GUEST POST from Janet Sernack
Being consciously innovative involves expanding your awareness and opening your heart and mind to disrupt habitual feelings and thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It allows us to play in the space of possibility by cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences. This encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving. Developing people’s consciousness involves strengthening a person’s ability to sense and connect with awareness-based systems and respond appropriately to achieve desired outcomes. Conscious innovation is a mandatory way of being, thinking, and acting that makes people matter and enables them to survive and thrive in the emerging, uncertain and disruptive world of AI, where leaders must know how to illuminate to innovate.
What is consciousness?
According to Dr Dan Seigal[1], consciousness has two elements that shape a person’s inner state or interior condition. There is the knowing, which is awareness itself. And there are the knowns, which are everything that enters awareness. To integrate consciousness means to differentiate these two elements from each other, and then to differentiate the knowns from one another.
Knowns consist of people’s thoughts, feelings, and memories, while sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch bring the outside world in as a constant stream of sensation. They also include intuition, inner wisdom, and awareness of mental and emotional processes, such as memories, beliefs, intentions, and hopes. As well as the relational self, the awareness of connection to other people, to living beings, and to something larger than the individual self.
What is conscious innovation?
Our approach to conscious innovation creates the conditions for individuals and teams to move and focus their attention, develop conscious awareness, and become intentional and passionately purposeful in solving challenging problems. People illuminate to innovate by advancing through the three levels of self to make the world a better place by balancing people, profit, and the planet.
Conscious innovation integrates the key principles and methodologies of emergence, systems thinking, human-centered design, sustainability and technology to empower people to realize their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation.
Conscious innovation includes being able to understand and improve a person’s inner state or interior condition, and illuminate to innovate by:
- Focusing on expanding who they are as human beings by creating the conditions to develop people’s metacognition[2] and brain health[3], enabling them to experience what it means to be responsible, passionately purposeful, and agile, and to build an adaptive capacity to flourish in an uncertain world.
- Developing an awareness of the potential of cognitive dissonance and harnessing creative tension that enables people to safely learn and grow as humans who act in ways that build their capability to be creative, inventive, innovative and resilient in the face of chaos and disruption.
- Creating the conditions by clarifying an aligned strategy and developing a safe, trusted, and aligned culture that enables and supports people and teams to collaborate, experiment, and innovate by willingly partnering human potential with AI.
These invisible elements of conscious innovation affect how people interact with, relate to, and lead people and teams; how they communicate, learn, make decisions, solve problems, manage, implement, and embed change; and how they execute innovation or transformational projects and initiatives.
Illuminate to Innovate – The three levels of self
The three levels of self-illustrate the deep learning and change journey involved in illuminating and harnessing human potential on the people side of innovation. At a time when companies are required to rethink the very nature of the corporation, especially how to integrate human accountability with virtual and physical AI agents.
- Self-regulation involves developing awareness of one’s automatic responses, understanding their sources and effects on one’s physiology and neurology, owning one’s responses, and ensuring they have a positive impact on oneself and those with whom one interacts.
- Self-management involves close observation and management of people’s knowns: being attentively present to neurological and physiological factors, including emotional states, traits, thoughts, feelings, mindsets, behaviours, and skills in how people use time to make decisions, communicate, and resolve business challenges.
- Self-leadership involves deepening and illuminating known skills: open awareness, knowledge, and the ability to intentionally master one’s own neurology and physiology, as well as others’, in interactions and challenging situations, to mindfully evaluate and successfully create, invent, deliver, and execute innovative solutions.
The intent is to create strategic and cultural alignment that delivers execution excellence by enabling leaders and engaging people to solve problems in generative ways, consciously prioritizing human relationships through collaboration and experimentation in partnership with AI, and steadily moving towards goals in deliberate, focused, systemic, kind and honorable ways.
What are the benefits of being consciously innovative?
Being consciously innovative involves learning to be, think, and act differently; people learn to stop trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it and to stop reproducing the same results they no longer want.
At the same time, the emergence of AI requires a major brain shift to maximize human potential by building foundational cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and technological literacy abilities that enable people to adapt, relate, and contribute meaningfully, integrating an awareness-based systems approach and a holistic focus.
The benefits of being consciously innovative include improving leaders’ and people’s abilities to:
- Replace short-term, reactive, and conventional linear thinking processes that initially created and now sustain problems, and embrace change as a circular, creative, continuous, and systemic process.
- Courageously adopt long-term, sustainable strategies for the organization’s growth and the impact it seeks to have on clients or customers and wider communities.
- Make better-informed decisions by considering potential scenarios, anticipating risks, identifying interdependencies, and making decisions that meet needs while keeping the bigger picture in view.
- Cease overlaying new structures onto people’s unchanged ways of perceiving and experiencing their world by creating the conditions for people to help people make sense of new structures and processes, show up differently, and take new and right actions.
- Combine futures thinking and systems thinking, emphasizing ethical considerations, social responsibility, and sustainability.
- Be empathetic and compassionate by discerning, understanding, and considering the needs, values, and perspectives of all stakeholders involved in a problem or a system, not just those present in a room.
- Improve people’s capacity to attend, observe, inquire, listen to each other, and differ in generative ways, and to feel empowered to think independently and act differently.
- Embrace AI strategically, using AI and new technologies to assist, help, and empower human agency, to partner, collaborate, and experiment with AI to rebuild engagement and deliver execution excellence.
Illuminate to innovate
Being consciously innovative requires actively illuminating and integrating the ways leaders and coaches bring clarity, creativity, compassion, courage, and meaning to their decisions, roles, and teams. This involves expanding your awareness and opening your hearts and minds to disrupt habitual thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It involves cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences and encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving.
[1]The Developing Mind (The foundation of Interpersonal Neurobiology) [1]
[2] Metacognition is “thinking about thinking”—the awareness, understanding, and control of one’s own cognitive processes, like learning and problem-solving, to improve performance.
[3]https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/the-human-advantage-stronger-brains-in-the-age-of-ai?cid=mgp_opr-eml-nsl-ofl-mgp-glb–&hlkid=507fe91b220d4915bbcd198daaeb857a&hctky=1766168&hdpid=bfbfe441-95e5-45b4-9dc7-c32cd1789c2f#/
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