GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I wish I had known about Clayton Christensen’s research on living overseas as one of the three ways of innovative experimentation before I relocated to the Middle East almost six years ago!

“In fact, the more countries someone lives in, the more likely he or she is to leverage that experience to deliver innovative products, processes or businesses. Individuals who live in a foreign country for at least 3 months are 35% more likely to start and innovative venture or invent a product.

Moreover, if managers try at least one international assignment before becoming CEO, their companies deliver stronger financial results than companies run by CEO’s without such experience, roughly 7 % higher market performance on average.”

As I move closer to my next global relocation, this time, in August, to Melbourne, Australia, I appreciate how it has been a useful experience for generating new business ideas. How the diversity and depth of experience has boosted my creativity, increased my courage and ability to adapt, boosted my creativity in the innovative entrepreneurship space ultimately enabling me to live a more authentic and compassionate life.

It has been transformational experience through actively observing, exploring and experimenting within an environment of constant change, uncertainty, turbulence and complexity. Perhaps this is the ‘new status quo’ that is challenging twenty first century organizations to adapt to, innovate within, if they want to grow, flourish and thrive!

There is no innovation without experimentation

Whilst the average manager and leader may not fully appreciate the role of experimentation in innovation, it is widely accepted in innovation management circles, that there is no innovation without experimentation.

This is because experimentation unlocks, through understanding the role of cause and effect, trial and error and field trials, the capacity for innovation.

Yet many of us don’t know how to embrace the failures that experimentation involves as we cycle through these three roles. Also many of us myopically focus on analyzing and sequencing ideas and solutions rather than testing, learning and iterating and pivoting from failures.

The tendency towards delivering quick short term results doesn’t allow us the time required to generate the data on what might work in the future as we search for new creative and innovative solutions.

People’s fears of failure and risk adversity also inhibits them from experimenting, and few organization have courageous cultures or the capacity to support them to safely fail fast to learn quickly.

These are the two key factors that keep us stuck in the conventional thinking box and inhibit innovators from generating the passionate engagement as well as key data on how well ideas work in practice.

This prohibits innovators from shaping revolutionary business ideas, solutions and models, piece by piece as experimentation requires.

Power of divergent and associative thinking

The diversity of experience involved in creating ImagineNation™, as a generative and provocative innovation training company, in a radically different survival and scarcity based Middle Eastern culture, with a harsh guttural foreign language honed my divergent thinking skills.

It also honed my associative thinking abilities, developed from my years in the fashion and lifestyle industries enabled me to make surprising connections across innovation management, corporate learning and lean and agile start-up entrepreneurship methodologies.

This enabled me to experiment by developing three innovative corporate learning prototypes, which I could then test (and fail), iterate, pivot and validate. At the same time experiencing first hand, the cognitive, emotional and visceral roller coaster that start-up entrepreneurs go through when inventing and realizing something that may not have previously existed.

Boosting your potential for innovation

If you want to boost your potential for innovation through experimentation, Clayton Christensen suggests three useful ways;

1. Try out new experiences through exploration such as living in a different country, working in multiple industries or developing a new skill.
2. Take apart products, process and ideas.
3. Test ideas through pilots and prototypes.

Experimenting to make brilliant blunders

As you courageously and compassionately experiment with these, notice how you experience your unique set of perfectionistic behaviours, your inherent risk adversity, or your own fears of failure and take heed of what Mario Livio, an astrophysicist, with the Hubble Program at the Science Institute, in his book ‘Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe’ says about making mistakes;

There are 2 types of mistakes people make;
– Sloppy or thoughtless mistakes.
– Thinking outside of the box, or challenging convention mistakes.

He suggests that these mistakes sometimes result in what he calls ‘blunders’ and that blunders have the potential to enable us to take calculated risks, where we might fail. Paradoxically they also provide us with opportunities to experiment to uncover great rewards!

He uses the term ‘brilliant blunders’ and suggests that they are the portals to great discoveries and disruptive innovations!

So make sure to have some fun, frustration and challenges exploring what it means to experiment in your business practice and enjoy making some brilliant blunders of your own!

image credit: jeanbaptisteparis

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In the Executive Summary of the 2014 Front End of Innovation Conference, produced by the Institute for International Research, the author welcomes us to the report with this statement;

“Welcome to Business as unusual. Business as usual is done. Stick a fork in it.

We’ve entered the age of business as unusual.

The world’s largest hotelier may soon be Airbnb- the one without a single brick.

Detroit goes bankrupt; Google starts building driverless cars”.

Suggesting that these are not anomalies and that collectively, they signify a ‘new normal’ in which the unexpected has become an expectation. A ‘new normal’ found when equilibrium (the condition of a system in which all competing influences are balanced) gives way to dis-equilibrium (loss or lack of stability).

This creates the opportunity for a new hero; the leader as an innovative entrepreneur to emerge!

“It is the entrepreneur, and no other, who disrupts the monotonous equilibrium of the economy and who is the prime cause of economic development and increases societal wellness. Therefore innovation and development are disturbances in the Walrasian circular flow. However, this disruption of the formerly established equilibrium leads to both a highly unstable growth phase and a volatile market for competitive industries.”

The Disruptive Provocateur

To take advantage of this emerging ‘new normal’ managers and leaders have the opportunity to exploit these “disturbances” by becoming disruptive provocateurs.

A disruptive provocateur is someone who is willing to flow with the “disruption” of the “formerly established equilibrium”. They dance at the edge of the dis-equilibrium in “the highly unstable growth phase” of a “volatile market.” A disruptive provocateur is someone who is willing and able to;

–      Break the rules that exists within conforming, comfortable and compliant organizations; the old hangover of our mechanical and industrial approach to business structures and systems.

–      Disrupt and challenge the conventional reality that perpetuates in these organizations; to harness trends, leverage resources and move peoples thinking towards the possibilities available in our emerging technological and connected world to create new markets that meet unsatisfied needs.

The Disruptive Provocateur Skill Set

A disruptive provocateur is a manager or leader who safely, confidently, courageously and compassionately develops and practices a way of be-ing different, thinking and acting differently.

They have cultivated the observation skills and insight to sense and see a disruption as it emerges and use it to;

–      Surprise the market again & again with exciting unexpected solutions!

–      Produce an unconventional strategy that leaves competitors scrambling to catch up!

–      Turn consumer expectations upside down & takes an industry into its next generation!

–      Fuse analytical rigor with fluid intuitive processes (business & design)!

They manage the emotional reactions that arise from the innovative entrepreneurial roller coaster by knowing how to;

–      Adapt to, live and flow with the dissonance, disagreements and conflicts that exist in dis-equilibrium!

–      Think what no-one else is thinking and do what no-one else was doing!

–      Take conventions and turn them on their head!

–      Maximize differences, diversity and creative tension as openings and thresholds for innovative ideas and solutions!

Heeding the wake-up call!

The strength of the current levels of global dis-equilibrium have already been disruptive enough to create the new ‘business as unusual ‘environment that The Institute of International Research describes.

Whether it is at the macro (such as in the former Soviet Union) or micro level (in your own organization) the majority of disruptions act as ‘wake-up calls’.

This adds further to the dis-equilibrium that already occurs and then results in a reactive organizational response called Disconfirmation; meaning that people will feel that they, their team or their organization are under threat,  or perhaps ‘wrong’ in some way or that they are frozen in maintaining their status quo.

Dancing with disequilibrium

Disconfirmation, according to Professor Edgar Schein, from The Sloan School of Management is an essential ‘unfreezing process’ that causes serious discomfort and dis-equilibrium that act as triggers for change. However, as we all well know, some of the potential side effects of the discomfort of disruption include conflict and resistance which erupt naturally when people values get challenged and fears erupt.

Typically, people will react by;

–      Doing nothing; freezing.

–      Taking Flight or by Fighting; aggression or avoidance.

–      Looking to authority to solve it for them; being dependent and/or seeking approval.

Rather than allowing these states to embed, a disruptive provocateur sees them as opportunities for innovation; to maximize differences, diversity and creative tension, to use these as essential resources in getting to the real, as opposed to superficial, harmony.

They know how frame these uncomfortable and threatening states and orchestrate them when working from an integrated whole.

They set out to seek resolution rather than appeasement, or as something to be neutralized or eliminated and utilize the disruptions to transform the core issue or problem into an innovative solution that people connect to, value and cherish.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our work at ImagineNation, we have created a new role for managers and leaders who want to be innovative. This is the disruptive provocateur,  someone who courageously questions everything; they use disruptive thought provoking and bold questions to challenge the status quo, often with an uncommon intensity and with great frequency.

So what is a disruptive question and why are they one of the most critical levers for creating the safe space for innovation?

A disruptive question is an invitation to be curious and to think differently about a person, situation, challenge or problem.

Disruptive questions cultivate insights about ‘what currently is’ and ‘what could or might be’. Crafting the ‘right’ disruptive questions enables people to better understand business problems, get to the core. To re-frame the problem into a generative or higher level systemic challenge for breakthrough innovation. Disruptive questions are key creative catalysts that allow and provocate and emerge possibilities for innovative ideas and solutions.

The Generative Inquiry Cycle

1. Elicit a description of the territory.
2. Identify the causes of the current reality occurring in the territory.
4. Elicit creative ideas.

Step One  Elicit a description of the territory;

Most of us are aware that the ‘map is not the territory’ it is only a picture or a representation of the actual territory. This requires us to listen deeply to reveal ‘what is’ and to connect with people to build empathy with how it feels to be located in that kind of territory.

–      Asking ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ questions;

–      What is the real problem?

–      What are you trying to achieve?

–      What does this problem/that really mean to you?

–      How are you feeling about it?

–      How does this impact on your customer?

–      How does this impact on your people?

–      Who else is involved?

Step Two  Identify  the causes of the current reality occurring in the territory or social field of attention;

To really know the territory, we have to immerse ourselves in it; by generating a deep understanding of the current situation or business problem; how it impacts on the business as well as on current and potential customers. This enables us to evolve a hypothetical disruptive solution, to then prototype, test and verify for innovation. Asking causal questions helps get to the core of the business problem, and it requires continuing shifting across listening to the facts and the data as well as empathically.

–      Ask causal questions;

–      What do you think might have caused that issue?

–      How does that issue relate or link to the core problem?

–      How do you frame this problem?

–      How is that important to you?

–      What else might be at play around your core problem?

–      How does it feel to be in this situation?

–      What is it that makes you feel this way?

–      What are some of the possibilities in this situation?

–      How do you want to see this turn out?

Step Three   Disrupt the territory;

To help formulate a hypothetical disruptive solution for the problem at hand, it is important to make the shift from specific and descriptive questions to generating disruptive ones to;

–      Create collisions between peoples internal programming, perspectives and thought patterns,

–      Initiate mindset shifts,

–      Create cracks and openings,

–      Elicit possibilities for solutions.

Asking intentionally disruptive questionsrequires us to deeply generatively listen, to create the safe space and an empathic relationship if you don’t want to come across as aggressive, or oppositional.  If you are doing this effectively, people will start to unconsciously move into a safe and constructive generative debate that will ultimately result in a right hand turn, or series of breakthrough ideas.

–      Asking deeper ‘what’ and more ‘why’ and ‘why not’ questions;

–      What do you really believe about that?

–      What is your purpose in this?

–      What are you expecting?

–      What would be the simplest way to solve the problem?

–      What could be possible?

–      Why do we do it that way?

–      Why is it so important to you to solve this problem?

–      Why not think differently about that?

–      Why can’t it be done differently?

–      Why aren’t more people involved?

–      Why aren’t our customers happy with that solution?

–      What if you were to think differently about that?

Step Four Elicit creative ideas through generative debate;

This step continues to explore the ‘what could be’ space, and generates a deeper constructive debate, that draws on potentiality and elicits unexpected possibilities awaiting us in the social field of attention.

–      Asking ‘what if’ and ‘how might’ questions;

–      What if we were to think differently about that?

–      What if we could re-frame the problem into an opportunity?

–      What if that didn’t work?

–      What if that did work?

–      What if we do the opposite to that?

–      What if we saw that constraint as an opportunity?

–      What if this product could be available to everyone?

–      How might we think differently about that?

–      How might we introduce…?

–      How might we explore that idea more deeply?

Being able to deeply question and listen are not only symbiotic, when we master this vital skill set; we demonstrate generosity, respect and appreciation for one another which makes collaboration and co-creation an effortless and easy experience.

“Changing our questions can change the world. The key is constantly creating better questions to see that world with fresh eyes. When this happens, we will find ourselves living the profound observation that Jonas Salk (discoverer of the first polio vaccine) made that “you don’t invent the answers; you reveal the answers” by “finding the right question.”

It also creates an opportunity for effecting daily listening and questioning practices that make innovation everyone’s job, everyday by;

–      Rocking the boat and exposing the elephants and sacred cows.

–      Disrupting the status quo and generate ‘out of the box’ thinking.

–      Stimulating, activating and generating new perspectives and thought patterns.

–      Colliding peoples ‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’ meta programming.

–      Achieving high levels or meta thinking to generate imaginative and creative ideas and unexpected solutions in the everyday business world.

The generative inquiry cycle was adapted from ‘The Innovators DNA’ by Clayton Christensen.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I recently participated in the Disruptive Innovation Festival where I presented an exciting new webinar on How the lean start-up is disrupting business as usual. Whenever I design a new webinar, blog or learning program, I always invest quality time in updating my resource materials so that I can share the latest thinking and thought leading ideas with the diverse range of online learning communities I collaborate with.

What really excited me is that I identifiedthree converging forces seriously disrupting ‘business as usual.’ This accelerates the importance and role of lean principles as the key emerging innovative business model for 21^st century businesses – Resulting in business as unusual!

1. Cisco Engineering identified 19 billion things connected today to the internet. It has forecasted that in just 6 years time there will be 37 billion new things; this means that there is a technological infrastructure available to everyone, everywhere to become a software designer and it is expanding rapidly.
2. Entrepreneurship is being promoted globally, by Asian and European countries and global economic forums as the key driver for future economic growth and development.  This supports a global shift from large corporations towards individual empowerment and enablement and smaller adaptive ones.
3. The Lean Start-Up offers a new potentially low cost methodology and business model for launching disruptive high tech companies that maximize the possibilities of the internet of everything. It provides the mechanism for advancing entrepreneurship in existing large corporate and businesses or in innovative stand alones.

Why is this Important?

1. The internet of everything is a movement, and movements are emerging as the key vehicles for effecting 21^st century transformation.

The internet of everything is transformational because it is creating an ‘explosion of connectivity!’ This potentially makes it possible for governments, organizations and businesses to invent and innovate with unlimited access to global connectivity. The internet of everything connects People, Things, Processes and Data, in ways that enables us to take Data to create Knowledge, Wisdom and Business.

It does this by shifting around massive bits of information which allows us to converge and shape new business models for Value Creation and Value Capturing and Sharing.

This is important because the technological infrastructure is built and in existence. It is being run by a number of global devices that are generating options for creating combinations for connecting data and markets that were previously disjointed –

Digitization is connecting all industries into giant eco-systems, where co-petition, rather than competition, is emerging as a critical success factor.

Additionally, it enables data collection efficiency by sensing, accessing and analyzing data to identify patterns that results in the development of new business logic.  This allows organizations to make informed predictions, measurements and correlations. It provides circularity and feedback loops where users can interact with and work together to solve problems.

1. There is a global drive for entrepreneurship as a lever for economic growth and development and The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the world’s largest entrepreneurship study, in their 2013 Global Report states that:

Entrepreneurship is believed to contribute to economic development because entrepreneurs create new businesses, and new businesses create jobs, ensure variety, intensify competition, and may even increase productivity through technological change. Some studies argue that in recent decades, several trends such as the development of new technologies have resulted in new business models that suit small and new ventures better than before; hence they see a shift from large corporations to small and new ventures  or put it differently: to the rise of an entrepreneurial economy (GEM Global Report 2013)

This is important because entrepreneurship is growing especially in emerging markets and Africa is predicted to lead the pack. There are three particularly ‘Hot’ Sectors – Social, Women, and Youth all being enabled by the rise of new ‘impact Investors’ or Venture Capitalist (VC) type organizations. Entrepreneurship can also potentially help solve current and future youth unemployment where “all told, almost 290 million (15 – 24 year olds) are neither working, nor studying; almost a quarter of the planets youth.”

One of the key questions is how can we use entrepreneurship to break the ‘education-work-employment’ paradigm? How can we to teach the one quarter of the world’s youth who are neither studying nor working (as well as the growing more mature jobless generation) how to take personal responsibility for creating their own futures by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset?

1. The lean start-up business model is an adaptive and flexible way of exploring, experimenting and realizing ‘blue ocean’ business opportunities that create uncontested market space. This makes the focus on competition irrelevant and encourages innovation by discarding the conventional rules of the business game.

In a recent HBR article Why the lean Start-Up Changes Everything, Steve Blank, consulting associate professor at Stanford states that the lean start-up turns the traditional and decades old business development and model on its head

The lean start-up differs from conventional business models because it favors experimentation over elaborate planning; this gives people permission to take intelligent risks and fail. It enables people to learn fast ‘by doing’ and can result in increased speed to market. It uses customer feedback to iterate and prototype new products and services, ‘on the run’. This gives start-ups agility and nimbleness in using design thinking to create, iterate and pivot low cost minimal viable products until the product is fit for purpose. This eliminates the need for expensive upfront product development and traditional testing methods.

A start-up is a company a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable, leveragible and scalable (and disruptive) business model that will generate significant revenue often disrupting existing industry paradigms to liberates “out of the box” breakthrough ideas and solutions.  Lean start-ups are already providing paradigm shifting solutions to many of the world’s health, environmental and medical problems.

What is the real opportunity?

Entrepreneurial lean start-ups can proliferate via the internet of things and potentially create an entrepreneurial innovation based economy that helps solve some of the world’s wicked problems whilst promoting economic growth.

It can also enable people of all ages and denominations, cultures and organizations to take self responsibility for surviving flowing and flourishing in this exciting new circular and connected world. By learning how to be, think and act like an entrepreneurs, which can of course, be cultivated and learnt!

How to take the first step towards be-ing, thinking and acting like an entrepreneur

Most entrepreneurs are motivated and some say ‘driven’ by necessity or a deep sense passionate purpose to make a difference.  They are fueled by sense of urgency and possibility to take responsibility and be accountable in bringing it fearlessly to fruition. They believe in themselves and their ability to do what others fear to do, to play in the unknown and bounce back from failures and adversity.

So it may be useful to begin by asking yourself these three key questions:

• What is it I deeply care deeply enough about that will compel me to explore and master unchartered and turbulent waters?
• What is the difference I want to, and am able to make to the world? Why is that important to me, and the world? What is the opportunity of possibility?
• What key wicked problem/possibility exists in the world that only I know now, or could know in the future, how to solve, and create an innovative solution that could be leveraged and scaled?

By investing time in retreat and reflection, to consider your responses to these key questions, you might just hit on a ‘blue ocean’ business opportunity and create an innovative uncontested market space that can be realized on the internet of everything.

image credit: solarnavigator

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I am not sure how many of my valuable ImagineNation™ and Innovation Excellence community friends and colleagues have ever purchased a completely new, “make believe” apartment “off the plan”. Nor am I aware of any who have attempted such a huge and monumental challenge in a different and strange country, during a war, in an indecipherable language and an argumentative culture, and survived and lived to tell the story! Needless to say, our recent move to our “almost finished”, still badly built, potentially beautiful new apartment has brought me back, yet again to the importance and incredible value of one of the core generic principle for succeeding in accomplishing almost anything!

I can happily play with how I have learnt (and failed) to apply this core attribute, not only towards trying to get our new apartment completed, to a reasonable standard of quality, but also to the challenges most people face in becoming successful innovative leaders and start-up entrepreneurs. This is “The Key to Entrepreneurial Success” because, strangely enough, if you know how to embody and enact this core attribute, on a daily basis, you can, and will, accomplish anything that requires courageous and creative endeavors! Even trying to work successfully with an undisciplined Israeli builder, his incompetent manager and range of diversely skilled and knowledgeable Arab supervisors!

The key to success is to develop strong self efficacy!

Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy “as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations”. Our sense of self-efficacy plays a major role in how we approach setting and achieving goals, completing tasks, and with how we persist in mastering challenges. It affects every field of human endeavors, and is determined by the beliefs we hold regarding our power to affect situations, it influences the personal power we are able to develop and the choices we make when facing a challenge.

Understanding self efficacy

When I presented at the European Innovation Conference in Brussels last year on “Disrupting the Entrepreneurship Learning Paradigm” almost every academic, presented a paper on the critical role good self efficacy plays towards enabling entrepreneurial success. Of course, as all good academics do, they established relevant “why” and “what” frames, they just mostly left out the “how to”. Of course, as a coach to innovative leaders and entrepreneurs, most of really important foundational groundwork is towards enabling my participants to cultivate the foundational strong self efficacy required to persist and sustain them through the peaks and troughs of the disruptive “Start-Up Cycle.”

To ultimately succeed in innovation and entrepreneurship game by developing strong self efficacy!

The benefits of a strong sense of self-efficacy is when people:

• View challenging problems as tasks to be mastered
• Develop deeper interest in the activities in which they participate
• Form a stronger sense of commitment to their interests and activities
• Recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments.

Strategies for cultivating self efficacy when facing entrepreneurial challenges:
Here are seven simple and specific strategies for cultivating your self efficacy to go and play where others don’t dare to!

1. Self efficacy requires resourceful states of be-ing

Make time to retreat and reflect, to go back to a time when you really succeeded at something significant, visualize yourself in that powerful emotional and physical state, tune into how it felt, and tell yourself “I can do this!”and/or “I just haven’t done it yet!”

2. Self efficacy requires an inner belief in self

Make time to retreat and reflect, in silence and perhaps in a meditative or mindful state, take a moment to tune into your inner knowing or wisdom, and ask “How can I approach doing this?” and/or “How can I get this tedious job done effectively?”

3. Self efficacy requires us to maximize our inner resources

Make time to retreat and reflect, in silence and in nature, if possible, and just notice the internal conversation you habitually have with yourself about what you “must” and “must not do”. Notice the range and power of each of the voices, and identify who is in charge. If by chance, it is a doubtful or critical voice, turn the volume down, to allow a more resourceful voice to be heard, the one who tells you how good you are, and encourages you to be powerful and successful.

4. Self efficacy requires us to maximize our outer resources

Notice your habitual use of language, when discussing a challenging task or problem, do you tend to self depreciate, focus on the limitations, constraints and negatives?

Here are some tips for shifting you limiting language when you are in challenging situations;

• “I could never do that!” and ask instead “What if I could do that?”
• “I always fail at solving problems!” to “I only failed just this time!”
• “I have no more energy left for this!” to “I am worn out right now, and need some time out to recharge!”

5. Self efficacy requires us to maximize our strengths

Focus on what you have achieved up until now, no matter how small they may seem to be, the point is that you did complete the race, solve the problem, build a new team or business whilst many others may not have even tried! Focus on cultivating and applying your inherent strengths, on what you do well, and not on what your weakest points.

6. Self efficacy requires us to stay focused on the goal or outcome

Always keep the end in mind, focus on what it is you are trying to achieve and why it is important, and how it will benefit you, your team or the world, if you persist with it!

7. Self efficacy requires us to learn from our mistakes

The last and most important strategy is to “fail fast to learn quickly”, and whilst it is really hard for some of us, surrender into your failures, reframing them as “learning opportunities.” Tell yourself, that it “just didn’t work that time”.

Taking it further, make “brilliant blunders” to create infection points, paradigm shifts and mindset flips, that would not have arisen, if you had not failed and used the opportunity to pivot to success.

Our apartment is almost completed, however, the real challenges have just begun, and we have a number of key strategies in place, to stay in the “buying off the plan game.”

It’s essentially no different to creating and sustaining an innovative and entrepreneurial start-up! It’s all about managing our reactive responses and sustaining our self efficacy during the disruptive peaks and troughs of the start-up cycle!

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent HBR blog ‘Collaboration Is the New Competition‘ author Ben Hecht suggests 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”.

Living and working in Israel, the ‘start-up nation’ within a connected and entrepreneurial culture has alerted me to this very powerful shift towards collaboration and the whole networking paradigm. The leader as a collaborative connector is now a key enabler of innovation and entrepreneurship to flourish. It was during the research and development process involved in compiling one of my free webinars -‘Leading for Innovation’ that I realized that the leadership context has shifted further beyond navigating and forming political and strategic alliances, to now expand their role further and become ‘connectors!’

Making connections enables leaders to lead and make fluid decisions in an age of upheaval!

Many of us are aware that we live within an interconnected world, enabled by technology, yet how many of us realize the deep implications and enact the possibilities and opportunities this connectedness allows us? As individuals, many of us are making Friends on Facebook, acquiring serious business contacts via Linked In, sharing our thoughts on blogs on Tumblr, posting pictures we love on Pinterst and Flickr. This is only the tip of the ‘connections iceberg’ affecting the social revolution exploding in creativity and diversity of thought and ideas. It is, in fact redefining how we communicate, interact and develop relationships with one another, both personally and professionally.

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 create coalitions of networks by seeking people’s ideas and input through 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 and innovation.
• Create increased speed and agility to deal with strategic issues and threats, to solve business dilemmas and wicked problems with the intent of transforming them into opportunities and innovative solutions.
• Mobilize and leverage people’s knowledge, skills and experience to solve generative 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!

Networking initiatives enable organizations to make the collective impact Hecht states in his article; they are required to make deeper connections internally as the knowledge, skills and experience of any company is inside the heads and hearts of their people. They are connecting externally with their end users, to harness their aspirations towards improving their experience to promote advocacy and retain their loyalty. They are connecting systemically with the key players in their value chains, to improve efficiencies and increase speed to market.

Additionally some of the most innovative organizations have adopted an ecosystem perspective as a way of flowing with, rather than resisting, global chaos and uncertainty. 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, often through collaborating and connecting.

Some simple networking tips!

Networking is a learnable skill set – to initiate and develop this vital skill set leaders can build a foundational growth mindset focusing on adaptiveness, possibility and collaboration. They can then embody and enact a courageous, confident, compassionate, generous and curious way of be-ing in putting ourselves ‘out there’ in the world because it’s about:
1. Taking the attention off ‘me’ and paying deep attention (being focused, open minded 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, opportunities and answers to questions that you could not have possibly conceived on your own.

Networking creates these vital and paradigm shifting intersections and exposes us to a range of creative opportunities and possibilities. This enables us to sense the random ‘bits and pieces’ that help develop the ‘associational muscle’ to perceive different worldviews and enact the world differently. The more diverse knowledge the brain possesses the more connections it can make when given fresh inputs of knowledge and experience this because our brain synthesizes and makes sense of novel inputs. These fresh inputs trigger the association that lead to imaginative ideas and also creates a powerful supplement to data when working through a problem.

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, paradigm shifts and inflection points, resulting in the Medici Effect-which is of course what innovation is all about!

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I was recently confronted with a surprising and perplexing response via an online innovative learning and education innovators discussion group, to the notion of The Start-Up Game™. My 30 years of knowledge and skills development and experience in corporate learning to some of Australasia’s and Israel’s top 100 companies proves that most adults (leaders and teams) “learn by doing” and designed The Start-Up Game™ with this in mind.

Disrupting the corporate learning paradigm

The Start-Up Game™ is an attempt to disrupt and re-invent the corporate learning paradigm by integrating adult and experiential learning with gamification processes to innovate the way innovation and entrepreneurship are taught in organizations, business schools and incubators. It is a profound and serious business game, a metaphorical business simulation that takes players through the emotional and cognitive rollercoaster and the four stages that a start-up entrepreneur experiences when innovating something that has never been previously imagined. It creates a visceral experience that enables players to understand, experiment with, practice (and fail) to acquire, apply and integrate the intrinsic motivators, mindsets and behaviors of innovative leadership and start-up entrepreneurship. Its design is flexible and can be customized to align to and support the execution of each client’s strategic agenda and can include their specific innovation or change dilemmas and challenges.

It was designed and developed on concrete and evidence based concepts, principles and techniques:
1. Learning by being and doing

In the early 1970s, Kolb and Ron Fry developed the Experiential Learning Model (ELM) establishing an experiential approach to learning. The outcome is a new and fresh way of experimenting with, responding to, improving with the learning concepts, principles and techniques, to improve their results or business outcomes. This approach to learning is especially relevant to the way adults learn and innovative entrepreneurs operate; because our research proves that it’s in the ‘being’ and the ‘doing’ rather than in the ‘knowing’ and it’s in the ‘practice’ rather than the ‘theory’ that ultimately ensures innovative leadership and start-up success.

2. The 60-30-10 springboard formula
The Start-Up Game embodies this within the springboard: 60-30-10 formula, which means that an Innovation Theory segment (the ‘10’) is introduced before each of the four rounds. Each round is followed by a group debrief discussion and a team debate on change decisions to experiment with in the next round. Teams then experiment with the desired changes (the ‘30’). Upon completion of the four rounds teams make linkages and applications to what happens in ‘real life’ (the ‘60’). This enables them to transfer the learning’s and distinctions to the workplace, to make necessary changes required to develop innovation practices and habits, therefore laying the foundations for the development of an innovation culture and business eco-system.

3. Simulations for experimentation
Many of us are aware that airline pilots learn how to fly in flight simulators, where they practice flying high tech aircraft in safe learning environments, where they can experiment, crash and burn and in effect learn from their failures, without blame, punishment and retribution. In fact, according to my old Aussie flat mate, a former Qantas 747 captain, it is impossible to learn how to fly an aircraft without experimenting with crashing and burning (and failing) during the flight simulation process.

4. Designing profound games
In a recent interview, Dr Doris C. Rusch a postdoctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, stated that:
“One of the questions I ask myself in my research is this: how can we make profound games? It starts with basing games on abstract concepts instead of physical ones. To make abstract concepts tangible, we need metaphors. Simply put, metaphors are physical concepts that represent abstract concepts—love as a journey, rising anger as an avalanche.”

5. Entrepreneurial innovation as a learning system
In 2011 Robert M. Gemmell surveyed 172 technology entrepreneurs to explore links between learning style and learning flexibility and decision making behaviours to hypothesize about what produces entrepreneurial innovation and success. Gemmell concluded that “entrepreneurs are most innovative when they utilise experimentation as a key practice without ignoring the other learning processes. Entrepreneurs will be more successful and innovative when they take time to reflect upon multiple alternatives and when they test trial ideas socially before making important decisions.”

6. Development of gamification
Technological advances in gamification have also created innovative new ways of learning that embrace the use of experiential metaphors, which involves cleverly designing challenges that will evoke a specific reaction in the player.

– Example; an innovative way to play basketball and hockey
A recent article on the Israeli Tech River website outlines how basketball and hockey players are improving their scores by 20-40% via an online gamified software tool:

“Originally designed as a simulator for Israeli fighter pilots, IntelliGym (https://www.intelligym.com) – a patented computer software training tool – is raising the scores of basketball and hockey players by 20-40%! Until now, it was believed that players either had an innate sense of the game – game intelligence, court vision, reading plays – or they didn’t. But, thanks to this ultra-sophisticated program – a ‘brain gym’ for competitive sportsmen – it’s becoming clear that everyone can significantly improve his game”.

– Example; an innovative ways to effect revolutionary change
Fast Company recently published an article, “Can a video game about the 1979 Iranian revolution create a revolution in gaming”? Where players become participants in a revolution, transforming the gaming paradigm, “Gaming is traditionally just seen as frivolous entertainment,” creator Navid Khonsari said. “This goes beyond that and tries to engage you in real life and real stories.”

7. Innovative ways to teach innovative leadership and start-up entrepreneurship
ImagineNation™ is a generative and provocative global learning company that uses the latest technology and thought leadership to enable people and organizations to develop their innovative leadership and entrepreneurship capability. The aim is to make innovation everyone’s job, every day to build highly engaged, courageous, experimental, emergent and passionate leaders, organizational cultures and business eco-systems!

The Start-Up Game™ embodies these findings and has integrated them into a corporate learning context in the form of a one or two day live workshop. This workshop meets the needs of organizations that are seeking to utilize people and other resources in more innovative and lean ways. It enables players to experiment with and apply four generative methodologies that involve the development of intrinsic motivators, mindsets, behaviours, skills and tools in being provocatively competent to safely:

– Challenge the process.
– Challenge convention.
– Disrupt the status quo.
– Generate paradigm shifts and inflection points.

The future of education

Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who runs the Million by One Million Club, is a leading global innovative entrepreneurship educator in “The Future of Education, 10 trends to watch” she suggests that we need a wide range of low cost, accessible and entertaining learning and vocational programs that attract and engage students to not only build new technologies, but also new companies. Shifting the education process from ‘sage on stage’ to ‘guide on side’ in a variety of media and incubator centric free ways that penetrate throughout society.

The Start-Up Game is a first step serious, researched educational and vocational innovation in this space.

Reflecting back to the disruptive online discussion, I was somewhat shocked by the narrow and conventional response; “Starting up a business is not a GAME. What I would highly recommend is the free counseling, support, insight and help from your local SCORE. SCORE is a free offering brought to you by local retired executives”. This made me shudder, whilst I deeply respect the wisdom local retired executives may offer, I suspect that whilst such counseling, support and insights might be beneficial, they may not be sufficient to not equip me to learn how successfully thrive and flourish in the face of the deep challenges confronting youth, leaders, organizations and communities in today’s fast paced, competitive and interconnected, globalized world.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I recently spent more than nine weeks of constant traveling along the global innovation superhighway, focusing on learning, making distinctions, developing The Start-Up Game™ business, catching up with long time clients, colleagues, associates and friends and networking profusely.

What no-one, was aware of, or knew, was that, at the same time, I was also riding out my own” set of unique “Valley of Death” and “Emotional Rollercoaster” death defying challenges, in the chasm that exists between an invention and its execution!

The “Valley of Death” involves clarifying the more tangible aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship, and the “Emotional Rollercoaster” involves managing the less tangible and more potentially reactive aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. These form the harsh reality and the deep chasm that exists between an invention and its execution, surviving and ultimately mastering it determines ultimate success or failure!

What does commercialization involve and why is it important?

Commercializing an invention or creation is by far the most challenging process an entrepreneur faces; in fact, it is the most critical success factor that has to be executed.
This involves a myriad of front end innovation management processes including the most difficult first step, which is to clarify the features and benefits of a product, service that has never previously existed or may not have yet been formally developed or validated:
– So do you make it up as you go along, or do you rely on your inner knowing, your intuitive hunches, or on your knowledge, skills and experience to clarify them?

• How do you incorporate lean start-up principles when you check in and research your potential customers, about what they need and want in terms of features and benefits of a product or service that they may have not yet seen, touched or felt?

And when this is happening, you have to rely on your self efficacy and courage to keep your fears at bay and stay in the innovation and entrepreneurship game. To constantly explore how you can generate the cash flow and resources you need to stay alive as well as to develop your new business. As well as to how you can realistically generate income, from a business model that may yet to be initiated whilst focusing at the same time on building your brand, its credibility and presence in the marketplace:

• How do you keep your delivery mechanisms in place, ready to rock and roll, with no real substance other than a projected sales pipeline to keep people and the team engaged and proposed delivery mechanisms in place?

• How can you develop and execute your service and support plan to ensure that you deliver and sustain what you promise whilst riding the peaks, troughs and conflicts of the emotional rollercoaster?

Mastering this myriad of front end innovation management processes is achieved by innovators and entrepreneurs staying focused, being adaptive learners and staying flexible. This ultimately enables them to courageously and boldly walk the tightrope between the “Valley of Death” and the “Emotional Rollercoaster.”

How to best survive and flourish!

1. Focus on successfully navigating the dangerous rattlesnakes involved in team and potential client interactions, relationships and conflicts.
2. Pay attention, be intentional and take responsibility for managing and regulating the challenges involved in mastering the unstable and seemingly insurmountable sand dunes and welcoming oases affecting your emotional reactions and overall state of being.
3. Seek collaborative opportunities and support from friends, colleagues, as well as from potential partners, agencies, resources and networks. Also make sure to be optimistic, kind, nurturing and forgiving of yourself as it is often a lonely and singular ride along a road less traveled.

Finally, the greatest and most challenging option is to do nothing at all, to give into your fears and to allow your emotional state to be flooded into acute paralysis and to then perish from lack of sustenance in the valley of death!

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It takes enormous passion, deep vision and incredible anti-fragility to become a successful innovative entrepreneur, more than most of us could ever imagine! My recent experience at the European Innovation and Entrepreneurship Conference in Brussels, last month reaffirmed this as I suffered through a number of mostly un-innovative, boring laborious and mostly irrelevant research papers on the subject, presented by the cream of global academia.

This is because academic and other educational institutions teach students’ theories that help them develop knowledge on the subjects of innovation and entrepreneurship. Whilst this is an important aspect of their overall tertiary education, it doesn’t support their overall learning process in applying and integrating their learning into successful and innovative and entrepreneurial business behaviors, practices and habits. This is especially relevant with the advent of the lean start-up as the emerging business model for innovation and entrepreneurship.

It seems that they have lost the essence of true education, as defined by Wikipedia “in its general sense is a form of learning in which the knowledge, skills, and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next through teaching, training, or research. Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational”. And that the true essence of it, is in the word “education”, which is derived from the Latin “ēducātiō” which requires “a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing” and not just the downloading of ideas and knowledge!

This means that there is huge gap between what academic institutions are teaching about innovation and entrepreneurship and what students need to learn to be successful innovative entrepreneurs to sustain themselves and deliver the results they want to have. It is a well know fact that adults learn best by “doing” and by “doing” together. This enables them to develop the competence, consciousness, collaborative abilities to be in and sustain what will become, their entrepreneurial lifestyle!

The gap can be easily reduced by enabling students to “do” through focused behaviors, skills, practices and habits of innovative entrepreneurship. It can be further reduced by enabling them to “be” successfully enabled innovative entrepreneurs! This can be achieved by enhancing their capability to think differently and develop the anti fragility required to be ultimately successful in their entrepreneurial endeavors; by developing and applying the intrinsic motivators, mindsets and thinking and feeling strategies of innovative entrepreneurship to everything they do!

Our research reveals that one of the most exciting and inspiring aspects of a successful and innovative start-up is the audacity, creativity and anti fragility of courageous start-up entrepreneurs. It’s amazing how many of these enterprising adventurers embrace, succeed and flourish within the 24/7 “emotional and cognitive rollercoaster” that pervades the broad range of entrepreneurial stresses and constraints. Start-up entrepreneurs typically operate within “ambiguous boundaries” and experience a “constant friction with reality” between what they know and what they do. Most start-up entrepreneurs will agree that it’s how they manage their own “survival game” to sustain what is an essentially entrepreneurial lifestyle which matters most.

In other words, it’s in the ‘doing’ or the practice, and not necessarily in the “knowing” or the theory that enables them to solve problems and deal with challenges in new ways that ensures their ultimate success.

One start-up entrepreneur, who attended the prestigious US Wharton Business School, described this experience as his “third degree” in what he termed, “practical entrepreneurship”. This is more about “doing” entrepreneurship which requires courageous leaps and deep dives into the uncertain, the unstable and unknown, which is something most normal people will avoid! It also requires letting go of the security provided by a well paying and regular job, to invent new breakthrough business models and strategies that may or may not be, ultimately successful! He went on to describe this as the entrepreneurs 24/7 “reality shield”, which impacts on every part of his life and has to be managed on a constant, day by day, minute by minute basis.

The term “self efficacy” has been used to describe the inner courage and confidence an entrepreneur needs to stay in the innovation or lean start-up game. This builds their ability to constantly challenge and change their own reality by extending themselves to operate successfully within, and flow with, the ambiguous boundaries that envelop their business efforts. However, this is only a small part of the equation; it also requires willingness to come from both an intrinsic, necessity and possibility based set of colliding perspectives. Also by the development of the mindsets, behaviors and skills of:

• “Not knowing”, to be able to quickly and seamlessly adapt and collaborate and to flow with “what is” and “what could be”.

• Challenging convention through disruptive and generative debate that transforms problems into innovative opportunities and solutions.

• Encouraging and permitting failure through experimentation and improvisation and not succumbing to risk adversity.

• Maximizing diversity and differences to explore and sustain fresh perspectives and pathways that keep the pot simmering and always being on the boil.

At ImagineNation™, we have developed The Start-Up Game™ to help academic institutions and corporations close the gap between teaching innovation and entrepreneurship and learning how to “do” and “be” an innovative entrepreneur. The Start-Up Game™ is a gamified business simulation that is part of a customized organizational learning process that brings the lean start-up process “to life” and develops innovative leadership and start-up entrepreneurship motivation, mindsets, behaviors and skills to create:

• A culture of “provocative competence”.

• An innovative culture and business eco-system.

It enables players to learn how to be an innovative leader or entrepreneur through collaboration, role play, creative tension and the integration of adult and experiential learning principles with gamification processes. The Start-Up Game™ simulates the 5 phases of the new business venture or Start-Up Cycle and takes players thru a visceral and cognitive experience of the innovative start-up entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster.

Let’s all lobby and awaken academia and their institutions to these phenomena, and close the education and learning gap by creating inspiring and innovative learning programs that proactively breed, bring up, and rear a new generation of innovative and entrepreneurial leaders. Perhaps these enabled innovative entrepreneurs will help catalyze the economic growth and competitiveness required to shape the emerging new world!

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Later this week I will be presenting my webinar “How the lean start-up is accelerating innovation” at the Global Women’s Leadership Summit. Next week I will be in Brussels presenting my paper on “Re-inventing entrepreneurship education” at the European Innovation Conference.

Writing these papers, presentations and articles has caused me to focus on, research and define the links between Entrepreneurship, the Lean Start-Up and how Israeli Start-Ups successfully integrate these concepts, principles and techniques to create game changing high tech companies, such as Waze, that recently sold to Google for a reported $1 billion dollars.

There are currently more than 4,500 “lean start-ups” being developed at this very moment, around the tiny nation (as big as New Jersey) of Israel, and entrepreneur.com recently awarded Tel Aviv, also known as “Silicon Wadi”, the number 2 entrepreneurial global hotspot.

Whilst start-ups emerged from Silicon Valley, still the number one entrepreneurial global hotspot, the “Silicon Valley Effect” is enabling other countries and cities to outshine its success.

Considering that a start-up a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model, and that a lean start-up typically goes through the following three steps as described by Steve Blank:

1. Build a business model canvas or hypothesis.
2. Test and develop the business model via customer feedback; guides the discovery, validation, creation & building phases.
3. Develop products iteratively and incrementally.

Citing differentiation, government support and art-entrepreneurialism as the keys to overall start-up success within an innovative ecosystem, Israeli start-ups have evolved their own uniquely iterative and collaborative approach.

How Israeli start-ups typically evolve!

• The intrinsic motivation is developed at home, in high school, in the IDF, and is an essential part of the Israeli entrepreneurial culture, and almost every child aspires to be a start-up entrepreneur.

• Ideas or hypotheses get incubated, in high school, in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), at university (in Israel or aboard), or in the many start-up hubs and hackathons that operate in the major cities.

• A “start-up gang” will informally develop and get together to seed the start-up solution by creating their unique collaborative DNA. They will be willing to work together, to co-operate, and collaborate as a loose team. They will maximize their differences and diversity by arguing and debating, until they generate higher levels of meta thinking. Most often they will then create a workable structure to ensure that they work effectively, with speed and agility and may seek initial crowd funding to finance their initial development.

• The outcome is the development of a business model, or “paradigm shifter” which is then prototyped, through rapid experimentation and improvisation. The intent is to give the market something innovative, of value that is accessible and has NOT previously existed.

• The team may now join an incubator to seek business mentoring, planning and/or financial support. They may also decide to self fund through bootstrapping or by making initial customer sales, even if they do not have a finished product or service. They may also, at this point, seek initial Venture Capitalist (VC) investment on the basis of uniqueness of their innovative business model, which may, not yet, exist in concrete terms.

• They will share and take advice from other start-ups and will think of their competitors as colleagues or resources for improving their own business model or start-up.

• The gang constantly tests their ideas through customer and market feedback to continually iterate and prototype their business model, whilst developing their business plan, often a power point slide pack, on the run.

• They will pivot their successes & failures, using every experience as a way to improve what they are developing.

• They may remain in stealth mode, until they have finally validated their proof of concept.

• They may now join an accelerator to seek business mentoring, planning and/or financial support or to obtain Venture Capitalist (VC) investment.

The start-up gang continues to accelerate their business model until it is finally realized via a sale to an external third party or VC Investor or their own market success and remain independent operators, valuing their freedom to manage and develop their start-up their own way.

They may merge with another start-up, or drop their current start-up if it fails and start all over again with a new hypothesis or solution, using what they have learnt to improve their chance of success in their new start-up venture.

Most of the start-up entrepreneurs in my research study have impeccable university and business school qualifications and degrees that support their business acumen and possibly their ultimate success at the “back end” of innovation. However, everyone of them has shared that the most critical success factors lie in how well they deal with the emotional roller coaster ride that creating a start-up involves. In fact, its the “doing” rather than the “knowing” or the “practice” rather than the “theory”, that ultimately ensures their success.

So before you take the giant start-up leap, consider how to develop your emotional resilience, how you can deal effectively and nourish yourself within high levels of instability and uncertainty, and how to collaboratively form and sustain your gang!

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