“What did he do?” she would ask. The student would answer, “He did this, he did that, he escaped by mixing products from under the sink…” The teacher would then drill down on the pertinent point.

“Ahh,” she would say, “he used such-and-such to create an exothermic reaction. Let’s take such-and-such and mix it with this-and-and-that and see what it does.” And then we were off and running, tricked once again into completing a chemistry lab with smiles on our faces.

In some ways, MacGyver gives a model for the challenges chiefs of staff face when understanding innovation. Innovation comes in immediate and intentional forms, and it can be technical or organisational. It can occur on a short notice time frame or as a result of deliberate planning.

The wild desperation, short notice type of innovation is what most easily comes to mind. It is that sometimes madcap, near-immediate solution to a problem you didn’t know you were going to have. It’s a plot device in shows from cartoons to dramas: a character says, “That’s crazy… but it just might work!” The others then do some elaborate thing, the crisis is resolved, and the show ends ten minutes later. The value of innovative, immediate solutions to problems is evident. They are frequently rewarded in organisations because there is a clear “before and after” of a problem and a solution.

Many people think innovation comes down to “just do something” or “throw something on the wall and see what sticks.” The reality is that almost all innovation comes down to careful preparation in order to take advantage of an opportunity, either created or discovered. Sometimes these preparations are specific, deliberate, and readily applicable: the fictional MacGyver had years of experience as a scientist that he remembered and relied on in order to excitingly end hour-long television episodes. Sometimes these preparations are vague, non-specific, and not intuitively relevant: the real-life Marine who made an aluminum pressure bandage had completed a multi-week course to become a Combat Lifesaver. He understood that a punctured lung and a punctured compression tank had the same loss of pressure challenge. He connected the solution to one as a potential solution to the other. Both of these of types of preparation for innovation must be nurtured and protected by chiefs of staff and other executive leaders. Our friends over at Oxford define innovation as: “a new method, product, idea; the act of innovating.” Well, yes. But what does that mean? Looking at synonyms gives better insight into the current context and use of the term. Some synonyms include: modernisation, addition, alteration, departure, deviation, introduction, modification, newness, permutation, shift, variation, wrinkle, wild idea. Now we are getting to terms we can understand in the organisational context. Most of us in our daily work are familiar with “modernisation”, “alteration”, deviation”, and “modification”. In those terms, innovation doesn’t seem scary but more of something we do regularly as a regular part of doing business. So, if innovation is important, what can chiefs of staff do to get more of it? They need to understand innovation and encourage and protect creative thinking and potential innovators.

Regardless of the form of innovation, chiefs of staff must understand that innovation is essentially a structured process of creativity.² Behaviour scientists Krasner and Ullman in their text Research in Behavior Modification explain three stages of creativity. Preparation is the most important stage but is frequently overlooked. Incubation is the least understood but adds practical value of both considering and discarding options – the eventual product has its roots in a strong incubation. “Incubate” means to hatch or grow; like chicks, ideas need safe, nurturing places to grow. Execution is most familiar of the creative stages; it is, apparently, where something “just happens”. But the visible output of the execution stage is directly invested in the quality of the preparation and incubation stages.

Think about Leonardo DaVinci: he was a gifted painter, architect, and inventor. In his preparation phase for a particular project, he decides whether he wants to paint, or draw, or invent and gets out the appropriate brushes and canvas. In the incubation phase, he thinks about what subject to paint, what emotions to convey, how to capture lighting, and dozens of other details. The execution phase has him mixing colors, blocking shapes, and using all the practical skills of painting. At the end of the process, he decides to name his project “Mona Lisa.” Just as the Mona Lisa didn’t appear as a standalone event of hastily collected strokes, so also must modern innovation go through all three stages of creativity.

It falls to chiefs of staff and other leaders to create environments where people can apply the stages of creativity in order to think about ideas, challenges, and “what if” solutions. Creativity is the core ingredient of innovation; the other important aspect is initiative. Both must be encouraged and protected. Training Magazine explains that people need to know a safe environment exists to use initiative, they need independent latitude to make decisions, and they need to be encouraged and rewarded for being involved.³

“Rewarding for Involvement” is an interesting concept to me. Frequently, organisations only reward the successes. But there is value in the ideas that don’t quite make it to “prime time” in the form of rigorous thinking, trying out ideas without consequences of public failure, and direct applications to the products that do succeed. Perhaps the Mona Lisa is so revered because of the Mona Erins, Mona Simones, or Mona Lauras that we never heard about.

Chiefs of staff need to encourage and protect today’s equivalent person of a Western Union employee, who in 1852 went into the CEO’s office in New York and said, “Boss, we need to open an office in San Francisco.” Sending a team 3000 miles away, at the current transportation rate of 300 miles a day, with no timely communications back to headquarters, was definitely uncertain. Yet, that team corrected their very own communications challenge and turned it into a profitable enterprise and helped thousands of other people with the same communication challenge. Somebody, perhaps an 1800s version of a chief of staff, made space for an innovative idea by helping the CEO be comfortable with the uncertainty of opening an office on the other side of a not-yet-fully-explored continent.

Innovation doesn’t have to be complicated. The simplified plot structure of a MacGyver television episode provides the model: you have a problem, you look around you to see what you have - technical or organisational, create what do not have, and then you solve the problem. And then you get to call it innovation. It’s the fostering and protecting of the innovators that is the modern-day challenge. A challenge that current chiefs of staff are well-situated to address.