GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I can’t remember how many times, in the last 25 years, I stood in front of a group of powerful senior executives, in a change management or transformational leadership training program, wisely sprouting these words: “feel the fear and do it anyway” or even more contritely: “the learning zone is outside the comfort zone” and what about “there is no failure, only feedback”!

What was I doing! How could I have been so cruel and naive to not understand the differences between people’s cognitive understanding of fear and their natural resistance to having a visceral experience of it!

It was only when I relocated to the Middle East almost four years ago, that I actually started to really understand what feeling fearful means, and how my fear of failure, up until now, pervaded every aspect of my life. If fear of failure is my greatest nemesis, how does it manifest, in its infinite variations and consequences, in other people’s lives, especially when they are expected to change innovate?

Whether it is procrastination, perfectionism or competitiveness, a real deep and unconscious fear is at the core. How we accept, embrace and flow with it, determines the ultimate role it plays in dealing with our failures as well our ability to change, innovate and succeed.

It wasn’t until I evolved and matured that I was able to develop a deep conscious awareness and understanding of this sometimes paralyzing and overwhelming fear. I learnt how to self regulate it by embracing it and making it “my friend”, acknowledging that, without it, I would not have cultivated the energy and drive to succeed in life the way that I have. I decided that it was time to take responsibility for it, to create a different and a set of results as well as affect a range of more useful and positive consequences.

Living in the constant state of uncertainty and instability here in the unpredictable Middle East, I finally realized much to my horror, that the world is essentially an “unsafe place”! That some people actually work really hard to make others feel totally flooded and paralyzed by fear, because, sadly it gives them a sense of power and control. This is the harsh reality the secret pacifist in me has to live with, and it really, really, deeply hurts.

When I started researching and developing my start-up, www.imaginenation.co.il, I was asked a range of successful and innovative entrepreneurs, “how did it feel when you failed, and what did you do to manage it?” Unsurprisingly, the responses often came across as “you can’t imagine how horrible it was!” Somehow, the more resilient and resourceful managed to create some useful unique recovery strategies and picked themselves up, and got back to work.

I realized that no-one wants to either “feel the fear” that exists outside of their “comfort zones”, or create intentional opportunities for “feedback” because, to go there, feels really, really horrible and why go there if you don’t really really have to?

The biggest barrier to innovation is people’s reluctance to feel the fear, and because you cannot innovate without failing, at least once, people will naturally resist and move away from anything that can potentially result in a range of horrible feelings!

One of my most challenging dilemmas in developing my three corporate learning streams to teach innovative leadership skills has been to seek out and clarify how to “work with” and resource people in organizations to deal with this fear barrier in radically different, positive and useful ways.

The solution I am proposing is an intentional and eclectic cocktail of the 5C’s of Consciousness, Creativity, Courage, Compassion and Collaboration.

Qualities that are seldom mentioned as leadership competences or cultural values!

Being a conscious means; developing the presence to deeply observe what works and what doesn’t work, and be present to ourselves, to others, and to retreat and reflect, to see and work with, what is really going on, for the good of the whole.
Being creative means; knowing how to deeply listen and disruptively inquire, to maximize diversity and stimulate out of the box thinking that creates deep generative debates that erupt in creative ideas.
Being courageous means; knowing how to be present to, and confront your own and others un-resourceful emotional states, accepting pain, being brave and candid in the face of risk, adversity and danger, uncertainty, or intimidation.
Being compassionate means; knowing how to be caring and sensitive to the needs and vulnerabilities of self and others, being generous and accepting what is, and not making it “bad” or “wrong”.
Being collaborative means; knowing how to activate people’s followership of a shared cause or agenda, to be put the needs of others and the whole first, whilst still respecting one’s own.

Organizations have the opportunity to be courageous and let go of their short term scarcity mindset and risk adversity, by proactively enabling people to accept and deal with their fears around failure, or of making mistakes and being exposed as “flawed” in some way, (and punished for it).

When they choose to consciously contribute toward the common good, have the courage to build creative, collaborative and compassionate organizational cultures and business eco-systems, then perhaps, people will flow and flourish in our unpredictable, chaotic and complex fast paced globalized world by being fearlessly and confide

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The Economist Magazine, in a recent article, “Generation Jobless”, analyzed figures provided by the International Labor Organization, the OECD, and the World Bank Database, and calculated that, “all told, almost 290 million (15 – 24 year olds) are neither working, nor studying; almost a quarter of the planets youth”. Attributing this to the Global Financial Crisis where the newest hires were first to be laid off and also to the poorly run labor markets in some of the world’s largest and fastest growing populations of young people.

The article states that this trend is exasperated by the mismatch between the skills young people offer and the skills employers need, resulting mostly from “poor basic education”. “Necessity” is causing the world to attend to this disturbing trend, evidencing the need for systemic changes in the education “education-work-employment paradigm!”

Perhaps, it could also create the possibility of getting businesses, academic institutions and governments to work together, within an innovative eco-system context, to develop young people as potentially Start-Up business entrepreneurs! Now could even be the time to initiate an educational and societal “right hand turn” whilst there is so much global financial and geopolitical instability and massive amounts of technological disruptions! Forcing organizations and governments to adapt and redesign their traditional structures, in their search for more innovative, global, high tech, cost effective and resilient business operating models!

Being located in the Middle East, which, when coupled with North Africa, as a region that has 40.6% youth unemployment and inactivity, (15-24 year olds, not in education). This unsettling and enormously challenging phenomena, is manifesting in a number of unexpected, disruptive and explosive ways. Israel, however, plays to a different tune, the younger generation are encouraged, and enabled to create innovative Start-Up businesses, which are a key part of its entrepreneurial Israeli Start-Up culture (and cult). Young people are motivated to be creative to constantly improve the way high tech businesses operate, the world we live in and the lives we lead. Israel, through “Necessity”, has created one of the world’s first successful national innovative eco-systems; the cluster of world class universities, government agencies, venture capitalists, large organizations, Israel Defense Forces and Start-Ups that collaborate informally and internally, to compete externally and globally.

Israel has adapted to its geographic and geopolitical instability and constraints and maximized these to become a world leader in disruptive high tech innovation. In Israel people constantly debate (part of the argumentative culture) and challenge conventional thinking and approaches to create “right hand turns”. In Israel, people willingly and continually disrupt the status quo and rock the boat to allow new possibilities and solutions to emerge. In Israel, people seek to maximize differences, deviance and diversity and build upon these to unleash “out of the box” ideas and generate unexpected solutions. Always willing to courageously improvise experiment and tolerate failures as the “basis for finding successes”, Israeli Start-Up entrepreneurs keep their lives, and their businesses, “simmering” and on the “constant boil”.

This has created a business environment where entrepreneurs and their Start-Up businesses quickly adapt, invent, develop scale, deal with adversity, and develop the resilience required to operate seamlessly in an uncertain, chaotic and unstable world. Entrepreneurial education begins in high school in Israel, students often incubate their initial ideas for exciting new Start-Up ventures in the classroom, supported by a curriculum that builds students competence, confidence, courage and passion for the inventiveness required to “make a difference”. Budding Start-Up entrepreneurs often meet their co-founders whilst completing their compulsory military service, often in an elite high tech unit, where they take on deep responsibilities unheard of in other nations. Israeli universities have created classroom based incubators that allow students to put theory into action, in safe learning environments, where failure is acknowledged as an expected, valuable and serious part of the overall learning process.

Microsoft and Google are just two of the many global companies and associations that have established start-up incubators and accelerators, or facilitate Start-Up weekends and hackathons. Almost every university has a centre for entrepreneurship, where students team up to present their well formulated Start-Up sales pitches to enthusiastic and supportive audiences, hoping that someone from the wide and diverse range of angel and venture capital investors, crowd funders, grants and business finance options will dare to invest in their innovative idea or solution to fast track and speed up its implementation.

ImagineNation, an Israeli Start-Up has spent the last 3 years researching and deciphering the intrinsic motivators, mindsets and behaviors that underpin and drive this unique entrepreneurial culture and innovative eco-system. It has modeled and replicated these into a corporate learning model and system, to teach the corporate world, how to develop innovative leadership capability and start-up entrepreneurship.

Ernst and Young, in their “Avoiding a Lost Generation” Report, based on their Entrepreneurial Survey, produced for the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance Summit in Russia in June, this year, states that:

“At a time when society’s biggest issue is youth unemployment, businesses and governments must work together to help young people foster an entrepreneurial mindset. That means fostering a culture which supports young people to take risks, set up businesses, create jobs and become masters of their own destiny. Whether it’s through finance, mentoring, incentives or training, we must all play our part so that this generation can achieve its potential.”  Their survey also revealed that “a very large majority of entrepreneurs are optimistic about their ability to drive growth and job creation in the coming years, whether based in mature or merging markets.”

That these entrepreneurs are ready “to play a key role in reinvigorating growth and job creation in G20 countries. Through their relentless investment in innovation, they create new products, new services, and new innovative business models-and so at a scale and speed that is unprecedented in recent decades.”

This suggests that there is an opportunity to create collaborative way of governments working together with large corporations, educational institutions and policy makers, with budding entrepreneurs to co-create the new “education-work-employment paradigm” paradigm.

This will ignite growth, break down barriers, and build the bridges between education and work necessary to enable young people to tune into and better achieve their potential. To create a new generation of innovative, global, high tech, digital, cost effective and resilient Start-Up businesses that can grow, flourish and sustain future generations.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent article Why the lean Start-Up Changes Everything, in HBR, Steve Blank describes a lean start-up as “favoring experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over ‘big design up front’” developments.

Residing in Israel, where there are currently more than 4,500 “lean start-ups” being developed at this very moment, around this tiny nation, I decided to explore how this phenomena could be applied to creating entrepreneurial and innovative corporate leaders.

With “Innovation” as a current “buzzword”, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reports in “The Most innovative Companies 2102” that 76% of their respondents rank innovation as a “top three” strategic priority – the highest level in the surveys history! That 85% of CEO’S ranked innovation as a top three priority, with almost 40% ranking it as the top priority, with a strong commitment to increase their investment in innovation.
The report also states that since the advent of the list in 2004, companies that have been on the list every year have delivered a 4% premium over 10 years, indicating that when companies become consistent innovators, they achieve longer term growth.

So, how does a company become a consistent innovator?

How can they do this by maximizing the qualities of the lean Start-Up to create a new entrepreneurial economy?

How can they create value from understanding the generative nature of business problems and ideas?

When researching the possible answers to some of these questions, I noticed that most company’s efforts were focused on installing idea generation and crowd based platforms as well as identifying mostly technology based process improvements. I also discovered that most innovation education was based around practical problem solving and idea generating techniques and tools, or upon a range of mostly formal consultant led interventions. Which, to my mind, were very traditional and even conservative approaches to becoming consistent or lean innovators and would not deliver the desired or possible long term growth factors!

“You can’t solve problems with the same thinking (or mindset and behaviors) that created them!”

With this as my mantra of I invested time towards understanding and identifying the unique attributes of the Israeli innovative eco-system, to explore how this systemic approach could be replicated and incorporated into a corporate learning environment.
I also researched and codified the range of cultural drivers that drive it, to see if these could be inculcated into organizations as the basis for developing innovative cultures – as the development of an innovative culture is the basis for being a consistent innovator.

Ultimately, I researched, codified and replicated the intrinsic motivators, mindsets and behaviors into the Innovate like an Israeli Model and Learning System (ILI). I integrated these concepts, principles and techniques with other cutting edge approaches to innovation management and emergence processes, including Otto Sharmer’s “Theory U” as a way of leading from the future as it emerges.

Innovation is a leadership responsibility!

Discarding most of what I “already knew”, I also researched and explored a wide range of options, including enterprise gamification, to create a visceral, provocative and memorable learning experience, which ultimately became “The Start-Up Game™”; a business simulation to teach innovative and entrepreneurial leadership in the global corporate arena.

Adopting a generative, gamified and experiential approach

Utilizing my 30 plus years in designing customized corporate curriculum, I adopted a generative and experiential approach to learning that emphasizes “continuous experimentation and feedback in an ongoing examination of the way organizations go about solving problems”, which is very much aligned to the lean start-up way. This also involves integrating the spiral of learning; by creating an initial and relevant experience that is debriefed to conclude and plan better ways of doing things next time. As games are metaphors for what happens in real life, learning’s can also be applied and integrated at the individual, team or business levels.

Catering for differing learning and cultural styles

The concept of experiential learning incorporates the 4 styles developed by David Kolb; Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist. These factors all influenced the sphere of adult learning and became the basis for designing and developing the majority of corporate education programs since the early 1990’s. Additionally, consideration was taken around the role and impact of cultural differences and inclinations in learning program design.

Making learning sensory specific and neurologically adept

It was also important to integrate the key sensory factors involved in learning, to make the learning program sufficiently ‘sensory specific’ to all types of individual processing and preferences; visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and audio digital. The intent was to stimulate peoples neurological processing and preferences for acquiring and accessing information, through a broad and diverse range of visual, auditory and active techniques based stimuli.
Neuropsychological research into learning suggests that Sensation Seeking provides a core biological drive of curiosity, learning and exploration. A high drive to explore leads to dysfunctional learning consequences unless cognitions such as goal orientation, conscientiousness, deep learning and emotional intelligence re-express it in more complex ways to achieve functional outcomes such as high work performance.

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 hypothesized to produce entrepreneurial innovation and success. His study confirms the “profound role of experimental practices” within a learning system for innovation, suggesting that “an overwhelmingly large portion of innovation performance achieved by our entrepreneurs (52%) can be explained by their hands on, iterative approach to learning and problem solving.”

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 decision.”

So, The Start-Up Game™ was born, a co-creation between ImagineNation and The Playful Shark, two Israeli Start-Ups, as a two day business simulation that develops innovative and entrepreneurial leadership capability. It aims to develop a culture of “provocative competence”, which is an innovative and entrepreneurial way of thinking, doing and be-ing resulting in consistent innovation, the lean start-up way!

image credit: musicteachershelper.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

As an aging “Baby Boomer”, I can recall, with a certain sense of pride and nostalgia, what it felt like to grow up in the Swinging Sixties and Fabulous Seventies. I am still in awe at how our rebellious generation, managed to connect globally through the diverse array of writers, poets, personalities, song writers, musicians, actors and artists of our time in our quest to be acknowledged and “heard”. The “baby boomer” generation, has since become the most powerful and advantaged demographic segments of all time.

We were the original “Digital Immigrants”, born before the existence of digital technology, only learning how to adopt it later in our lives.

Today’s emerging equivalents to the “Baby Boomer” generation are described as “Digital Natives”, or “Gen Z”; having had a lifelong use of technology, via the internet, instant messaging, MP3 players and mobile phones. Also in a quest to be acknowledged and “heard’, this generation has found innovative and different ways of connecting and excelling in an uncertain and globalized world. Wikipedia describes “Gen Z” as having been raised “after the end of the Cold War and spread of the Internet. Generally speaking they’re the children of Generation X although some of the oldest may be the children of Baby Boomers; the youngest members can also be children of Generation Y.”

“Digital Natives” are described as people “who were born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, have a greater understanding of its concepts.”

“A person who understands the value of digital technology and uses this to seek out opportunities for implementing it with a view to make an impact”.

Whilst the “Baby Boomers” used magazines, radio and TV shows, rock shows, music, off beat art galleries, cabaret, fashion, anti war demonstrations to connect us and power our anger and enthusiasm for making the world a different, if not better place.

This emerging generation’s way of connecting is powered through technology, in ways that we never could have previously imagined.

An incredible example is Nick D’Alosio, who in March this year, at 17 years of age, sold his computer application, Summly, to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars. An article in Forbes Magazine describes how, in the previous year, while studying for a history exam, he grew frustrated with the flood of text he received from Google search results. It describes how D’Alosio received his first computer at age 9, and used it to create movies with editing tools such as Final Cut Pro, and actually began writing apps at the age of 12 in 2008. At the age of 15, he completed his first round of venture capital funding and is acknowledged as the youngest person in the world to raise venture capital. Summly received Apples Best Apps of 2102 award for “Intuitive Touch” and currently has a 4.5/5 star rating on the App Store.

Even if Nick D’Alosio, is found to be an “anomaly in the technological matrix” or a “technological deviant”, his incredible success, at such a young age, is effectively a “game changer” in sourcing technological innovations. He is also representative of an aggressive new individualistic demographic, that will catalyze and drive the development of the new waves of technology that will impact significantly and shift the way society connects and businesses innovate and run in the future.

These shifts, in this new world, according to Ginni Rometty, the first female CEO of IBM, will be driven by cloud, mobile, social and big data advances, which are all happening at once and at lightning speed. She talks about how data will become the basis of competitive advantage going forwards, how social networks will drive value, and how consumer segments will cede to the individual.

Whether we consider ourselves “Digital Immigrants”, “Baby Boomers”, “Gen X’s” or “Gen Y’s” or “Gen Z’s, we all have the chance to learn how to play, excel and succeed, in this brave new world. As Rometty said, just because the technology exists and will become increasingly accurate, the shift will require new ways of thinking and acting.

“At the end of the day, it’s about mindset and culture,” she said.

Applying almost 6 decades of my hard earned “Baby Boomer” wisdom, I suggest that we choose to rise to the challenge and learn how to be truly innovative in the way we think, act and connect with one another. To co-create, with the emerging “Digital Natives” the “authentic corporations” Rommety talks about. These organizations will harness the talent and creativity of “crowds” creating meritocracies where age, gender, race, education and job history, will no longer matter.

The way work will be organized, talent will be employed, research will be conducted and products made and marketed will be different and disruptive to what we know as “business as usual”.

We need to find innovative ways of understanding, nurturing, embracing and adopting an attitude where “business as usual” is no longer sustainable or good enough!

Perhaps if we encourage people to engage with change through developing their innovative leadership capabilities, as “Baby Boomers” we can help lead the way forwards by collaborating with and empowering these “technological deviants”.

Who knows, it might just re-ignite our enthusiasm, re-focus our efforts and fulfill our dream towards making the world a better and more coherent place.

It just won’t be in ways that we expect, so be prepared!

image credit: edsocialmedia.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ our experience tells us that innovators are both born with a genetic predisposition and made through active endeavor.

In fact, major research projects carried out on the creative abilities of identical and fraternal twins found that 25-40% of what we do innovatively stems from genetics, whilst 60%-75% of our innovation skills come from learning.

“Nurture trumps nature as far as creativity goes”.

We first need to understand the skill, and then practice it, which supports us to gain the confidence in our capacity to create. Innovative organizations are almost always led by innovative leaders who nurture virtually people’s capacity for creativity and innovative thinking through desire, experience and effort. With innovation fast becoming an organisations lifeline to thriving in an uncertain and unstable world, it seems that not enough organisations are investing in systematic innovation education to nourish and nurture this creative and innovative capacity.

Innovation is the result of a COLLISION between different internal programming, perspectives and thought patterns resulting in an explosion of creativity that leads to innovative ideas and solutions! It occurs best when there is a powerful collision between the ‘need’ to change and create something new and different, with an awareness of what is, or could be ‘possible’.

“Successful innovators have ways of looking at the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, often by accident, a set of perpetual habits that allow them to pierce the fog of ‘what is’ and catch a glimpse of ‘what could be’.”  – Gary Hamel

For innovation to result from this collision of ‘need’ and ‘possibility, it requires a unique mix of conscious awareness, competence and deep courage. From my 30 plus years of consulting and corporate education experience, especially the last 3 years in the high tech disruptive Israel Innovation space, I have found that the lacking just one of these three qualities will cause the organization to fail in its innovation efforts.

• Noting that many, if not all organizations, may have a strong ‘need’ to innovate, yet do not invest in building the internal competence required to design and deliver the desired results.

• Some organizations are often ‘seduced’ by CEO’S or consultants offering them limitless possibilities for expansion or growth. Yet, often an organization lacks the conscious awareness and may actually be ‘blind’ towards to the limitations and impact of their operating cultural patterns towards designing and delivering the desired results.

• Finally, all innovation efforts require considerable depths of passion and raw courage to sustain their focus and momentum, especially when experiments fail and prototypes need to be re-built. To develop both the patience and the resilience to stay in the innovation game.

For a systematic innovation education to successfully nourish and nurture people’s creative and innovative capacity, it must enable people to safely develop the provocative competence to:

• Challenge the status quo, and actively ‘rock the boat’ to reveal, disrupt, question and dispute the operating beliefs and patterns that have converged over time.

• Discern and assimilate the best of their knowledge, skills and experience to pay deep attention to cultural patterns, emerging trends, markets, needs and ideas.

• Stay in the game and take the necessary smart risks to make the innovation happen.

To create the platform for a successful innovation education program, three key elements need to be in place:

1. People need to have the ‘chance to’ or opportunity to safely connect with, research and experiment with new ideas that may, or may not, be related to their current reality, to practice the divergent thinking and deep questioning required to generate new ideas in emergent and cognitive ways.

2. People have to be inspired to ‘want to’ or be motivated to explore distant horizons and stretch their boundaries, to discover new ways of being and doing things.

3. People need to be taught ‘how to’ do it, by developing the mindsets, behaviours, skills and practices of successful innovative and entrepreneurial leadership, until these become habitual and are embedded into the culture and delivered through behaviours, processes and systems.

Gary Hamel, in his new book, “What Matters Now”, appropriately suggests that we have an incredible opportunity, to learn “from the crucible of crisis” and to remind ourselves that “we owe our existence, prosperity, happiness and future to innovation.”

Now is the time to be proactive, to pay deep attention to ‘what is’, and find the courage to be intentional about ‘what could be’. The worst thing that could happen by taking up the innovation challenge is that you could create a future that is sustainable, prosperous and happy, for you, your team and your organization!

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ we acknowledge that innovation is the result of a COLLISION between different perspectives and thought patterns. In our programs we initiate intentional and constructive collisions that disrupt the status quo and cultivate peoples ‘provocative competence’. This enables people to develop, manifest and maximize the ‘creative intelligence’ required to be innovative.

People learn how to challenge and question existing perspectives and thought patterns in deeply disruptive and provocative ways.

Research reveals that all successful innovators take responsibility for facilitating the innovation process, they don’t delegate it, and they do it themselves! They intentionally stimulate, activate and generate new perspectives and thought patterns that lead to the discovery of innovative ideas and solutions. Authors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, Clayton Christensen, in their recent article “The Innovators DNA” in HBR, outlines the results of their six year study to uncover the origins of creative – and often disruptive – business strategies in particularly innovative companies. Their research led them to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguish the most creative executives:

. Associating
. Questioning
. Observing
. Experimenting
. Networking

They found that innovative entrepreneurs (who are also CEO’s) spend 50% more time on these discovery activities than do CEO’s with no track record for innovation.

Underlying these five critical skill sets are the Innovation Be-ing States or Mindsets that drive the Behaviours that result in the development of these skills.

Associating; is the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.

• To develop this skill we need to cultivate an open mind and adopt divergent thinking processes; which is able to view questions, problems and ideas from the ‘outside’ or from the ‘whole’.
• To understand and deconstruct issues by taking a whole systems perspective, considering global competition, instability and uncertainty, product and market analysis, cost /benefit analysis to expose and/or make the connections.

Questioning; is the willingness and ability to constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom, status quo and operating assumptions. It requires us to imagine and synthesize opposites and embrace constraints.

• To develop this skill set we need to cultivate an open heart, be detached and curious, seek possibilities and pay deep attention.
• To learn how be present and deeply attend to one another, to listen and ask questions at the generative level. To challenge the status quo by inquiring and constructively debating to achieve high levels or meta thinking to generate imaginative and creative ideas and unexpected solutions.

Observing; is the ability to pay deep attention by scrutinizing common phenomena to gain insights about new ways of doing things.

• To develop this skill set we need to be able to perceive and sense the operating patterns from the whole system perspective.
• To zoom in to the detail and tactical aspects as well as to zoom up to the conceptual and strategic aspects of the question, problem or idea.
• To work with, and not against, what could be wanting to emerge from the whole.

Experimenting; is the ability to actively try our new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots. It requires us to construct interactive experiences and to try and provoke unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.

• To develop this skills set we need to create the openings, or ‘right hand turns’ and inflection points that transform questions, problems and ideas into innovative opportunities.
• To accept that failure is a natural part of doing business, allowing people to fail small, fast and cheaply to create the safe space for mitigating risk.
• To be courageous by creating new opportunities for learning and change through experimentation and prototyping by be-ing adaptive, persistent and resilient.

Networking; is the willingness to devote time and energy to finding and testing ideas through a network of diverse individuals. Going out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains.

• To develop this skill we need to cultivate an open will, be detached and listen for the possibility in every encounter.
• To constantly interact with others to create, notice and act upon chance opportunities and make successful decisions by using intuition and gut feelings.
• To be willing to be intentionally disruptive & deviant, to dispute the status quo, to shift perceptions & create openings as to ‘what could be’.
• To generatively debate, not to ‘win’, or be ‘right’, but to create unconventional and unexpected ideas and solutions.

At ImagineNation™ www.imaginenation.co.il, we have over thirty years of experience in corporate consulting and learning projects with some of Israel’s and Australasia’s top 100 companies. We have integrated and evolved our successes and learning’s to create our own innovative approach and methodologies to bring these mindsets, behavior and skills ‘to life’. We can enable you to learn, practice, practice, practice and apply these skills to be more successful and innovative in 2013. We call them, the “Art of Provocative Competence”; an innovative and entrepreneurial way of thinking, doing and be-ing that engages harnesses and maximizes the imagination, creativity and potential for innovation from your most costly and valuable resource, your people. We have three learning streams:

1. Coach for Innovators Certified Program™ https://www.imaginenation.co.il/coach-for-innovators/
2. The Start-Up Game™ https://www.imaginenation.co.il/the-start-up-game/
3. Team Innovation Labs.

Finally, be courageous and put your own unique “ding in the universe” in 2103 by:

• Seeking the connections to seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.
• Constantly asking questions to challenge and disrupt the status quo, conventional wisdom and operating assumptions.
• Experimenting with new ideas and taking more risks.
• Testing ideas through networking and debating with deviant and diverse others to extend your knowledge domain.
• Embracing and crystallizing a powerful vision for innovation and change!

image credit: reorbit.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

All great achievers start out as individuals with a vision that ultimately impacts the realms they care deeply about!

They may not initially intend to, yet they all have the ability to shape an entire industry or market.

In our uncertain and turbulent world, we all have the power to tune into and harness this creative energy to make a significant difference within the realms we care deeply about.

It is possible to expand our ideas in unexpected ways that create and harnesses the power of entire industry eco-systems to shape innovative new industries and markets, especially to meet the needs of the emerging Gen-Y generation.

“Small moves, smartly made can set big things in motion.”

An example that stunned me recently was stumbling across Seth Godins’ Education Manifesto where he demands that “we stop stealing dreams (what is school for?)”.

He states that “top-down industrialised schooling” is not enabling children to understand, never mind develop the mindsets and skills to meet the needs of, and flourish in the emerging “internet and connection economy”.

He challenges the very nature of our industrial age education system, how it deprives children of their imagination and creativity and “steals their dreams”. He states that most schools are still churning out safe, “predictable, testable and mediocre factory workers.” Who then become productive and dependent workers in affluent countries that can no longer afford them if they want to compete in a globalized world. He challenges the purpose and roles of schools and demands that we re-invent schooling, stating that we do not need schools to “create compliance, to cause memorization, or to teach students to embrace the status quo”. He demands that schools teach children to be “fast, flexible and focused”. He states that the real shortage is in “dreams, and the wherewithal and the will to make them come true”.

This is definitely one of those “small moves” that has sparked a global debate on the nature and role of schools and education in a globalized and diverse world.

Reading this made me realize that I have been at the effect of this “rational, assembly line approach” to education for the past 30 years in my career as a corporate consultant, trainer, global facilitator and executive coach.

I have sat next to, stood in front of, and shared audiences with a wide range of both passive and aggressive managers and leaders, who are so accultured to “not rock the boat” and “play safe” that even the mention of the words “disruptive innovation”, creates enough fear and trepidation to cause the shackles to rise on their necks!

I realized that the same principles Seth Godin is applying to reinventing schooling also applies to the need to re-invent corporate education, a realm I care deeply about!

This is a billion dollar global industry in need of a massive re-invention process to meet the needs of an emerging generation of new managers and leaders as well as an internet and connected world!

We need to enable leaders to recover from their inadequate industrialized schooling so that they can dream and create new ways of flourishing in this new world.

This was further reinforced, by my recent participation in an Innovation Lab, called
“Gen Y Entrepreneurship – Reinventing Leadership and Learning” at the Presencing Global Forum in Berlin in July this year. Our group, which comprised of delegates from South East Asia, Middle East, US and Europe, understood that the emerging Gen Y workforce embodies values and aspirations that call for a re-evaluation of the way things are done in organisations. Some of the key questions we dialogued over two days included:

• How is Gen Y tackling our current social and organisational challenges with new ways of leadership and learning?
• What are the opportunities for Gen Y to help the current system shift and move towards a better society?
• How can we create enabling spaces for Gen Y to innovate and be even more effective in bringing such transformation into being?

Within our Lab, there was acknowledgment that the industrialized system, as described by Seth Godin, was both inadequate and inappropriate. There was a real sense of urgency for the development of new forms of learning, which were perceived as being largely experientially and playfully based.

• Gen Y contributors expressed a deep desire to be shown ways that help them see themselves within the current system to effect ways to shift it from within.
• They sincerely want to contribute through entrepreneurship, to feel connected, to be creative and authentically themselves.
• They want to be awakened, think for themselves, be heard, be part of a collective and realize their potential.
• They want the corporations they work for to positively impact the communities, governments and societies they operate in by role modelling a different way.

This requires the development of a new skill set based on the Presencing principles:

1. The quality of our results in a system is a function of the awareness that the people in that system operate from; the essence being “I attend this way, therefore it emerges this way.”

2. The new reality emerges from the opening of the mind, heart and will to connect ourselves to our deeper sources of wisdom, creativity and humanity.

3. In order to bring about profound change around us, we first have to go through a profound inner opening not only as individuals, but also collectively. It’s about to linking people to each other, to themselves and to their own journey.

I have spent the last six years developing a deep understanding of the practical applications of the Presencing Process, as well as two years researching, designing and prototyping my own innovative global corporate learning consultancy,  I hope that ImagineNation™ is just one “small move” that has been smartly made re-inventing corporate learning to spark innovation. I hope that it will contribute towards creating an innovative new approach to corporate learning that will inspire the Gen-Y emerging leaders, as well as meet the needs of cross generational and diverse leaders to shape a new and connected corporate world. I hope that some of the provocative and disruptive, iterative and generative, experiential and playful concepts, principles and techniques that I have developed will inspire peoples’ innovative and entrepreneurial sparks.

I hope that collectively, we can enable people to learn how to dream again and develop the wherewithal to shape the profound change that is so needed by organisations today and model a new way.

image credit: squidoo.com; myprettypennies.com; presencing.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent TED presentation, successful British multi business owner, Margaret Hefferman, talked about the need to ‘think together’. She outlined how to do this by daring to confront conflict and create disagreement.

The concept of ‘disconfirmation’, which is to challenge a belief, idea or a theory, as being ‘right’, unacceptable or ill-formulated, is one of the key practices required to create the constructive conflict and generative debate that is critical to effect change and innovation.

One of the key comfort zone points, I developed as a result of spending most of my adult life in Australia, is to ‘not to rock the boat’, or to ‘make waves’, which usually means, in real terms,  avoiding conflict.

Let’s take a moment to consider the whole subject of ‘debate’, and how it gets typically gets played out in Australia and in other western countries . In high school, debate tends to be perceived as a ‘contest’, or a ‘competition’, with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Each team represents a point of view and elegantly puts forward their case ‘for it’ or ‘against it’, the team with the ‘best’ or most convincing case, according to the judging panel, wins! Most western governments debate their laws and policies, with each political party taking ‘sides’, often resulting in ‘win/lose’ and ‘denial/blame’ games. The language, ‘in opposition’ supports what is considered to be a very limited ‘right/wrong’ way of seeing the world, very often confirming and validating existing beliefs, ideas and theories. The consequences of this approach is resistance to change, conventional and rules bound ways of thinking and behaving, and more importantly, a lack of creativity and innovation.

In most organisations I have consulted to, in my 30 plus years of corporate experience, where ‘right/wrong’ perspectives thrive, it has now become, culturally incorrect to be challenging or argumentative in case you get judged as being ‘oppositional’. Conflict is avoided at all costs, and debates have become very polite and even tempered conversations. I have noticed that very few people seem to have the energy, confidence and the courage to really debate challenge the status quo and disconfirm existing beliefs, ideas and theories.

The problem with this approach is that it eliminates possibilities, breakthroughs, and inflection points and inhibits innovation.

It seems that many of us no longer know be appropriately assertive and challenging in our communications. This hesitation and politeness creates a range of passive and aggressive, frustrated and conventional responses to the questions that get asked.
For innovation to occur people need a collaborative process that allows them to ‘think together’: an active and disagreeable debate process that generates higher level or meta ideas and solutions, not one which seeks to make one party ‘wrong’ and the other ‘right’.

Some of the world’s most successful business people deal with threats, instability and uncertainty, by taking a position of being ‘in opposition’; to the organisation and its identity to deeply resist complacency (and constant confirmation of the status quo).

They stimulate the disruptive thinking required for experimentation and the generation of ‘out of the box’ ideas and unconventional solutions. Ideas get challenged, dismissed, deviated, reinvented, until high levels of ‘meta thinking’ and inflection points are achieved. This accelerates the creation of the ‘right hand turns’ required to effect unexpected dramatic change that affects progress, change and innovation.

Finally, generative debating has the power to be intentionally ‘disruptive’, which creates the mindset shifts and disconfirmation to generate innovative solutions and ideas to problems that may have previously seemed impossible and insolvable.

So, if you would like to get the ball rolling to include more debate into your business:
Ask more questions, especially open and exploratory ones that don’t minimise and disengage the person you are interacting with:
1. What would happen if……………? Pause and listen for their response. Keep on repeating the question until Meta thinking levels are achieved.
2. Accept very suggestion someone presents, even if you don’t agree by stating “yes……… and….” Pause and listen for their response.
3. When someone makes a suggestion, reply with “I like ……………and what if we………………..” Pause and listen for their response. Repeat first question.

You may be surprised by the possibilities and opportunities that get generated!

image credit: neoformix.com

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