  He then pulls a stone from his pocket and puts in in the boiling water.  The confused villagers ask him what he is doing and he responds “I am making stone soup.  I wish I had a carrot or two to add to the soup”.  Despite the lack of food in the village one person brings out a lone carrot and puts it in the pot.  Upon seeing this another villager brings out a lone potato and adds it to the mix, another brings a tiny piece of meat.  Slowly more and more villagers bring the one small morsel of food they possess and add it as well.  After a short time, there is a delicious stew that the entire village can share and no one goes to bed hungry that night.

What would this have to do with innovation you might ask. Everything!  Take a minute to think about this, was boiling a rock a good idea?  Would that feed anyone? Who can make soup with just a rock and water.  On its own merits, stone soup is a terrible idea.  What if the man was told to leave the village because his idea was terrible and would never work?  We make soup with vegetables, not a rock, That’s the way we have always done it.  Can you believe that he thought that would work?  Had the villagers thought like this there would have been a lot of hungry people in the village that evening.

Instead, we took the one man’s “terrible” idea and built it into something that provided value to everyone.  This is one of the important things we should keep in mind while trying to promote innovation in our workplace.

• Rather than tell someone their idea will not work and burying it, let’s start saying “good start, what if we also……”.
• Rather than tell someone their idea is not how we do things, let’s start collaborating about new ways we can make things happen.
• Rather than stifling an idea and burying it instantly, let’s start throwing them into the pot and see what others can add to it.

Like the stone soup, innovation is rarely one idea that makes it from beginning to end by itself.  It takes one person not being afraid to throw that stone in the pot despite the fact their idea cannot stand alone.  It then takes the others to add their own vegetables to the mix until it turns out just right.  Here is a stone.  Now does anyone have a carrot?