As I celebrated the end of 2013, I spent some time ruminating about the hopes, dreams, and open minds of children in my family and community. I love reading and hearing about the cheerful wishes children expressed close to the holidays. My local newspaper runs a spread of messy crayon drawings, and Christmas lists that consist of the silly or the impossible: “For Christmas, I want to be a princess.” These children take risks in their thinking, their imaginations have no boundaries, and their ability to take risks is free from the so-called realities of authority figures.
Unfortunately, our childhood imaginations are often left behind when structure, procedures, standards, and expectations barge in and tend to flatten creativity. As we all know, it is incredibly easy to become overburdened by lengthy lists rather than aspirations to become this or achieve that; these mundane tasks that need accomplishing take over our lives and become all we do.
So, what’s the balance between taking positive, creative risks and upholding commitments to safety and policy? What constitutes an effective risk to take in terms of our thinking? Though firmly defining the weight of risks is difficult within aviation, we all do have the ability to entertain both structure and creativity within our specific areas of expertise. The aviation industry has proven that with the design innovations of the last 100 years. It’s hard to believe the first flights were taking place just a little more than 100 years ago.
Taking these sorts of risks, as popular entrepreneur Seth Godin describes, are like “poking a box…When you do this, what happens? When you do that, what happens? . . . The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer,” or perhaps it might even be your airline or flight school’s safety procedures. Whatever it is, it will benefit from our constant pushing for something greater, newer, and different.
And all this takes is just a proverbial lift of a finger: the initiative to start trying something, perhaps in a small way at first, just to see what happens. This year, let’s lift our heads to a creative level—one higher than our to-do lists (or lower, to the free imaginations of children)—and consider what effective risks we can take that may result in monumental improvements for aviation.
What will you innovate and implement this year?
-Rochelle Johnson, JETPUBS Inc.
(For a great, short read, check out Seth Godin’s Poke the Box.)