GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I recently attended a Fintech Meetup event involving 400 people present to hear the CEO of one of Australia’s four biggest banks speak about his innovation strategy. Unsurprisingly, it was to embrace innovation through technology and to create a people first culture. Interestingly, the people involved in organizing, hosting and even attending the event, seemed to be mostly ex-bankers, and were now highly motivated and enthusiastic start-up Fintech entrepreneurs.

The CEO stated “all the innovations in Fintech over the past 10 years could have been done by a bank and we still supply the plumbing.”

Having worked extensively in the domain of leadership in the financial services industries over the past 20 years, it made me ask…

Where have all the most exciting high potential and courageous leaders gone?

Gone to start-up garages everywhere!

It seems that the financial services industry, especially here in Australia, are grappling with 2 key generative 21st century problems that are about knowing how to;
– Juggle being disruptive with innovative technologies, products, and services within an inherently risk adverse, compliant and conventional enterprise culture,
– Differentiate and add value by providing a great customer experience and sustain customers trust whilst simultaneously delivering increased shareholder value.

It looks like these problems have catalyzed them into either a reactive response, such as seeking innovative new technologies and products via mergers and the acquisition of Fintech start-ups, which have largely failed to deliver on their promises. Or have become frozen into complete inaction and confusion around the complex task of re-inventing their largely centuries-old business models.

Innovative crypto technologies incorporating blockchain and crypto currencies such as bitcoin are expected to disrupt banking at two levels, as predicted in a May report called Cryptotechnologies, a Major IT Innovation and Catalyst for Change as by the Euro Banking Association;

“The first wave [of innovation] will concentrate on deeper automation of existing processes. The second will arise from new innovations based on the application of the exclusive features of cryptotechnologies. Distributed ledger technology is likely to disrupt financial services first by making existing processes more efficient, secure, transparent and inexpensive, and then later by creating new products that we can’t even dream of”.

So how can we respond proactively to such potential disruptions?

Steve Jobs made use of the word “intrapreneurship” in a Newsweek magazine article in 1985 stating that “The Macintosh team was what is commonly identified as intrapreneurship – only a number of many years before the term was coined – a group of people going in essence back to the garage, but in a big business”.

Similarly, after the Macintosh computer was launched in 1984, Steve Jobs described its development as an “intrapreneurial venture” within Apple – since the machine would compete with the Apple II, previously the company’s core product.

Going back to the garage – levering enterprise innovation

Perhaps the financial services and other key industry sectors in a similar challenging situation could take advantage of the intrapreneurship concept by focusing on the development of a “back to the garage” enterprise culture which has already being taken up by the early adopter enterprises. These organizations are applying intrapreneurship as a strategic and systemic lever to engage, enroll and empower people to effect the deep changes and business transformations required for 21st-century growth, competitiveness and success.

What is intrepreneurship?

Coined by Gifford Pinchot III in the late 1970s, he described intrapreneurs as “dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind, within a business.”

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur in order to evolve ideas into new ventures that have an impact for the organization.

Today the term intrapreneurship encompasses two main concepts: first, “corporate venturing”, which usually describes the search for spin-off opportunities; and second, the fostering of an entrepreneurial culture in large organizations.

Who is an intrapreneur?

An intrapreneur is an employee of an established (often large organization) with an entrepreneurial spirit and innovation skill set who works within the company to discover, design and deliver innovative products and services.
Someone who is courageous, compassionate, connected and creative, who dares to be boldly different, think and act differently within an organization, to make the difference they want to make in the world in ways that people value and cherish.

First 3 Steps to developing an intraprenurial enterprise culture

From our own learning experiences (and failures) at ImagineNation™ in engaging and enabling clients to develop intraprenurial enterprise cultures, we have identified 3 key steps, as the “non-negotiables” that will help facilitate ultimate success;
1. Determine enterprise readiness
2. Build top team alignment and engagement
3. Create a safe and creative learning environment.

Finally, when people have the ‘chance to’ and are inspired to ‘want to’ explore distant horizons and stretch their boundaries, they can then be taught ‘how to’ do it.

Which is about developing the passionate purpose, intrapreneurial traits, the growth and innovation mindsets and behaviors, and the generative skills and daily practices of successful life “in the garage” intrapreneurial leaders.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I was reminded recently “that you always teach what you most need to learn” so I am happily sharing a key learning from one of the amazing executive coaches on a recent global Coach for Innovators Certified Program™.

This illustrates the critically important role of emotional engagement and how it allows us facilitates deep listening as a prerequisite for innovation to emerge! Most of us know what this means intellectually, yet how often do we ensure that we, as leaders, consultants, or coaches ensure that our clients or our people are sufficiently emotionally engaged and connected at the heart and gut to enroll in the change or innovation goal?

Leading is the art of possibility

Benjamin Zander, is the co-author of ‘The Art of Possibility; transforming professional and personal life’ fame, and the presenter of a TED talk – ‘Transformative Power of Classical Music’. It has over a million hits and brings a new perspective on leadership that can also be applied to innovative leaders and start-up entrepreneurs. Having never felt comfortable with the plethora of sports coaching or team metaphors, I resonated with the “symphony metaphor” which Zander describes as the ability to “sound together.”

The symphony metaphor

Using Chopin’s Prelude as the sample, he invites the audience, as they listen to this beautifully evocative and haunting piece, to remember a time when they lost someone they really loved and adored in their lives – this really makes them present to the music.  He relates his experience of facilitating this exercise with a group of 7^th graders, how, at the end; everyone was loudly clapping, when asking the group why everyone was clapping someone responded – “because everyone was listening!”

He relates another example in Ireland, post-conflict with a group of Catholic and Protestant Street kids. Where one of them shared with him the next morning – “You know I’ve never really listened to classical music in my life, and you know when you played that ‘Shopping’ piece’ and continued “when my brother was shot last year, I didn’t cry for him, but last night when you played that piece he was the one I was thinking about and I felt the tears streaming down my face and you know that it felt really good to cry for my brother.”

This implies that if we manage to the space to be present enough to listen together and to the whole, people become deeply engaged and emotionally associated and connected.

Zander suggests that this creates the space to spark possibility and activate the best in people.

With our busy and hectic lives, our interconnected high tech world where the constant battle for our attention often consumes us, many of us have forgotten how to stop and observe, how to retreat and reflect and actually assess the whole system and then choose what the best actions to take are. So many of us have become lost in ‘busy-ness’ and in the ‘do-ing’ and are sadly disengaged emotionally for most of our working time. Some of us are disassociated and disconnected from who we are ‘be-ing’, and Zander reminds us that leadership is about who and how we are ‘be-ing’ with ourselves and with others.

He suggests that “The new leader’s job is to recognize downward spirals and enroll people in the journey to radiating possibility.”

• By embodying and enacting true and deep listening and acknowledging peoples uniqueness, we will ignite their joy and spark their aliveness.
• By generating authentically deep relationships, we will enable people to be the best they can be so they can become passionately purposeful.

If we do this in a way that is generous and gracious, we will engage and enroll people wholeheartedly in the change, leadership or innovation cause.

Innovative leadership defined

An innovative leader is someone who contributes the best of oneself, and generates the best from others, for the good of the whole – in the context of innovation and entrepreneurship!

An innovative leader attends to what is really going on, and intentionally creates and facilitates the safe space and conversational fields that reveal and unleash the range of hidden possibilities that abound in our interconnected universe. They enact and embody the very qualities that make people’s eyes sparkle and radiate with the possibility that a solution to the problem can be found.

This is because when we change the way we attend, a different world is going to come forth.

Listening across four levels

One of the most generous and positive impact gifts leaders bring into the conversational field is their capacity for true listening; as demonstrated in Zander’s TED presentation, where the entire audience became emotional engaged and connected; where people deeply attended to the beauty and flow of Chopin’s Prelude.

True listening requires us to attend to, be intentional and know the distinctions across the four levels of listening, to have the leadership presence and flexibility to flow up and down and across the four levels;

1. Level one listening is when we apply our own projections and judgments filters on the other/s – reconfirming what we already believe about what the other is saying.
2. Level two listening in when we listen from the outside to what others say – identifying facts and data that may disconfirm what the other is saying and when we impose our own point of view onto the conversation.
3. Level three listening involves being present to other/s and listening from within – seeing the world through the others eyes and creating the safe space for true dialogue.
4. Level four listening involves being fully present to the whole system, listening from the emerging future – listening with an open mind, heart and will, to sense the highest future possibility that wants to emerge.

This creates an altered and generative state and that creates openings & thresholds between the current reality and the emerging possibilities and opportunities.

‘Sounding together’ to generate innovation

Operating at level four listening requires us to be deeply present, emotionally engaged and engaging, it gives us the chance to “sound together!” It requires us to be courageously, creatively and compassionately willing and able to touch and tap into people’s hearts, guts and minds in purposeful ways.

Innovative leaders make a passionate commitment towards pursuing deep inquiry or questioning processes, they are guided by their inner knowing and through level four listening – that the solution being sought exists as a hidden possibility that encompasses the whole system and our universal connectedness.

The quest towards pursuing the inquiry process and in observing and immersing themselves into the realm of infinite possibilities is the vehicle for igniting people’s passionate purpose.

Without igniting their own, and their peoples passionate purpose, our research and experience in coaching innovators and start-up entrepreneurs indicates that innovative leaders and start-up entrepreneurs will seldom have the staying power to sustain, complete, never mind succeed and flourish, in the start-up or innovation game.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt shares in the quotes included below:

“Today we all live and work in a new era, the Internet Century, where technology is roiling the business landscape and the pace of change is accelerating.” 

This is to say:

• Consumers have more choices (and power) than they have ever had!
• Product excellence is now the critical success factor due to the fact that the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly.
• Prototypes can be modeled digitally with a 3-D printer, can be market tested online, designs can be adjusted based on the resulting data, and even production funds can be raised online with a prototype or clever video.
• Collaboration is easier, across a room, a continent and the globe making the business eco-system concept a viable, attractive and accessible development.

“Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.”

The birth of the adaptive learner

IBM Learning is now developing a completely different set of competencies which they encapsulate and describe as an ‘adaptive learner’. Stating that “innovation is the art of combination” wheredesigners, developers, and engineers (and supervisors, managers, and leaders) are required to combine their ‘expert intuition’ (and knowledge, skills and experience) with ‘strategic intuition’ (and innovative thinking).

Where ‘not knowing’ and having an open mind and heart is allowing people to better flow with, and not resist, the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and creative tension.

These are fast becoming the new rules of the business game boosting innovative thinking and acting in this new world where employees have incredible impact!

So what is a smart creative?

According to Google, these people are the key to success in the Internet Century. Google describes them as someone who combines “business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy and a hands-on approach to getting things done.”

Someone who:

• Is not confined to a specific task, and has access to all of the company’s information and computing power, who is not adverse to taking risks, and is not punished when failure happens.
• Is not restricted by organizational structure or role definitions and who is encouraged to exercise their own ideas.
• Doesn’t keep quiet when they disagree, get bored easily and shift jobs a lot.
• Is multi-dimensional, in that they combine technical depth with business savvy and creative flair.

Key qualities of the smart creative

1. Experts in doing; they design and build, are able to analyze and conceptualize & use data rigorously to make informed business decisions.
2. Business smart; they see and practice the lines of sight between technical expertise, product excellence,and business success.
3. Competitive smart; they are driven by their own sense of passionate purpose and desire to create ‘great’ things.
4. User smart; they understand the end product from the user’s perspective and act an ‘obsessive user’ in their own right.
5. Generates creative ideas & is curiously creative; that are genuinely new, are open to multiple perspectives and plays the perspective chameleon when required. Always questioning, debating and seeking problems to solve in their individualistic way.
6. Risky, collaborative and takes the initiative and is a good and open communicator.

“Their common characteristic is that they work hard and are willing to question the status quo and attack things differently. This is why they can have such an impact. It is also why they are uniquely difficult to manage, especially under old models, because no matter how hard you try, you can’t tell people like that how to think. If you can’t tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think. And make it a place where they want to come every day.”

How to adapt and be-come a ‘smarter creative’

It all comes down to having the self-efficacy, courage, creative confidence, connectedness, curiosity and compassion to be different and resilient when confronted with adversity.  No matter the depth of your expert knowledge, your role, organizational structure or occupation.

• To have the flexibility to develop the capacity to think differently in multiple perspectives by operating from emergence, detachment and allowing. By paying deep attention, creating cracks, openings, and thresholds to see the possibilities and opportunities problems offer us with fresh eyes.
• To be safe in ‘not knowing’ the answer or the solution but how to generate it through intentional disruption, provocation, and disagreement and through deep inquiry, listening, and debate.
• To be receptive and cultivate skills in the innovative thinking including divergent/convergent, critical, associative to ideate hypothetical solutions that may not have previously existed.
• To know how to apply human-centered design thinking processes and lean and agile start-up methodologies to develop empathy speed and agility.
• To be receptive and cultivate skills in acting differently through attending and observing, generative listening, inquiring and debating, teaming, networking, smart risk taking and experimenting with innovative business models and prototypes.

By developing these ‘smart creative’ being, thinking and acting differently states and skills, we can develop our belief in our ability to create change in the world around us as well as maximize the diversity that exist in our global working worlds.

To safely generate disruptive debate and disagreements that co-create innovative ideas and solutions that users value and cherish in our interconnected 21st-century internet based world.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent Fast Company article ‘Why Millennials Don’t Want to Buy Stuff’ the author states that “Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We are starting to think differently about what it means to ‘own’ something.”

Technology is facilitating this evolution and new generations are championing it and “the big push behind it all is our thinking is changing.”

So how is our thinking changing, from what and to what, what is driving this supposed evolutionary shift and what can we do as leaders and consultants to align to it?

In our interconnected world, we can find practically anything we want, at any time, through the “unending flea market of the internet”. This is altering the balance between supply and demand and overwhelming us with choices – people’s concept of value and their motivations for purchasing are constantly shifting.

This is causing organizations to not only redefine what value means in the eyes of their customers and potential users, and to also to find new ways of connecting our clients as to how their product or service can;

–      Make people’s lives better.

–      Connect people to a broader community.

–      Connect people to something bigger than themselves.

Doing this enables us explore new ways of helping our clients to better ignite people’s motivations for purchase.

This requires us to help our clients create;

• Sharp deviations from conventional thinking, planning and development processes for new products and services, so that they create the real value customers and potential users are seeking.
• Major disruptions to how they see, attend to, connect with the whole, so that they know how to generate creative ideas and innovative solutions that solve customers, business and society’s most inherent and wicked problems.

Suggesting that perhaps the first key step is to work on attending to, and evolving our own consciousness; because to solve a problem we need to shift from the same consciousness that created it.

To shift our consciousness, we first need to be aware of it, pay deep attention to it to shift our blind spots.

A first key step is to know how to see the world in new ways.

Developed by Otto Scharmer and described in his book ‘Theory U’ he states that “What we pay attention to and how we pay attention – both individually and collectively” – is key to what we create.

What often prevents us from “attending” are what Scharmer calls our “blind spots”; the inner place from which each of us operates.

Learning to be present to, and become aware of our blind spots is critical to bringing forth the profound strategic, systemic and innovative changes our clients are seeking in business today.

To generate discovery, we need know how to prototype, verify and manifest the new.

The next key step is to know how to enable our client to generate discovery, Joseph Jaworksi, in his book ‘Source’ describes the generative discovery process as a way of;

(1) Being open to alternate and differing world views;

(2) Operating from the stance of human possibility;

(3) Tapping into the generative order of the universe, the field of active information- the Source.

He broadly outlines the seven core practices;

1. Preparation: undertaking a disciplined path of inner self management.
2. Igniting passionate purpose: defining your own unique necessity, for an innovative solution to a clearly defined problem, with the personal foreknowledge that the solution exists in the realm of human possibility.
3. Observing and immersing: Seeing reality with fresh eyes, suspending judgment and immersing oneself in the whole system.
4. Letting go: Releasing old mental models, mindsets and world views that will not serve your own innovation intention and process, beginning a period of incubation.
5. Indwelling and illumination: Living in the undertaking, surrendering oneself to the work, retreating and reflecting, being in nature as a portal and receiving illumination – the perception of a new reality, discovering the hidden solution.
6. Crystallizing and Prototyping: Transforming the business problem into an innovative vision and prototype.
7. Testing and Verifying: Transforming the new knowledge into commercially viable and useable products, services and strategies in ways that people will connect to, value and cherish.

Imagine if we could encourage our clients and their organizations to invest in evolving their consciousness?

To disrupt their habitual short term ‘stimulus-response’ ways of operating to seriously connect with, and redefine what value really means in the eyes of customers and potential users?

To find new ways of connecting people in organizations as to how their products or services could really make their lives better, connect them to a broader community and to something bigger than themselves?

Wouldn’t the world be a better place for it?

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Sometimes, every once in awhile, an amazing book drops off the shelf, in front of your eyes and into your hands and resonates with you at the core of your being.‘Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration’ by Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, recently had that effect on me!

So why is this story having such a profound impact?

It was an incredibly validating read, for me, as an inherently creative person, who after a diverse range of major career changes, became a start-up entrepreneur. In doing so, I took on a very complicated creative and inventive process and subsequently got lost in it. As I am always keen to make sense of things, Ed Catmull provided me with a simple way of understanding what had happened to me. He also provided me with a set of strategies I could use personally as well as to teach others what to do when they get confused and lost in the complicated creative processes necessary for innovation.

Creativity is an emergent process

“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things— in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence.”

This makes creativity initially a very deeply personal process that emerges something new, that has not previously existed. As there are no parameters, restrictions or boundaries, it occurs in a free form state of flow that is part of an inner discovery process and an inner knowing of ‘what is’ and ‘what could be.’

Creativity is confusing

“But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/ director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming”.

This means that creativity requires a tacit understanding of the role and nature convergence and divergence as a disassembling and reassembling process. one in which the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle tend to fly in, fly around and fly out of space simultaneously.

Creativity is a team sport

Creativity and innovation are most successful when played as team sports, what really matters is the level of trust that exists between the people on the team, as well as their willingness and ability to be courageous, confident, compassionate, connected and curious when operating in the tea space.

Creativity requires patience and candor

As there are no apparent boundaries, road maps,junctions and assembly points in the creative process, creativity also requires some kind of acknowledgement, acceptance, comfort and detachment from the confusion and overwhelm.

Creativity requires a special type of work environment

Whilst in a state of overwhelm and confusion and where people are passionate about a creative idea, they won’t actually see the problems that are occurring around or within it.

So coming to clarity with creativity is an iterative process and takes patience, collaboration and candor. In both the start-up and innovative organizational context, it requires a work environment where everyone has a vested interest in one anothers success.

Key Steps in creating a creative work environment

People on the team need to be able to operate from a growth, outward and collaborative mindsets to;

1. “See” individually, collectively and systemically by zooming up, across and down and acknowledge and be okay with “what is really going on.”
2. Candidly conduct constructive feedback processes and mechanisms to iterate ideas to their highest possible creative level.

Ed Catmull describes how this operate in Pixar; “we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust” and explains how the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanisms because it is comprised of people who engage in constructive criticism by;

–      Understanding the generative nature of the problem and are empathic because they have been through a similar situation themselves.

–      Seeking to identify the true causes of problems and operate through suggesting and not mandating solutions, which do not have to be followed.

–       Raising the game, by not being prescriptive, but by offering candid and deep analysis of the problem or situation.

–      Excavating the truth, and generating creative ideas, through energetic and rigorous questioning and debate.

–      Adding value and contribution to the creative idea, and not competing with it.

“Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer— at least briefly— through others’ eyes”.

Which is why, creativity and innovation are most successful when played as true trusted and candid team sport!

Suggestions on developing “good notes” that enhance creativity the Pixar way!

–      Say what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense.

–      Offer constructive feedback at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem.

–      Don’t make demands; don’t even include a proposed fix. But if a proposed fix is offered, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer.

–      Most of all, a good note is specific.

As Ed Catmull says, the successful feedback system is built on empathy, collaboration, and candor and in pursuit of a common goal; which is supporting and helping each other to be the best and to make the best product or service possible to their market.

Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.

image credit: Random House

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When I was Qantas airline hostess, in the pre ‘flight attendant’ days, I was required to attend and pass, very strict Emergency Procedures (EP) training. This involved a week long, comprehensive experiential training session, teaching us how to evacuate a 747 aircraft by applying “the 90 second rule.” Our role was to act ‘as if’ we were the actual aircrew team on a fully loaded long transpacific flight. Our job was to empty the cabin of passengers, in a smooth and orderly way, in a simulated crash landing in either deep turbulent waters, where we launched life rafts and in dangerous land emergencies, where we launched inflatable rubber slides for people to escape hazardous fires from the damaged aircraft.

All within the required “90 seconds”!

Interestingly, our fun filled annual EP training sessions, were always conducted without any actual technical crew, or pilots, passengers, or anyone simulating these functions, being present. In fact we just had to imagine ‘as if’ the actual pilots and passengers were there, and to then shout loudly “come this way” to the mere 10-15 fellow aircrew attending the training!  Of course, in real life, it’s been proven that when an actual airline emergency happens, passengers’ ‘prime ‘survival’ directive kicks in, and the real result is bedlam, people drop everything, run like crazy, jam the exits and generally make “the 90 second rule” a fictional fantasy.

This is a great example of “how polite fictions riddle proposed innovations”

Fortunately I never actually had to use my EP training in a real life airplane emergency. However, I always wondered how valuable and meaningful our EP training experience would have been, and the real level of our competency to evacuate a fully loaded 747, been seriously tested by having to deal with a serious life threatening real life emergency?

Being willing to play

“Innovation attitudes, not just aptitudes, matter. The ethos is as much about culture as competence.”

As culture is typically defined as ‘the way we do things around here’ and with innovation culture being a CEO priority, we do need to focus on attitudes or mindsets as well as the ‘way we do things.’ And the best way to do this, for the cross generational range of global learners, is to deeply engage them in learning processes that involve ‘learning by doing and by playing.’
“You can be a serious innovator unless you are willing and able to play” says Michael Schrage, in his paradigm shifting book “Serious Play; how the world’s best companies simulate to innovate”. He explores how simple simulations invalidate a lot of the organizational assumptions and the ‘polite fictions’ that preserve them. He maintains that rapid prototyping is the ‘corner stone’ and ‘cultural fountainhead’ of an innovative enterprise. With the increasing demand for speed and agility it makes sense to see innovation as a social process and ‘a byproduct of how I play with others’.

Innovation for everyone everyday

This is because “For many firms, the innovation agenda is now as much about human capital investment as delivering new products and services” – making innovation part of everyone’s’ job, everyday!

Behavior drives innovation

Whilst most of us really enjoy the pleasure experienced when attending a truly artistic and professional performance, especially a theatrical or musical one, we often forget that it’s the rehearsals that enable performers to expertly and superbly ultimately enact them.
A masterful performance is created within the ‘shared space’ performers safely enact their mental models, by exploring, improvising and experimenting with the behaviors, actions and techniques that work, and that don’t work!

When players have permission to play with different versions, within a range of unlimited possibilities, to improvise and experiment with new ideas, they can ‘get to’ a place they may have never previously imagined, experienced or enacted. This is one of the reasons I love designing and facilitating experiential training sessions, this is because, inevitably a team of managers and leaders will have a chance to enact out, witness and shift their mental models in order to be more effective.

Prototyping is a collaborative and creative process

“Prototypes engage the organizations thinking in the explicit. They externalize thought and spark conversations”.

When I was prototyping The Start-Up Game™ in collaboration with my Israeli co-designers, we facilitated a series of pilot or prototype workshops. It was amazing to see how people’s mental models externalized and were represented through enacting their behaviors, within the safe shared learning space we created.

Some players became crazily competitive, others complacent or cozily collaborative, this gave players lots of explicit substance for having candid team conversations and generative design debates. It created the safe shared learning space for players to safely witness, introspect and enhance their self awareness; to take personal responsibility for proactively managing the impact of their behaviors on self and their teams, to be innovative, to achieve their desired start-up team outcomes. Start-up teams became deeply engaged and involved in developing their shared start-up prototype by igniting and forging collaborative creativity and firing innovation.

The Start-Up Game™ business simulation provided explicit evidence for players to;
– See and operate from a whole systems perspective, to self manage and regulate their own behaviors to ensure that they impacted positively, differently and creatively on their individual start-up teams.

• Improvise and experiment with the key learning principles and techniques, especially with being creative, collaborative and courageous when solving problems by applying lean and agile methodologies.

• Candidly and creatively prototype empathic design led, high quality customer centric solutions to serious business problems, as commercially viable start-up organizations, in ways that people value and cherish.

Tips for innovation and improvisation

Show and ask and then show and tell

Encourage people to be different, to be curious and inquisitive, to expose and challenge the fictional fantasies and operating mental models behind them. Involve them in the interplay between individuals and the expression of their creative ideas and innovative solutions.
– By building something, a model or prototype together by knowing how to think differently.
– By re-perceiving and playing with current reality by do-ing things differently together.

Focus first on rehearsing and then on performing

Most organizations are inherently risk adverse, so flow with this;
– By making it safe to rehearse new ideas by encouraging people to play.
– By creating shared spaces for improvisation and experimentation for people to play with possibilities and experiment (and fail) with new ideas until they master their ultimate masterful innovative performance.

– By recognizing and rewarding people’s efforts rather than punishing people for their imperfections and mistakes.

Use prototyping to force introspection, self awareness and cultural transformation

(1) Engage people in rapid prototyping and simulations, encourage and make it safe to;
– Introspect to develop self awareness and awareness of others.
– Take intelligent risks.
– Generate candid and courageous conversations, creative debates and constructive two way feedback.

(2) Building the corner stone and cultural fountainhead
By engaging people in playfully improvising and experimenting with new ways of radically transforming the cost and quality of the raw materials through rapid prototyping, organizations will build the ‘corner stone’ and ‘cultural fountainhead’ of an innovative enterprise.

At ImagineNation™, we believe that the days of indulgent personal development focused leadership and management training programs that don’t foster a culture of innovation and deliver improved business performance and growth are over!

(3) Making engaging people in rapid prototyping initiatives and expertly facilitated focused business simulations, the key vehicles for developing the competency required to effect urgent and necessary innovative business transformations.

Please sign up to attend my next inspiring and comprehensive free monthly webinars. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/ or the next ImagineNation Coach for Innovators Certified Program. Visit https://www.imaginenation.com.au/coach-for-innovators/ for more information.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

If you don’t network, you don’t work

Living overseas, in Israel for almost 6 years gave me an opportunity to experience me a series of challenging harsh realities, including “if you don’t network, you don’t work”! Like many of us, I developed my consulting and learning and development business in the days when networking was largely centered on personal and business promotion, focusing on facilitating business development.

Living and working in the ‘start-up nation,’ within a connected and entrepreneurial culture awakened me to the shift disrupting the networking paradigm. It is now one of the key foundations and enablers of innovative leadership and successful entrepreneurship.

During the research and development process involved in designing one of my free monthly webinars -‘Leading for Innovation’ I realized that leaders have further shifted the context of their role to become ‘connectors!’

Making connections enables leaders to lead whilst making fluid decisions in our age of upheaval!

Most of us are aware that we live within an interconnected world, largely enabled by technology. Yet how many of us realize the deep implications and are enacting the possibilities and opportunities this connectedness allows us?

As individuals, some of us are making Friends on Facebook, acquiring serious business contacts and posting via Linked In, sharing our blogs on Tumblr and posting the pictures we love on Pinterst and Flickr. This is only the tip of the ‘connections iceberg’ impacting the current a digital social revolution.

Creating a tipping point, in exploding creativity and diversity of thought, generating ideas and redefining how we communicate, interact and develop relationships with one another.

How does this relate to innovation and leadership in the 21st century?

An innovative leader is an inherent ‘connector’ who confidently, courageously and compassionately networks across differing and diverse teams, business units, fields, and multiple disciplines. They are curious and create coalitions of networks by seeking people’s ideas and input via a range of novel and interactive channels to:

• Harness and maximize difference and diversity of thought, ideas and solutions in organic and autonomous ways to elicit the ‘out of the box’ thinking that affects change, results in creative ideas and innovative solutions.

• Create increased speed and agility to deal with strategic issues and threats, as well as to solve business problems by transforming them into commercial business opportunities, creative ideas and innovative solutions that people value and cherish.

• Mobilize and leverage people’s knowledge, skills and experience to solve systemic challenges that cross multiple disciplines, geographies, industries and systems to promote global, regional or corporate sustainability, growth or value.

Developing an innovative culture requires focusing on connections!

In a recent HBR blog, ‘Collaboration Is the New Competition’, Ben Hecht suggested that;

Leaders and organizations are acknowledging that even their best individual efforts can’t stack up against today’s complex and interconnected problems. They are putting aside self-interests and collaborating to build a new civic infrastructure to advance their shared objectives. It’s called collective impact and it’s a growing trend across the country”.

Networking initiatives enable organizations to make collective impact

• They make deeper connections internally as the knowledge, skills and experience of any company is essentially within the heads and hearts of their people.
• They connect externally and empathically with their end users to harness their aspirations towards improving their experience to promote advocacy and retain their loyalty.
• They connect systemically with the key players in their value chains, to improve efficiencies and increase speed to market.

Additionally most innovative organizations are adopting an ecosystem perspective as a way of collaborating and flowing midst the growing global chaos. They use innovative social technologies to engage and collaborate across private, public and social sectors to promote sustainability, reduce costs, increase business value or growth and increase competitiveness.

The Medici Effect and creating breakthrough ideas

In his groundbreaking book, ‘The Medici Effect’ author Frans Johansson describes a fascinating journey to “‘the intersection’: a place where ideas and concepts from diverse industries, cultures, departments, and disciplines collide, ultimately igniting an explosion of ideas leading to extraordinary innovations”.

Breakthrough ideas are most often ‘intersectional’ and occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory.

Some simple networking tips!

Networking is a learnable skill set – to initiate and develop this vital skill set leaders are required build the foundational growth, collaborative and adaptive mindsets.

They embody and enact an emotionally agile courageous, confident, compassionate, generous and curious way of be-ing, by putting themselves ‘out there’ in the world because it’s about:

1. Taking the attention off ‘me’ and paying deep attention (being focused, open minded, hearted and present to the whole system) to the ‘other’ you are interacting with.

2. Knowing how to listen generatively (very deeply and from the whole system) for possibilities that are present in the conversation, group or presentation.

3. Knowing how to ask deep and powerful generative questions that disrupt and provoke peoples thinking, capture their attention and facilitate options, possibilities, opportunities and answers to questions that could not have possibly conceived by a single individual.

Networking creates these intersections and exposes us to a range of creative opportunities and possibilities and gives us with the chance to sense the random ‘bits and pieces’ that help develop the ‘associational muscle’ to perceive and enact the world differently.

Innovative leaders use networking to explore the seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas to create breakthroughs at the intersections of diverse disciplines & fields.

This leads to the discovery of new directions resulting in the Medici Effect-which is of course what innovation is all about!

If you are curious & keen to explore why creativity and collaboration the key levers for innovation, then register at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/for ImagineNation™’s first free 45 minute “Teaming creativity and innovation” webinar for this year. It’s on Wednesday, 2nd March at; 12.00pm Tel Aviv, 11.00am Central Europe, 3.30pm New Delhi, 10.00am London, 6.00am New York, 9.00pm Sydney, Melbourne & 7.00pm Perth.

Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

Also check out the only ICF CCE accredited online innovation and entrepreneurship program and top up your toolkit to better help your clients succeed and flourish by transforming complex business and wicked problems into innovative solutions that people will value and cherish. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/coach-for-innovators/

image credit: vector-eps.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

A new fluid and agile team paradigm is emerging in the 21st century that compels them to work more like an improvisational jazz ensemble rather than as a conducted static orchestra. This is because work frequently occurs now within an uncertain and dynamic environment involving shorter duration innovative projects as well as the need to develop and sustain virtual and cross cultural relationships within a high rapidly changing global high tech environment.

Teams are required to come together and disband quickly within localized and globalized projects, differing infrastructures, lean methodologies, regions, geographies and conventional business hierarchies and functions.

It is expected that in the future there will be even less time and possibly less resources for teams to follow the conventional consuming team development route. Work now requires us to be capable of teaming up with anyone, anytime, via any medium and in any place to deliver the results organizations want and need to flourish in the increasingly competitive environment.

“Teaming”—reaching out, getting up to speed, establishing quickly who they are and what they bring, and trying to make progress without a blueprint”.

“Teaming is very different from the idea of building a high-performance team to fit a known task. It is dynamic; learning and execution occur simultaneously.” Teaming is the engine of organizational learning,”

Making ‘teaming’ a key to innovation success – because innovation is a team sport!

Innovation success requires teaming as it exemplifies serious co-ordination and deep collaboration to leaner, execute and achieve the desired outcomes. This might involve small groups of people to work together effectively to deliver a business or sporting outcome; or functional business units to develop lines of sight to their customer or possibly an entire organization to focus their efforts towards delivering results to its key stakeholders. It could also be a distributed network working together to achieve social or community change or a business eco-system working together to compete globally.

Harnessing and mobilizing collective impact and genius

What is important now is that truly innovative groups and teams are consistently able to intentionally develop and focus the power of their collective impact. To then elicit and then combine members separate slices of genius into a single work of collective genius – with anyone, anytime, via any medium and in any place.

Teaming case study

A long standing client was recently appointed CIO of a global Australian organization, like many large companies, had inherited a legacy of blaming IT for all of its business woes.

Realizing that his success depended on engaging and enrolling the business owners in an innovative “one team” approach, he partnered with Compass Learning and ImagineNation™ to create a Top Team Leadership, Alignment, and Teaming Innovation Learning Journey.

The aim was to enable IT to become “the go to group” – a catalyst for igniting and harnessing peoples “collective genius” in their organization. To lead, create and execute an innovative systemic business change that improves the customers experience and adds value to the overall global business.

We created a three phased learning journey including a comprehensive team diagnostic, a three day residential experiential workshop and a follow up online team coaching program to embed and integrate key learning’s and team habits.

Developing teaming mindsets

As so many of us are aware; mindsets drive behaviors which then drive the results we get.

So whilst everyone was keen to discuss the problems of such an approach and debate their unique role in this potentially new world, we focused our efforts towards opening people’s minds and hearts, and to experiment with be-ing, thinking and doing things differently, provocatively and disruptively.

The key growth mindsets we introduced at the offsite included;

• Taking personal responsibility, which means not blaming others for what goes wrong, or by denying and justifying, being constructive rather than passively or aggressively defensive in the face of problems, disagreement and conflict . This provided the foundations for shifting the language towards ‘I’ and ‘we’ and evolving later discussions and defining what individual accountability and mutual accountability meant to the group. All of which are fundamental to establishing teaming success.
• Knowing how to see their worlds both systemically and strategically as well as specifically and accurately simultaneously. Enabling them to be both flexible and adaptive and to reason inductively and deductively so that they could perceive possibilities and make unexpected associations. As well as create the intellectual collisions that create the intrinsic motivation for innovation to occur. This provided the basis for generating the real conversations that needed to be had, so people could perceive, sense and share their different perspectives within a safe and sensible space.
• Knowing what it means to operate from an ‘outward’ rather than an ‘inward’ mindset and to shift from their ‘business as usual’ box and conventional silo and ‘in the box’ thinking. Enabling them to pay attentions as to how they impact on others, and on ‘what’s best for the business’ and ‘how can they help each other be successful’. This provided the basis for further defining what co-ordination and collaboration meant to them in their team context. It also created a need for identifying, understanding and ultimately working their interdependencies in the future.

Developing teaming skills

Once the group got to know one another better through a range of targeted deeply debriefed experiential activities, that allowed them to experiment in an environment where they had permission to fail, they successfully enrolled in the ‘one team’ cause.

Our focus was to then build their teaming capability and skill set. The key teaming skills we focused on developing included;

• Developing interpersonal awareness; noticing how I impact on others, paying attention and being intentional in every interaction. Also by introducing the simple and much improved DiSC profile enabled the team, through facilitated discussion, to understand and flow with their individual behavioral styles and inherent group culture.
• Knowing how to ask generative questions as a means of skillful inquiry to explore multiple perspectives and maximize the differences and diversity that existed within the group.
• Knowing how to listen from possibility, to withhold evaluation and judgment and be empathic toward others to really hear one another and build deeper value adding conversations.
• Knowing how to practice having real conversations that were outcome focused and respectful.

Key teaming elements

Within an environment of fun, frustration, challenge and hard work and via a series of improvised facilitated processes, the group put these critical mindsets and skills to practice, and seamlessly develop;

• An agreed coherent ‘one team’ purpose statement to focus their efforts towards what they were together to achieve for their global organization.
• An agreed set of codes of engagement to focus and guide mindsets, behaviors and activities with clear rewards and consequences.
• Clear and concise agreed roles and responsibilities, outlining specifically their role and accountabilities, what they commit to do for the team and the organization, and what they want others to commit to doing in making the team purpose and CIO’s vision a reality.

What was truly amazing was how much deeper, richer and more meaningful these real conversations were by the third day, and how much coherence and intentionality the group could achieve in such a short time frame by experimenting with be-ing, thinking and acting differently, provocatively and disruptively.

Harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective impact and genius enables groups and teams to be agile and improvisational when operating effectively in an uncertain and dynamic environment is one, if not the most critical key to innovation success.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent Forbes article, What Innovation Is and Isn’t by Rob Preston from Oracle, he suggests that consumers are suffering a bout of “innovation fatigue.” He presents data from communications firm, Ketchum’s new Innovation Kernel study, which attempts to figure out how consumers “define, perceive, and value innovation.” The Ketchum study is based on an online survey, conducted in January 2015 with M/A/R/C Research, of 4,094 working adults in the US, UK, Spain, China, and Hong Kong. The study never quite defines innovation, but survey respondents said they’re most interested in innovations that improve their quality of life (58%) or help them be more efficient (57%).

“Arguably, it’s that same commitment to continued innovation, backed by visionary leadership and sufficient financial resources that keeps first-mover products on top over the long haul. Think Oracle Database, Adobe Photoshop, and Quicken QuickBooks. Without that long-term commitment and vision, first movers quickly become also-rans—or answers to trivia questions. For every Oracle Database or Adobe Photoshop there’s a VisiCalc and a WordStar: great early products that didn’t keep up.” – Rob Preston

Innovation agility provides leverage for long term focused visionaries

The first point about understanding innovation agility is that it is, in essence; a blend of great advances in technology development together with the leading edge practices and principles of innovation management and visionary leadership. This enables people to see and solve key problems in adaptive and consistent ways, through incorporating lean and agile principles, within a systemic framework.

The focus is on using financial and key resources to “out-innovate” the competition in ways that improve the quality of people lives in ways that they value and cherish.

In their book Agile Innovation, the authors state that agile innovation addresses the critical drivers of innovation success. At ImagineNation™ we see these drivers systemically and synergistically because they involve making organizational climate, culture and process change decisions simultaneously. This enables organizations to balance short term objectives with long term needs. It also enables them to stay on course in successfully delivering the organizational outcomes they want to achieve from real innovation that either improves efficiencies or adds value to the quality of people’s lives.

If we adopt a business eco-system context we can:
1. Accelerate the innovation process,
2. Reduce the risks inherent in innovation,
3. Engage the entire organization as “co-ideators” and broader ecosystem in the innovation effort.

See this illustrated in Our Conceptual Framework – A Systemic Approach

1. Define the results you want to HAVE

The first step is to clarify what kind of short term results and longer term organizational outcomes and the desired future the organization wants to have. Many global organizations state that they want to have agile innovative organizations that compete strategically.

Through innovation to “out-innovate” the competition and create high value and low cost, new market segments. Seldom is this expressed and articulated within a visionary, quantifiable and clear goal and defined strategy.

2. What most organizations DO

In many cases, we noticed that organizations tend to focus their innovation efforts on either;

a) Achieving short terms results involving quick and easy ways of generating income and or reducing costs. These are mostly internally focused, tend to be episodic and seldom outwardly focus on understanding and empathizing with customers’ problems, their perception of value or efficiency, or involve true organizational learning.

Companies who do this think they are being innovative, and focus their efforts by investing in idea creation processes such as hackathons and company wide ideas competitions that are largely supported by technology based idea management platforms.

Whilst this is an effective way of engaging people and harnessing their creative energy towards imaginative ideas that may ultimately add value to bottom line results, it is only a first “baby step” towards developing real innovation agility. What they neglect to do, is focus on achieving a visionary, longer term objective around developing real agile innovative organizational capability.

b) Achieving longer term objectives such as business transformation programs or innovative organizational culture programs are often initiated via some kind of skills based leadership and management training program.

Whilst skills’ training is important as a critical success factor, it’s really the last, and not the first area of focus for learning and development in bringing about the desired changes or outcomes the organization wants to HAVE.

What most organizations should do:

• To achieve longer term objectives and sustainable results, the first step is to know how to see and deal effectively with the company’s own unique set of inhibitors to change.
• Next is to pay attention to what is needed to acknowledge and flow with people’s survival and learning anxieties when involved in any kind of change process or new learning intervention.

In other words, to engage and enroll them, at the cognitive, heart and visceral levels in the results they want to HAVE.

As well as to create an environment where people have the chance to, are able to and want to create the desired changes that deliver the outcomes the organization wants.

Most organizations neglect the BE in innovation agility

Also as these types of skills based training programs tend to be theoretical and often academic in nature and may even be delivered by a renowned academic institution. They seldom include and integrate the three key phases of innovation; discovery design and delivery and mostly focus on execution and not ideation.

They also tend to neglect the critical foundational factors of enabling people to;

• Know how to see and interact effectively with the world from their customers’ point of view to empathize with their problems. Especially with their specific products or services, or to see and perceive the key converging trends in their industries that provide “blue ocean” possibilities and opportunities for agile innovation development.
• Knowing how to ignite people’s intrinsic motivation by creating an urgent necessity and passionate purpose for innovation in their organization.
• Cultivating people’s entrepreneurial traits and most resourceful emotional states to equipping them with the self efficacy and resilience necessary to stay and flourish in the innovation game as well as to develop a safe and engaged organizational climate.
• Creating true learning in terms of the desired core growth, outward and systemic mindset changes required to develop consistent innovative processes, cultivate an innovative culture, accelerate innovation and reduce risk adversity.

If organizations invest precious resources in integrating these key factors into their innovation efforts they will build their foundational internal core agile innovation competency. This is necessary to keep up with the current speed of change requiring people to be trained and up skilled continuously. It also ensures that they successfully avoid being out thought and out maneuvered by competitors.

It’s actually this BE level that drives what we DO to create the results we HAVE, especially in regards to innovative entrepreneurship and agile innovation.

Imagine if organizations invested in creating constructive organizational cultures where people are able to improvise, take intelligent risks, experiment and fail without fear of retribution or punishment?

Where people feel safe, motivated and esteemed when they dip their toes into the experimental, iterative and agile waters that the lean start-up methodology and business model offers.

Where visionary leaders do the really hard work of leading self organizing teams from whom they are be-ing and fearlessly role model real collaboration and true agility.

Back to Rob Preston:

“In the end, what customers’ value is true innovation—opportunities “missed by most people,” Thomas Edison famously said, because they’re “dressed in overalls and look like work.”

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In the 2014 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report more than 206,000 individuals were surveyed across 73 economies and 3936 national experts on entrepreneurship from 73 economies participated in the survey. GEM participant economies represent 72.4% of the world’s population and 90% of the world’s GDP, enables GEM to feature different profiles of entrepreneurship according to regionsand the economic development stage.

Amazingly, and alarmingly, they stated that “people’s fear of failure can be a strong inhibitor for seizing opportunities and transforming entrepreneurial intentions into entrepreneurial activity. The highest fear of failure (measured among the group with perceived opportunities) was expressed by respondents in 2104 GEM EU economies (40.7%), followed by respondents in Asia and Oceania region (37.5%). In the most developed countries (innovation-driven economies), the fear of failure is higher than in factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. In the group of GEM EU economies, the highest rates of fear of failure are observed in Greece (61.6%), Poland (51.1%), Oceania economies, the highest fear of failure was expressed by respondents in Japan (54.5%) and Vietnam (50.1%)”.

Does this mean that between more than one third and one half of people are so inhibited by their fear of failure that they are unable to seize an entrepreneurial opportunity to transform it into actual entrepreneurial activity?

So what does it mean to fear of failure and what really drives it?
In my twenty plus years as a global leadership facilitator and executive coach, peoples’ fears around failure have impacted or inhibited every major change initiative I have ever been involved with. In fact, recently, a very powerful and incredible participant in my Coach for Innovators Program shared; “my client didn’t pay my bill for 90 days, so I quit the project and I am so frozen now by my fear of failure I can’t leave the house.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘fear’ as “An unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.”

So from a cognitive perspective, I’ve noticed, in my work as an executive and innovative coach, that most people’s fears around failure are a result of a cognitive bias, or an irrational belief that acts as a filter which then distorts reality. From an emotional perspective, I’ve noticed that most people’s fears around failure area result from the pain of being vulnerable, abandoned, punished or shamed in front of others, or of being disapproved of rejected or disliked by others. From a visceral or gut perspective, I’ve noticed that we are wired neurologically to avoid the threat of danger or pain, so we automatically move away and avoid, or move towards and confront dangerous or threatening situations.

It seems that some people’s motivation to avoid failure often exceeds their motivation to succeed. This fear of failure causes them to unconsciously sabotage their chances of success, and can play a significantly undermining role in the derailment of what might be, a successful career or outcome.

Managing your cycles of collusion
I have also noticed that most people’s fear of failure tends to operate as an unconscious ‘closed loop’ which often makes it self sustaining. This means that once it develops, which is most often in childhood, it perpetuates itself as an automatic ‘cycle of collusion’ until there is a direct intervention to stop and re-frame it.

Another recent client, Steve, a very dissatisfied senior executive in a global financial services organization, was aching to play in the innovative entrepreneurial space.
In our work together we managed to acknowledge and work with his cycle of collusion to resolve his fear of failure by;
1. Enhancing his self awareness and paying attention to his internal state, this enabled him to anticipate and tune into any feelings of potential disapproval from the other person he was interacting with.
2. Acknowledging (and not judging) the internal state of anxiety resulting from the potential threat of danger, pain or harm.
3. Instead of reacting automatically to relieve the anxiety by appeasing the other person and giving his power away to them to gain their approval, he developed the presence to simply flow with the situation.
4. He then experimented with a series of internal disruptive generative questions to create the space between stimulus and response to introduce options, some of these included:
– “What is really going on for me right now?”
– “What is my outcome in this situation?”
– “What do I want for me?”
– “How can I choose to respond to have what I want?”
5. He then calibrated and chose his response to the other person and relived his anxiety by responding appropriately.
Had he not taken personal responsibility for managing the situation, he would have simply relived his anxiety by appeasing the other person to resolve and avoid any potential conflict.
He would have been rewarded by the sense of relief he would have felt by doing this. This then would have confirmed his false assumption that the real danger had been averted which would have reinforced and perpetuated the fear.

Letting go of our avoidance strategies
Interestingly, this type of avoidance strategy ensures that we never actually experience what we are trying to avoid. It is only when we do have an authentic failure, which hits us at the cognitive (head), emotional (heart) and visceral (gut) levels that we truly experience what failure, in reality, means.
Having spent the better part of my corporate career being consumed by my fear of failure and playing this avoidance game, and having the start-up entrepreneurs real life experiences of making colossal failures, I have dipped my toe in the water and broken this pattern.

Just imagine, if more than one third to one half of people were also empowered and enabled to effectively take responsibility and manage their fears of failure?

What if they seized the entrepreneurial opportunities that GEM describes and transformed them into actual entrepreneurial activities, products and services that people valued and cherished?

Wouldn’t the world be a better and richer place for it!

image credit: Behrooz Nobakht

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