The Back Story of Innovating Yourself
My Back Story is Your Back Story
“You need to innovate yourself!”
That’s what a trusted friend told me when I presented at One Million Cups.
One Million Cups is a grassroots founder community where entrepreneurs share ideas and get blunt feedback over coffee.
He was right.
More about One Million Cups later.
My Back Story.
I had spent over two decades in the comics entertainment industry.
One day I met with a friend on the executive floor of a major comics publisher with numerous characters with “Super” in their name. Both of us were in business development, so I expected to brainstorm new ideas.
He stopped me and dropped a question — “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Why are you helping create someone else’s IP instead of creating your own?”
Boom.
That moment got me thinking.
I didn’t take action right away, but soon I went independent, still working in the comics industry.
As I worked on pages, literally thousands of them, I listened to podcasts and audiobooks.
During one podcast, I heard an interview with Kathy Kolbe. I’d never heard of her.
She described how she grew up in a data-driven family. Her father was the creator of the Wonderlic test, the ubiquitous IQ assessment.
She had rediscovered the missing component—described with words like volition, instinct, and the classical long-lost original term, conation.
She developed a unique assessment to measure conation, the Kolbe A Index.
Each individual has a conative MO, or modus operandi. It’s unique, like a fingerprint. It doesn’t change with time.
It describes how you WILL take action when you’re free to be yourself.
It describes your natural strengths.
It describes your natural energy levels.
I was intrigued, so I took the assessment.
The results were so accurate, they seemed a little creepy.
I am a Quick Start, which means that my initiating strength, or the strength that I go to first, is to innovate.
Innovation comes naturally to me.
I helped drive digital initiatives in the publishing industry during some of its most disruptive times of change.
AI has brought a new age of change and disruptive innovation.
That’s good news to me, because I’ve seen it before. I know that change brings opportunity.
As I studied innovation, I found that innovation is opportunity based, not problem-based.
Furthermore, I found that innovation favors non-linear and random events.
I found that there was no opportunity-based non-linear framework for innovation. So I purposed to create one.
My first focus was corporate and institutional.
They were intrigued and polite, but ultimately uninterested. They were already invested in problem-based, linear solutions.
But that didn’t stop me. I presented anywhere to anyone who would listen.
It was after my presentations when my audience appeared. It was individuals.
A common comment I heard was:
“I took notes the entire time, and I NEVER take notes.”
They wanted to know where they could get this. They came to my workshops. They went from a blank page to a personalized, actionable innovation project in 30 minutes or less.
At that time, I called it 30 Minute Innovation. Now, with AI as an amplifier, we can produce multiple projects, pivots, and what-if scenarios in the same 30 minute period.
Why One Million Cups:
I presented at One Million Cups because I wanted feedback from my peers about possible niches for my framework.
The feedback was the same as what I was already used to—polite disinterest from the establishment, enthusiastic responses from individuals.
Then my friend added the mic drop—“Ken, you need to innovate yourself.”
Boom.
Everything clicked.
But pivoting isn’t easy. This was ten years ago.
That’s why I’m client zero. I’m here because I applied this stuff to myself first.
Your Back Story
If you want to innovate yourself, how would you do that?
My personal innovation framework is essentially the same as it was when we called it 30 Minute Innovation or 30MI, except now it has been adapted especially for high-agency individuals who are navigating change.
Now, it’s the MVP Framework. MVP stands for Mindset, Volition, and Process.
What are some tips I could give you that you can use today?
M is Your Mindset
You have been trained all of your life for a problem-based mindset. That winning is tied to finding a problem and solving it. The bigger the problem, the bigger the win.
There is truth to that, and problems are important, but innovation is opportunity-based, and a problem is just one of several kinds of opportunities.
If you focus primarily on problems, you limit yourself to the full gamut of opportunity indicators that cross your path each day. Your brain trains itself to look for problems first, producing a narrow problem mindset.
Here is HOW to get and keep an opportunity mindset:
HOW stands for Hmm, Ouch, and Wow. Three little words.
Grab your favorite note-taking medium—analog or digital. Keep it with you and use it daily.
Those three little words are shortcut gateways to an entire array of opportunity indicators across seven categories. But you don’t need to be concerned about all of that during your day.
Just pay attention for things that make you think or say Wow, Hmm, or Ouch. Make a note. That’s it. Do it today. Do it for the rest of your life.
This simple micro-practice will help re-wire your brain for indicators of opportunity, and help produce an opportunity mindset.
If you change your mindset, you can change your future.
V is Your Volition
I group intuition, agency, conative strengths, and trusting your gut under the rubric of volition.
The Kolbe A index has been a literal game-changer for me. It was my validation. It made me feel right in my own skin.
The Kolbe A Index is different from other assessments that measure affective qualities like personality or IQ. It’s the only clinically validated profile to describe how you work when you’re free to be yourself.
Because volitional strengths are a key component of the MVP Framework, I became a Kolbe Certified Consultant and provide Kolbe A Index assessments and interpretations.
I have other less-scientific methods available to help determine your volitional strengths, but none are as comprehensive or reliable as the Kolbe A index.
P is Your Process
It’s great to identify opportunity indicators and develop an opportunity mindset.
It’s illuminating to understand your volitional strengths, how work energizes you, and how you recharge.
Mindset and Volition are essential, but by themselves, they don’t make you win.
You must execute. You must have Process.
You must be organized enough to innovate yourself. Not organized like others tell you to be. Organized enough for you.
If you are organized enough to turn the opportunity you have identified and committed to into a project, and it actually goes live, and reflects you as the individual who created it, that’s winning.
The MVP Framework is designed to be a flywheel, not an event. It’s designed so that you can use it all of your life to win again and again.
Each of these areas, Mindset, Volition, and Process, are profoundly deep rabbit holes, exposing rich opportunities and ramifications for practical personal innovation projects.
But for today, it’s simple enough to be all you need in the moment. You can always deep dive the rabbit hole whenever you’re ready.
And that’s where it really gets interesting.