Dive Deeper — Be Happy & Innovate

Happy people talk more about meaningful topics and have deeper conversations with their friends and colleagues.

The New York Times reports that research by Dr. Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, has found that deeper conversations make for happier people. Unhappy people have three times as many “small talk” conversations as happy people.

This research got me thinking about conversations at work. Sure, there are often very “serious” conversations in the work world (“Sales are falling, what are you going to do about it?”) but how deeply meaningful are most conversations?

Our experience with thousands of groups shows that when we enable people to engage in deeper conversations they not only find them more satisfying, they also dive deeper into the intuitive pool where the gold coins of creativity await.

There are three levels of innovation – surface innovations (change the look of something), base innovations (change the basic way something works) and deep innovations (tap into the creative insights to fundamentally change the whole game). 

Whether an enterprise is changing its products, its messaging or the business model that will define its future, its leaders must dive beneath the surface.

So what kind of conversations have the people in your organization been having lately?

Happy Innovations!

—Dan Beam