Especially if you’re ill, being healthy is a transformative innovation. But innovation is difficult. And not because coming up with innovative ideas is tough–just listen to a 3 year old talk for an hour and you’ll probably hear a million innovative ideas about how to get to the moon or defeat ninjas. Innovation is difficult because implementing innovation and getting from Step A (the innovative idea) to Step Z (the innovation as functioning reality) requires lots of collaboration, dedication, and leadership, and all three of those things can be very scary to many people. When it comes to innovation, having an innovative idea is irrelevant if you can’t implement it. Innovation is the implementation of a great idea.
There are fantastic project management and design thinking tools we can borrow from the world of business and apply in our own lives to make the process of innovative personal change simpler and more effective.
There seems to be a myth that mental health just happens, that there are healthy people and unhealthy people and if you have a mental illness, that’s it, there’s nothing you can do about. That’s ridiculous. It’s as absurd as saying there are successful companies and unsuccessful companies and nothing can change that.
There are always going to be elements of an organization’s DNA that might predispose it to having advantages or disadvantages, but any company can change and innovate with a great project management process. And any person can innovate with a great project management process that helps them implement change on a macro and micro level, making holistic changes in day-to-day activities that help them embrace uncertainty and act healthy, while constantly taking steps towards long-term, sustainable health.
Your life is a complex, wonderful, dynamic project. Applying project management tools in your life can help tremendously in creating personal change, just as they help create organizational change on complex, dynamic projects (that are sometimes also wonderful).
Over the course of the next week or so, I’m going to post a variety of project management tools and techniques and how you can apply them to personal change, whether that’s getting over OCD and addictions, or learning how to run a marathon: