Innovation… clear as mud

Don’t you find that some of your clearest thoughts emerge before you’ve consciously started thinking?

You go to bed with something unresolved and wake up with the answer apparently waiting for you. Not every detail, but the essence of it. The complication has somehow fallen away and, for a few moments, the words are simply there, almost narrated in your head with startling clarity.

Wouldn’t it be great to simply download that purity of thought in a single brain dump, before you get up, before you check anything, before the day has had the chance to interfere? Because even reaching for a pen or your phone can be enough to lose that fleeting moment of distilled clarity, disappearing almost as quickly as it arrived.

You know the thought is there. You know it made perfect sense even a few seconds ago. Yet already you’re trying to reconstruct something that, briefly, required no reconstruction at all.

I have noticed it happens most when I really care about the subject.

Only a few years ago, I woke at around three in the morning with my father-of-the-bride speech, The 60 Second Speech, almost fully formed in my head. It arrived as a poem, complete with rhyme but, more importantly, with some heartfelt reason behind it.

I had never really considered myself a writer.

That speech changed something.

Only a month later came news none of us would have wished for. Out of that family experience came My Mum’s a Chameleon. At a time when comforting words never seemed enough, I woke again at around three in the morning.

This, it seems, must be my clarity window.

The title and whole pages were clear in my mind, with an alertness stark enough to make me capture them before they faded.

That thought dam burst its banks in the middle of the night, producing more than eighty percent of what became my first self-published book.

The story itself grew from something intensely personal into something with a much wider purpose: a gentle, lighthearted way of helping children understand momentous changes in someone they love. It subsequently became a wider fundraising project supporting Lymphoma Action.

There is another connection I probably wouldn’t have recognized at the time.

Without The 60 Second Speech, I’m not sure I would have written My Mum’s a Chameleon.

Without that book, I’m pretty certain I would never have written Skiing Uphill: The Innovation Black Run.

One thought gave me the confidence for the next.

So, I find it increasingly hard to dismiss these moments of clarity as coincidence. When something matters enough the thinking carries on after the conscious effort has stopped. The problem loosens, the unnecessary parts begin to fall away, and occasionally what remains is remarkably clear.

The difficult bit is capturing it. That is where the morning dog walk often comes in.

Sleep creates the clarity. I walk to sharpen the thought and connect the pieces.

The wording returns. The edges become clearer. Something complicated starts collapsing into something simpler.

And when it does, you’d better act on that clarity, in that moment, because once the working day starts filling your head with everything else demanding your attention, another faint layer of mist appears.

The thought that seemed crystal clear first thing becomes softer around the edges and harder to retrieve.

But it’s rarely completely lost.

Sometimes it sits quietly, still being tested and refined, until another walk gives it enough room to surface again.

And occasionally what comes back is simpler still.

That happened again recently while I was working through how to help clients cut through all the things they could do and identify what they really should do next.

A myriad of thoughts eventually collapsed into three groups of three interconnected threads, all leading to one simple, clear purpose. Something I coined 3³ = 1.

It distills a bigger piece of thinking onto a single sheet, with prompts that trace back to the research behind it.

Naturally, I do realise that 3³ is 27. In fact, that’s exactly why there are 27 innovation insights within Skiing Uphill.

Yet somehow the math’s still adds up.

It’s about finding a simple way of transferring a much bigger piece of thinking to someone else.

Ultimately, this new framework has become a very effective thought-transfer tool for helping clients identify the single most impactful step they can take to make real progress.

I spend a lot of my time trying to make things clearer, not more complicated. That is harder than it sounds.

Adding more is easy. Knowing what to leave out, and expressing only what really matters, is much harder.

Perhaps that’s what those early-morning moments have been teaching me.

The speech collapsed emotion into 60 seconds.

My Mum’s a Chameleon turned a difficult conversation into a simple story a child could understand.

Skiing Uphill made me confront decades of innovation experience and work out what was actually worth saying.

And now 3³ = 1 is attempting to do much the same thing for a client faced with too many possible directions.

Different subjects. Same instinct.

Find the clarity within the complexity.

And when it finally collapses into something simple, I’ve learned one other thing.

Make it real before the mist rolls back in.

If you need help with the math’s behind your project. Connect with me.