Innovator

. Apollo 13 Ground Controller

Faced with a clear problem and clear set of constraints, this person thrives in solving the problem within the bounds of such constrains.  Named, of course, after the extraordinary ground controllers who brought a spaceship safely home under what seemed to be impossibly low power reserves.

Key skill set: a tremendous grasp of underlying scientific and technical principles, enabling them to rotate a problem, view it from different perspectives, and creatively manipulate parameters and variables in new and interesting ways.

Consider: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-13/apollo-13.html

2. Primetime Detective

Everybody knows there’s a problem, but defining exactly what the problem is (and therefore what the constraints are) remains elusive.  If you’ve ever seen great TV detectives (Monk, Mentalist, any of those quirky detectives that seem to know what other people are thinking), they walk into scenes and, while others obsess on the clearly observable facts (dead body, broken glass, jilted business partner), they dig, ask questions, and extract emotions, reactions, and psychological profiles that reliably point to a solution (i.e. the real culprit).

Key skill set: the ability to ask great questions, dig deep into the emotional or psychological drivers that frame a problem, and expansively think about solutions that satisfy those drivers.

Consider: The “Design Thinking” movement: http://dschool.stanford.edu/

3. Psychic

The label is not meant to be pejorative.  Psychics do what, to many of us, seem like peering into the future but, to the innovators, is the simple result of charting the evolution of existing trends to yield some natural conclusions.  If X is going up and Y is going down and people are willing to do Z, well it seems kind of obvious that A will be necessary.  They have an uncanny ability to identify the key drivers which determine how trends mature, evolve, and intersect with each other.   While the...