GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When I was living in Israel, seeking a more meaningful life, I was unable to work in my culture consulting, top team and leadership development areas of expertise.

As a result of this very serious and high impact problem I experienced a powerful and deep collision between the necessity to earn a living, and the possibilities emerging in such a creative, innovative and entrepreneurial environment.

It meant that I had to develop the learning agility to embrace, adapt to a disruptive, diverse and different culture.

This required letting go of most of what I knew and practiced, and learning completely new ways of being, thinking and acting differently in almost every area of my life.

It was not easy, and I made zillions of mistakes, seriously failed, and faced heaps of adverse people and situations as well as a huge number of monumental brick walls. What mattered was that I had already experienced, experimented with, and achieved eight major career and life changes. I had also invested a large part of my corporate life in continuously learning how to learn, and in learning how to teach others how to learn, to be the best they could be in the context of transformational leadership, teams, achievement and accountability.

This meant that I was capable, had the capacity (and occasionally) the confidence, to stay in the learning and development game.

I did this intentionally, by working on being proactive, constructive and non defensive (even though it was often very hard) and by not blaming and shaming others (even though it was often very tempting) when things went astray.  By seeing myself as responsible for becoming the best person I could be, and by perceiving it all as significant “learning experiences”.

Little did I realize at the time, and only through retreat, reflection and later through integration and assimilation in one of my many career manifestations, I had become, in practice, what we now call, at ImagineNation™ an “agile learner.”

This is now the basis for our global innovation culture, education and coaching streams.

Developing learning agility

Sustaining success in today’s uncertain, unstable and highly competitive business environment is becoming increasing dependent on learning, yet most people, and most organisations don’t seem to know how to learn, never mind know how to develop learning agility.

“In an age of rapidly evolving technologies, business models, demographics, and even workplace attitudes – all shifting concurrently- change is not only constant but also exponential in its pace and scope.”

BCG in their “Twelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organization Work Report” identified four key categories; “The first two address changes in demand for talent; technological and digital productivity and shifts in the ways of generating business value. The second two address changes in the supply of talent; shifts in resource distribution and changing workforce culture and values”. 

These forces will revolutionise the whole notions of “talent,” and the way work gets done in companies. It will compel leaders to rethink and relearn “even the most basic assumptions about how their organizations function”.

To survive, compete and flourish with the pace and scope of change, improving people’s confidence, capacity and capability for learning agile ways of being, thinking and acting differently is crucial.

This enables them to develop the ability to make intentional shifts in changing contexts, to know how to create the safe space, to respond to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways.

Benefits of learning agility

When we know how to embrace, adapt and continuously improve ourselves (and others we impact and interact with) through learning, we can create, invent and innovate real business breakthroughs. We can really make a difference, in ways that are meaningful and add value to the quality of people’s lives. In the case of customers, when we know how to learn to continuously invent and deliver new products and services, through constant improved operational efficiencies and business model innovation, it results in a “greater user experience.”

In the case of our peoples’ talent, when we know how to learn how to make work more meaningful, connected and purposeful, we can better energise, catalyse, mobilize and harness their collective genius.

This results in a more creative, engaging and empowered high performance workplace.

In the case of organizations we can learn how to learn to increase revenue generating products and services and to generate greater customer satisfaction (and advocacy). Organizations benefit from increasing their speed to market and by the number of innovative projects, by improving operational efficiencies and by developing innovation cultures and eco-systems that maximize people’s talent as collective genius.

Cultivating innovative agility

At ImagineNation™ we know that the corporate learning and development market is being seriously disrupted.

Seeing this as a catalyst for re-inventing the corporate learning paradigm, we have developed, by testing, failing, learning and adapting our capability, capacity and confidence to innovate, an innovative and agile menu of learning pathways.

Where connecting happens through an implicit shared experience and intention, and learning happens through play, experimentation and emergence, that enables people to see their worlds with fresh eyes, and co-create new ways of being, thinking and acting.

This enables people to:

• Discover, explore and generate simple ways of working and flowing with, complex adaptive systems.
• Passionately and purposely create value by transforming business and user generative problems into innovative solutions.
• Creatively, courageously, compassionately and collaboratively respond to the unexpected.
• Give, take, and get permission to fail (with forgiveness) and learn by improvising, experimenting & doing.
• Provocate, punctuate and disrupt the status quo and experiment with unconventional methods to get work done.

This enables organizations to use their resources creatively and effectively, sometimes at a moment’s notice in response to the unexpected.

It also prioritizes ways of being, thinking, and acting which creates the permission and safe space for your people to move, reflect and respond authentically and effectively.

Developing the four “E”s of Learning at work

If you are seeking to develop both innovation and learning agility it is important to incorporate the “Four E’s of Learning” at Work – Education, Experience, Environment, and Exposure.

This involves supporting people to learn at work to continuously upgrade their talent; “both” their knowledge, skills, experience “and” their motivation, moods and mindsets.

This is achieved by integrating technology and blending learning solutions that enable digital learning, playful and experiential learning, self paced and team based 24/7 learning.

In other words, making learning agile, available and accessible to everybody, at every time, across everything!

Having the time to learn and feel that their new skills are valued.

• Taking time out for retreat, reflection and exploration of generative discovery of new ways of being, thinking and doing.
• Having the freedom and permission to question, challenge the status quo and experiment with new ideas, fail without punishment, make and learn from mistakes.

Develop macro and micro learning agile customized learning solutions

It is important to design and develop learning programs that facilitate both micro and macro learning that develop people’s competence, capacity and confidence to adapt and innovate in changing contexts.

Macro learning involves learning a whole new domain, where people need to continuously inject new skills, information, moods and mindsets, behaviors and connections to;

Move and speed up their learning curve until they become experts at innovation so that they can teach and coach others.

Create space for learning “on the job skills” through practice, repetition, and continuous questioning about why something didn’t work.

Whilst micro learning involves what we can quickly learn, view or consume in short periods of time, and at ImagineNation™, we cluster micro learning activities to create customized agile macro learning blended learning programs for our clients.

Creating new agile learning pathways at ImagineNation™

The following diagram illustrates our approach, by putting The Agile Learner at the center, and offering a range of micro options that can be patterned into a macro customized blended learning structure.

This can meet our clients learning needs in terms of subject or topic depth and breadth, as well as suit all learning styles, time, and technology and cost needs.

Flourishing in the new world of work

In the report Josh Bersin “The Disruption of Digital Learning: Ten Things we have learned” reveals that employees are feeling “overwhelmed” and in reality, only have “24 minutes a day to learn”.

If we want to seriously achieve 21^stcentury success, sustainability, then we have to work harder at making people matter.

We can do this strategically, systemically and in more intentional, meaningful and purposeful ways, and through more creative, agile and innovative micro and macro, blended and agile learning pathways.

This will energize, catalyze, mobilize and harness your people’s collective genius.

He suggests that what really matters is your culture, your people’s career successes and coaching. In ways where people feel safe, empowered and have permission to participate in on the job experiential learning, where they can learn from mistakes; supported by effective performance data and rewards systems within a culture of learning.

Join the next webinar in our ‘Making Innovation a Habit’ Series; Coaching for innovation agility?It’s on Thursday, 22nd June, 2017 at 8.30pm Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney and at 6.30pm Perth, 11.30am London, 12.30pm Amsterdam, and at 6.30am New York.

The next Coach for Innovators Certified Program for 2017 starts on Tuesday, 17th October and ends on Tuesday, 6th December. To take advantage of the Super Early Bird Price and get a US$400.00 DISCOUNT register now https://www.imaginenation.com.au/product/certified_program/

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At a recent Australian innovation conference, one of the presenters stated that “inertia leads to irrelevance” suggesting that organisations that are inactive, passive and even lazy about seeing innovation as a strategic lever for improving the bottom line, whether it be a people, profit or planet  focussed one, are actually in a state of resistance.

This made me wonder what really causes organizations to resist or disincline motion, action, or change? What Causes organizations to essentially resist innovation as an accelerator of business change, competitiveness, growth and value?

Another presenter called this a state of “permafrost“ suggesting that organizations are behaving as if they are permanently frozen, year after year.

Unfreezing the permafrost

So why might some organizations be “staying at rest” when there are so many possibilities and opportunities available to them, in the current business environment, to grow, nurture and sustain their competitiveness and relevance to their customers and key stakeholders?

It’s quite simple really; all organizations only exist because they are successful at being relevant, in some way, to a customer, who is generally willing to exchange value (usually money) for a benefit (usually functional, purposeful or emotional) they receive from their experience, a product or a service. With globalisation, data overload and digitisation making so many more options and choices available to savvier, smarter and discerning customers, it seems quite bizarre that so many organizations have allowed the permafrost to set in. Not just because it causes stagnation, it also depletes capability, resources and loss of motivation and minimisation of efforts.

It starts and ends with culture

At ImagineNation™ we know that culture is easily described as “the way things get done in an organization” what most people don’t understand is that it is formed and expressed by the “messages” that get sent.

These are most often demonstrated by peoples’ (especially leaders) behaviors, which in turn, are generated by their needs, values, beliefs and mindsets about what’s important or valued mostly by the organization.

People often build affiliation and comply so they can fit in, get their jobs done, and will do whatever it takes to survive in an uncertain world by focusing on securing their jobs, even if they hate them.

Messages are also communicated by the organizations’ core focus (sales, customer, production, and/or profit), systems (especially communication and reward and recognition) and artefacts (what’s important to show others, often to illustrate how important you or they are).

4 steps to unfreeze a ‘permafrosted’ organizational culture

Rather than resist, and allow the permafrost and winter to really set in, what if brave organisations  consider exploring and experimenting with the four key fundamentals that will accelerate innovation as a lever of business change competitiveness, growth and value?

1. Articulate a really, really compelling and coherent reason to change; be-come passionately purposeful

To venture down the innovation path the first crucial step is to articulate a really compelling and coherent “why” or necessity for innovation – because “necessity is the mother of all invention”.

At ImagineNation™ we describe this as igniting your “passionate purpose” and it’s usually to solve a business or customer problem or to exploit an opportunity that may or may not yet exist in the marketplace.

Doing this makes innovation a “necessity” which is demonstrated by the executive teams’ conviction that a solution to the problem or the opportunity exists, and is not yet known, because is exists as a “hidden possibility” that has infinite potential to make a difference to the quality of peoples lives in ways they value and cherish.  This requires entering a set of discovery mind states of being able to work “both” with “what is” (already in existence) and with “what could be” (the solution that lies hidden).

This involves stepping into a “not knowing” mind state, one which allows something new to emerge. This is also very challenging for some leaders, because it is not something you “do” as a task or as an activity, that you can “control” or wilfully force into a pre conceived solution. It involves “be-ing” willing to let go of limiting beliefs and “be-ing” present to the whole system and the potential and possibilities it offers.

2. Develop a common understanding of the impact and role of culture; be intentional to leverage culture strategically as a lever for innovation

To shift a culture, it’s important to have a common understanding, acknowledgement and acceptance of:

• What is really going on to cause or create the existing organizational culture?
• What the desired or target future innovation culture might look like?
• What are the gaps between the current and desired cultural states?
• What are the key supporting and inhibiting factors and adaptive business problems?
• What are the key priorities and possibilities towards “both” closing the gaps “and” creating the desired future state?

At ImagineNation™ we know that an innovation culture can be contextualised, measured, diagnosed and benchmarked through applying human centred design processes and the OGI® quantitative tool and by qualitative research to identify both the explicit and implicit factors impacting innovation.

Seeing innovation a lever for effecting changes that customers want and need, and don’t yet know they want and need, that adds value, in some emotional, purposeful or functional way, to the quality of their lives.

3. Develop a clear strategic intent to innovate; be willing to align and contextualise what innovation means, and what it doesn’t mean, in your own organisation

To develop an innovation culture, it’s crucial to have a clear systemic perspective and strategic intent, supported, enacted and embodied by the board and executive team, and aligned to the Passionate Purpose and BHAG and;

• Define innovation in your unique organizational context
• Focus on the type of innovation to pursue; disruptive, breakthrough, differential or incremental
• Develop an explicit language around innovation that people can relate to and habitually use
• Develop an engaging communications plan about the intent, role and nature of the innovation intervention/process to enrol people in it.

At ImagineNation™ we know that organizations that see innovation systemically and strategically, and not as “tick the box” episodic and short term solution, program, training course, workshop or event, deliver sustainable outcomes. They see it as a long term strategy, to really reap the business benefits and results that innovation offers them.

4. Be prepared and risk mitigate the permafrost from really setting in; be curious, confident, courageous, compassionate and connected to the human factor, the people in your organization

At ImagineNation™ our research revealed five innovation killers that are alive and well in the majority of organizations.

Because innovation involves unlocking, igniting and harnessing people’s collective genius then knowing both how to acknowledge, and work with the five innovation killers is critical:

1. Risk Adversity
2. Resistance to change
3. Fear of failure, unknown, uncertainty, loss of control, status, looking silly
4. Complacency
5. Competitiveness and not collaboration

This can be done by investing in cultivating people’s innovation agility, to engage, enrol and empower them to execute a successful innovation culture development process.

Creating a psychologically safe holding space and environment are critical for maximising rather than minimising the crucial human and people factors in innovation enables organizations to respond constructively and reduce the impact of the five killers on business performance.

Quoting my esteemed colleague, Paul Hobcraft:

“Organizations need to work at ways to reduce fear, discomfort and resistance. To allow for opposing views, seeking out a diversity of opinion and establishing that one thing we all would love to be part of, this is an authentic culture that matches the promise with the reality. One that shifts away from conventional thinking to embrace risk and not try to always control but to seek actively experimentation. It is through experimentation we gain our best learning. Equally experimentation should be at the core of every organizations drive to innovate; we accelerate our knowledge the more we attempt something different, proving or disproving is exciting work.

Shaping ideas, taking risks, allowing experimentation, providing tolerance, exploring the unknowns all should be an integral part of innovation. Innovation is risk-taking”.

 What to do about it?

Our combined years (too many perhaps) of experience at ImagineNation™ with some of the world’s best companies globally in the high performance culture, leadership, team and innovation arenas assures us that the root causes of organizational permafrost; resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change, essentially to resist innovation, can potentially be resolved by boldly committing to these five key steps;

• Align the board and executive team to demonstrate conviction and commitment to embracing “both” a strategic “and” a systemic perspective to innovation.
• Flow with “both” with “what is” “and” with “what could be” in regards to clarifying a meaningful passionate purpose for innovation.
• Work “both” with “what is” “and” with “what could be” in terms of your current and target cultures and building the internal capability to transform it, aligned to technology, systems and artefact innovations.
• Respond constructively by creating a psychologically safe holding space and environment where people have permission to experiment and fail, to challenge convention, and collaborate rather than compete with one another.
• Build peoples’ readiness and receptivity to innovation, cultivate their agility confidence, capacity and competence through customised agile education and blended learning programs and awaken them from complacency, arouse discomfort and resolve their fears, and ultimately accelerate change.

So what might be your fundamental choice towards unfreezing your organizational permafrost?

image credit: disney.com

Register or learn more about the next free monthly webinar on June 22, Making Innovation a Habit Series: Coaching for innovation agility? Or, the next Coach for Innovators Certified Program.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The business playing field has changed and will keep on changing – and it will change in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

Uncertainty and instability are the key drivers of the business game – and our clients are challenged by a diverse range of wicked, societal, business and people problems, none of which are going away.

This means that the future will be very different from what happens today- and as coaches, we are in a unique position to support and enable clients in these types of organizational environments to survive, master and flourish within the playing fields of the future.

We have a unique opportunity to empower our clients to maximize these trends and problems as creative opportunities for change and innovation today.

We can achieve this by supporting them to shift their often conventional and traditional ways of leading, managing and doing things. To co-create new ways of leading that result in profound change that create the REAL results that people want.

C. Otto Scharmer, author of Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies writes, “We collectively create results that nobody wants because decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the people affected by their decisions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to leadership – that is, the limits to traditional top-down leadership that works through the mechanisms of institutional silos.”  

What is business enterprise agility?

Business enterprise agility is the “ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”. It is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways.

What is innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we acknowledge that innovation is about creating “changes that add value” & involves knowing how to see, respond & solve problems in creative ways that people value and cherish!

What is business enterprise innovation?

Business enterprise innovation involves making changes that add value in terms of either revenue growth or increased operational efficiency. These may involve the creation of new products and services that deliver value to customers, supported by a sustainable & profitable business model.

How does business enterprise innovation merge with agility?

Innovation results as a collisionbetween different perspectives and patterns, which break habitual ways of being, thinking and doing. The result is an explosion of creativity that leads to innovative ideas and solutions!

C. Otto Scharmer writes: “Isn’t there a way to break the patterns of the past & tune into our highest future possibility—and to begin to operate from that place?” 

The key collisions are between “necessity” because necessity is the mother of all invention and innovation – and with the highest “possibility” seeking thought patterns.

In her book, The Agility Shift: Creating agile and effective leaders, teams and organizations, author Pamela Meyer writes “Agility as the ability to make an intentional shift in order to be effective in changing contexts” and that“every person in every organization will experience the need to respond to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways, and will have a choice whether or not to make their own agility shift.”

Agility merges with innovation when we apply the collision both as a way of intentionally shifting our way of being, thinking and doing and taking a strategic, systemic, end-to-end approach to discovering, designing and delivering the change or innovation strategy.

Where people can:

• Quickly embrace, respond, adapt to, and safely deal effectively with change
• Self regulate their complacency and unconscious resistances to change
• Feel confident and empowered to take smart & courageous risks
• Permit, encourage and enable people to rock the ‘business as usual’ boat and safely disrupt their comfort zones
• Collaborate and connect, are curious and inquisitive, generatively see, respond to and solve problems
• Create an energetic environment that cultivates their purposefulness, creativity and wellness

How does this benefit organisations?

• Accelerates the innovation process.
• Reduces the resistance factors and risks inherent in change & innovation.
• Engages, empowers and enables the entire organization and broader ecosystem in the innovation effort.
• Build long term business value, growth & sustainability.

Who is an innovative & agile coach?

A coach for innovation agility is someone who knows how to be present to, see, and respond to (complex adaptive systems), the unexpected and the unplanned.

Who is able to shift their way of being, thinking and doing to emerge possibilities, opportunities and solve problems generatively by demonstrating agility competence, capacity and confidence.

A coach for innovation agility is someone who contributes the best of oneself, and generates the best from others, by being able to listen from the whole, for the good of the whole – as a coach in the context of innovation and entrepreneurship!

What is your highest possibility?

At the heart of every successful coaching intervention is the willingness of the coach to courageously and compassionately step outside of our comfort zones and hit the issue in safe powerful authentically powerful ways.

When we are able to connect with the other person, and create a collective holding space, in deep and meaningful ways, often to effect profound change and transformation.

Coaching for innovation agility is a key lever for effecting this, because, as Otto Scharmer says: “This is the moment when what we need most is enough people with the skill, heart, and wisdom to help us pull ourselves back from the edge of breakdown and onto a different path.” 

The next Coach for Innovators Certified Program for 2017 starts on Tuesday, 6th June & ends on Tuesday, 25th July. To take advantage of the Early Bird price and get a US$200.00 DISCOUNT, please use the discount coupon- EARLYBIRD and pay by Friday, 19th April. You can register now.

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When I moved on from being a high powered corporate retail executive almost thirty years ago, I took the entrepreneurial leap and initiated a design management consultancy to serve the Australian fashion and lifestyle industries. Interestingly, in those days, the focus was on stabilising innovation entrepreneurial businesses through conventional business management practices. This included tools like SWOT and competitive analyses, target marketing strategies, product portfolio management and of course, sound business planning incorporating the 3-5 year strategic plan.

With the shift towards game changing start-ups as the emerging organizational model, tools like these are no longer as relevant as they were in the past. This doesn’t mean that efficient management practices no longer matter, the need for organisations to cultivate speed and agility have re-framed the context of what it means, to be an efficient organization, whilst  being “both” dynamic “and” stable.

This was reinforced recently, in McKinsey Quarterly; “Companies can become more agile by designing their organizations both to drive speed and create stability” and that “truly agile organizations, paradoxically learn to be both stable (resilient, reliable, and efficient) and dynamic (fast, nimble, and adaptive)”

How does this impact innovation consulting?

At ImagineNation™ our clients come from both the conventional manufacturing and service sectors, as well as from the growing start-up sector, which means that we adapt our methodologies to meet their needs, see, respond to and solve their problems and co-create innovative solutions that add value to people and customers.

This suggests that the focus now is on towards designing organizations that can survive,flow and flourish with disruption and change. This requires us to think very differently about how we, as consultants approach, apply and anchor the paradoxical notions of agility and stability with our clients.

It’s about knowing “both” how to adapt the dynamism that start-ups excel at, to cultivate speed, nimbleness and adaptiveness in larger, more traditional organizations, who want to cultivate innovation agility.

“And” how to adapt the stability that larger organizations excel at, to enhance start-up resilience, reliability and efficiency and especially to consolidate their expediential growth, whilst sustaining their creative and unique cultures.

This is further evidenced by the recent ING Business Transformation, co- led by Bart Schlatmann, former COO, of ING Netherlands, where he stated: “Agility is about flexibility and the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt and steer itself in a new direction. It’s about minimizing handovers and bureaucracy, and empowering people. The aim is to build stronger, more rounded professionals out of all our people”.

Strategic, systemic and end to end

At ImagineNation™ to enable our clients to manage this paradox, we take a strategic, systemic and end to end approach to discovering, designing and delivering our clients change or innovation strategy. This encapsulates what Bart Schlatmann, former COO, of ING Netherlands also said to Mc Kinsey:  “Being agile is not just about changing the IT department or any other function on its own. The key has been adhering to the “end-to-end principle” and working in multidisciplinary teams, or squads, that comprise a mix of marketing specialists, product and commercial specialists, user-experience designers, data analysts, and IT engineers—all focused on solving the client’s needs and united by a common definition of success. This model was inspired by what we saw at various technology companies, which we then adapted to our own business”.

Building a business evolution plan – ImagineNation™ case study overview

A new client, a very successful digital start-up, experiencing expediential growth, recently challenged us to outline how we could partner with them, to achieve stability within their specific organizational context. They requested that we design an approach and method to co-create and implement an aligned solution to master this paradox.  Specifically to evolve, stabilise and scale their business to achieve the next major step change and execute their business strategies successfully for the coming year within a simple business evolution plan.

This became a challenging experiment; to invent an organizational design, within a “loose/tight” structure, to enable them to “both” achieve their high business performance business outcomes, “and” at the same time, maximize their core strengths of speed, flexibility and empowerment, human centred positioning and enviable start-up culture.

• Co-creating the playing field of the future

Our generative challenge focussed on how we could possibly and ultimately co-create, with our client, the parameters for operating in “their playing field of the future” what McKinsey describe as defining “a relatively unchanging set of core elements—a fixed backbone”.

• Step One Readiness and Receptivity

This involved our initial design incorporating three key concepts: a human centred, customer and people centric focus, ensuring alignment to the start-ups defined strategic pillars and core values whilst adapting lean start-up methodologies and strategies to anchor their scale and growth.

We focussed on building top team alignment as well as selecting, empowering and coaching an internal team of INNOVATION TRANSFORMERS to partner with our consulting team.

• Step Two Analyse and Diagnose

This involved empowering the INNOVATION TRANSFORMERS to engage with people to research the key business problems, operating patterns, possibilities and opportunities within a simple facilitative and coaching context.

• Step Three         Plan and Implement

This involved co-creating a hypothetical agile start-up business structure and identifying the key roles that could be constantly be verified, adapted and evolved as the business scaled and grew. To develop a culture of ownership/personal responsibility, empowerment and collaboration and a focus on improving their people and customer experience. To clarify what success could look like and what 90 day business goals could facilitate the first key steps achievement.

This was supported by the development of the agreed desired behavioural norms that brought the values to life and clarified expectations as to “how to do things around here.”

“One critical prerequisite for sustaining real change is putting in place the behavioural norms required for success. This is not about making cultural statements or listing company values; it is, rather, a matter of instilling the right kinds of behaviour for “how we do things around here.”

Our focus as to then identify, agree and embed high performance mindsets behind the behavioural norms which would support the agile start-up culture, vision and values to establish the playing field of the future.

It was also important to develop aligned communications channels and agreed core decision making processes and role clarity.

• Step Four Educate and Coach

Our next task was to create a common understanding of the business evolution plan and build overall innovation agility by developing a customised blended learning solution that included The Start-Up Game™ and The Coach for Innovators™. This involved creating a playful, engaging and experiential learning environment that encouraged creativity and built collaboration, whilst teaching people creative problem solving and teaming skills.

The Start-Up Game™ is a two day business simulation that brings lean start-up methodologies to enable players to debate and generate creative solutions to the key business problems that the INNOVATION TRANSFORMERS identified. It was customised to bring the agreed behavioural norms to life, within a safe learning environment, so that players had permission to experiment with them, learn by playing, doing and failing, and to embody them at the head, heart and guts levels.

This facilitated the development of the desired mindset and behaviour shifts and generative skills development to apply in daily actions, activities and embed habits.

• Step Five Align People, Process & Technologies

To ensure that our process delivered what it promised, and involved deep implementation processes including setting up internal challenge teams led by the INNOVATION TRANSFORMERS: with clearly assigned roles & responsibilities, project plans and monitoring & reviewing processes.

It involved a series of facilitated sales pitches by the challenge teams with their innovative solutions presentations for further product, service and technology developments.

Finally we agreed and planned the next set of 90 day actions plans, aligned reward and recognition processes, developed feedback loops and processes and processes for measuring and celebrating successes.

Making innovation part of everyone’s job, everyday

The playing fields of the future will be very different to what they are today, and organizations, no matter their size or nature, will master the future business game by maximizing opportunities available today, within the paradoxical nature of integrating agility with stability.

To take advantage of the Early Bird price for The Coach for Innovators Certified Program and get a US$200.00 discount by using the discount coupon- EARLYBIRD if you pay by Friday, 19th May. Register now https://www.imaginenation.com.au/product/certified_program/

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The Conceptual Age

We are living in an age of disruption, where changes are accelerating making innovation a strategic and systemic necessity and competitive lever to ensure your organization’s survival and sustainability. Living now in what Daniel Pink describes as “The Conceptual Age” our attention needs to be on both enhancing creativity, agility and in developing customer empathy.

Organizations that embrace this and do it successfully, will develop a new breed of knowledge workers, who know how to be, think and act differently, and thrive, within an agile innovation culture.

What is an agile innovation culture?

Is when people know how to quickly respond, adapt to, and safely deal effectively with change, and self-regulate their unconscious resistances to change. It is where people are permitted and feel confident to take smart risks. It is where people are permitted, encouraged and enabled to rock the ‘business as usual’ boat and safely disrupt their comfort zones. Is when people feel energized in an environment that cultivates their purposefulness, creativity, and wellness.

It is when ‘smart creatives’ who combine “business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy and a hands-on approach to getting things done”[1].

How does an agile innovation culture benefit the business?

It better enables organizations to achieve the key business outcomes they want and to deliver the required bottom line results; including increasing ROI, delivering business growth goals and increasing business value, making productivity and efficiency gains to compete successfully.

At ImagineNation™ we embrace a strategic and systemic approach to contextualising, measuring, and benchmarking an agile innovation culture. This involves cultivating an innovation culture that creates changes that add value to the quality of people’s lives in ways that they value and cherish.

“The cultural lens is the most difficult to “get right” in the sense of having a culture that fits the challenges the organization is presently facing. It certainly is the most vexing to both diagnose and alter, in terms of difficulty and time. Change that threatens valued professional or occupational identities is particularly problematic. My sense is that if you can figure out a way to work within and with respect for the various cultures represented in the organization, change is somewhat easier. Culture is not a variable that one tunes up or down. It is a set of deeply embedded habits and ways of looking at the world that works and works well for cultural members. So, there are limits, serious ones, to the extent which cultural change can be directed and hastened[2].”

Suggesting that innovation is like a dance, and to dance well it’s important to know the key steps and how to orchestrate them carefully by balancing Strategy (vision) and Systems (technology) with People (culture) and Learning (capability).

The result is the development of an innovation culture that creates a both a human and a process focused environment that is both customer and people centric.

Our research also indicates that the majority of organizations don’t know how to take advantage of or adapt to, the global trends towards enterprise innovation and business agility.

Many are excited about Start-Ups, yet they don’t know how to capture or cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit Start-Ups embody, and exhibit this vital energy into their often, conventional business structures. Many aspire towards developing an intrapreneurship culture, yet don’t really know how much change at the core level, this will require.

Alternately, they lack the global perspective to see entrepreneurship as an economic lever for economic, social and civic change, as well as for effecting business enterprise change at the core.

Your operating culture will either support or inhibit your innovation success

At the same time, leaders are being expected to understand their business Innovation path with insufficient benchmarking and cultural data. Without this crucial data set, they put their innovation efforts at risk of being ‘episodic band-aids’ that don’t embed an innovation culture, and therefore wasted.

This is because they will try to either implement process or technological based changes, or perhaps introduce innovation practices, that the core messages within the culture will potentially reject. This is because they haven’t had the information; benchmarking and cultural data, to work at the deep organization mindset level, which is where culture lives.

What are the key steps involved in developing an agile innovation culture?

1. Assessing your organizations readiness, receptivity and strategy for innovation.
2. Developing an aligned cultural diagnostic process.
3. Conducting the cultural diagnostic; qualitative and quantitative measures and analysis.
4. Developing a culture plan that is executed internally.
5. Implementing your culture plan to articulate new messages, solve business problems, maximize strengths, minimize constraints and build capability, capacity and confidence.
6. Aligning people and technological solutions.

What gets measured gets done

We incorporate the use of a reliable and validated innovation culture diagnostic tool; the OGI™ (The Organizational Growth Indicator) that measures an organizations ability to adapt, grow and transform.

The old saying “what gets measured, gets done” is as relevant as ever in the world of organizational culture development.

This makes the need for Measurement – creating the tangible data that turns “soft” people and culture issues into “hard” metrics, Evaluation – assessing ROI on organizational change and learning efforts and Business Impact – linking organizational change and learning efforts to actual bottom line performance and results, critical.

Acknowledging these three elements as critical to innovation success, our innovation eco-system partner, Connective Intelligence™[3] has created the OGI™ (Organizational Growth Indicator)[4] as a statistically validated tool designed to assess an organization’s ability to grow through new value creation and adaptive change.

Who developed the OGI™?

Dr. Brett Richards, Ph.D., President, Connective Intelligence, developed the OGI™ with the cooperation of leading consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, education, and healthcare organizations. Following 5 years of extensive research, development, and testing, the OGI results have been shown to align closely with an organization’s actual revenue performance.

What is the OGI™?

An incisive, “next generation” organizational diagnostic tool that measures an organization’s ability to drive real growth through new value creation and adaptive change.

How does the OGI™ work?

It is an online employee survey that takes less than 20 minutes to complete. It measures 12 key factors that determine an organization’s ability to grow and transform, effectively.

The OGI assesses the organization’s “readiness” for and responsiveness to internally and/or externally generated change.

• New value creation – holistic view of innovation – internally and/or externally focussed efforts to either enhance or create new value.
• Adaptive change – the ability to effectively change structures, processes and/or culture as required to achieve the organization’s mission, vision and strategic business objectives.

The OGI™ quantitatively assesses the organization’s internal environment consisting of its climate, culture and mindset which strongly influence its approach and capability to drive growth and transformation.

The OGI™ provides a quantitative diagnosis provides a metric based cultural assessment of the organizational cultures ability to adapt, grow and transform within 4 key mindsets and 8 orientations.

It also identifies eight different types of organizational cultures – where are you now, and where do you need to be?

Adding the Qualitative Diagnostic Element

At ImagineNation™ we support this initial assessment process by conducting a qualitative diagnostic process, through targeted one on one interviews and focus group discussions that provide concrete evidence of the Key Messages apparent in the Organizational Mindset;

• Revealing the operating values, beliefs and thinking preferences that influence attention and action within the organization.
• Identifying the key factors impacting people’s shared perceptions and attitudes on the level of engagement within the organisation.
• Identifying the specific operating beliefs and assumptions that drive people’s behaviours in the organization.

By combining both assessment processes we can then identify the core generative problems within the organization that need to be seen, responded to and solved through innovation planning, capability, capacity and confidence building and implementation.

Making the strategic culture decision

If you really want your business enterprise to flourish, then experimenting with ways of introducing the innovation as the way of “doing things around here” is critical to your future success. Doing this will harness and mobilize your people’s collective genius and deeply engage them in doing meaningful, creative and energizing work.

This is the real difference that will make the difference in achieving 21st-century success in the developing both the creativity and customer empathy required in the “Conceptual Age”.

It’s also a crucial way of shifting your organization from its inherent complacency and as a mechanism for resolving people’s fears and resistance to change and creating the safe space and permission for change.

It will also enable you to constructively resolve and shift your overall risk adversity towards smart and effective risk taking, through improvisation, experimentation and iterating key innovative products and services.

By taking a strategic and systemic perspective, and building a human-centered culture around your people and your customers you will accelerate the innovation process.

Invitation to join the webinar

Find out more by joining ImagineNations™ next free 60 minute webinar in our ‘Making Innovation a Habit’ Series; it’s with Connective Intelligence and the Organizational Growth Indicator (OGI) and it’s on Friday, 31st March 2017 in Asia and East Coast Australia, and on Thursday, 30th March in the USA, South America and Canada. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

[1] How Google Works Erich Schmidt

[2] https://executive.mit.edu//blog/three-perspectives-on-organizational-change-more-answers-from-mit-sloan-professor-john-van-maanen#.WKt3jjt942w

[3] https://www.connectiveintelligence.com/

[4] https://www.theogi.com/site/home

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I was at a committee meeting recently and one of the guiding principles adopted by the team was “agile decision making – the 80:20 rule”. When I inquired as to what “agile decision making” actually meant, I was informed that it meant accelerating planning by making fast decisions that did not need to be “perfect”.

So does this mean that I had to discard my 20 plus years of developing effective and agreed decision making processes with top teams?

How do I make fast instant decisions without taking time (even just 5 minutes) to reflect on and inquire, verbally with the team, or even internally, on the three “R’s” of agile decision making?
• Relevance – Why is this an important issue/or not? What exactly do we hope to achieve?
• Responsive – What are the options, what is the likely impact of each one?
• Resilience – What could be some of the possible disruptions? What if……?
• Resourceful – What is best use of resources? Where might we experiment and improvise?
• Finally – What will I/we choose to do about it?

This added even more confusion to my recent conundrums, how the word “agility” has slipped into the vernacular, and yet, it seems that there is no common understanding as to what it really means, and how to leverage it as a key concept for 21st century business enterprise success.

So, like possibly, some of you, I began searching for a practical and pragmatic definition for the “agility” some time ago to explore – Why is it that, despite many leaders’ approaches, agility is not simply accelerated planning?

What does it mean to be agile?
Some of the questions I asked famous innovation webinar presenters, blog writers and innovation management consultants without getting clear answers;
–What does it really mean to “be” agile?
-Why is this one of the most important capabilities to cultivate today?
-How can it be applied to individual, teams and business enterprise success?
-What key elements need to be in place to develop agility competence, capacity, and confidence?

What is the definition of agility?

Using this data as my starting point, I found on Wikipedia a well-accepted definition; this just confused me even more;

Business agility is the “ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”. Business agility can be maintained by maintaining and adapting goods and services to meet customer demands, adjusting to the changes in a business environment and taking advantage of human resources.

It goes onto to describe, that in a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An agile enterprise uses the key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success.

Finally, it declared, business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence. This made me inquire and question even more;
– How then, do we find the time to discover and explore simple ways of working with the notions of complex adaptive systems and complexity?
– How can we make these abstract concepts coherent to apply them to individual, team and business enterprise success?
– What then, are the foundations of organizational intelligence?

At ImagineNation™ our focus is on building “know-how” in applying innovation as a strategic and systemic lever, focussing on the “how-to’s” of innovative culture, management, leadership, coaching & start-up entrepreneurship.

Taking into account our clients need for Speed and Simplicity, and Low-Cost, High-Value Agile Learning Solutions, we just don’t have the time to go deeply into the theory behind complex adaptive systems, complexity science, and the multiple intelligence debate.

We just need to know how to contextualize and our clients to apply them.

The Agility Shift

It wasn’t until I came across a fabulous book, The Agility Shift, by Pamela Myers, that it all started to make sense to me, and if I was going to teach it, then I needed to congruently embody and enact it myself, and then build the concepts, principles, and techniques into our innovation curriculum.

She describes “Agility as the ability to make an intentional shift in order to be effective in changing contexts” and that “every person in every organization will experience the need to respond to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways, and will have a choice whether or not to make their own agility shift.”

It was music to my ears because, at ImagineNation™ we agree with Pamela Myer, in that be-ing innovative depends less on new skills and knowledge and much more on the context or safe space people co-create together in a “Playspace” involving;
– The play of new ideas
– People playing new roles
– More play in the system
– Improvised play.

What are the Three “C’s” of Organizational Intelligence?

1. Agility competence involves cultivating the mindsets, behaviours, and generative skills necessary to respond to the unexpected and unplanned. As well as being safely disruptive in the discovery and design phases of innovation to generate new developments and innovative breakthroughs from emerging trends.
2. Agility capacity is about cultivating the emotional, visceral & cognitive abilities to flow and flourish with uncertainty and volatility.
3. Agility confidence is about cultivating the self-efficacy to trust their own, and others’ judgments, competence and capacity to be effective in changing contexts.

Who is an innovative and agile leader or coach?
Someone who knows how to be present to, see and respond to (complex adaptive systems) the unexpected and the unplanned (complexity), and shift their way of being, thinking and doing (applying multiple intelligence) to emerge possibilities, opportunities and solve problems generatively.

What are the benefits of innovation agility to individuals, teams and business enterprises?
– Accelerates the innovation process.
– Reduces the resistance factors and risks inherent in change and innovation.
– Engages, empowers, and enables the entire organization & broader ecosystem in the innovation effort.

Creating the “Playspace” for Agility
Supporting Pamela Myers’ discovery – “one of the most important aspects of agility – the ability to make intentional shift in order to be effective in changing contexts” rings very true to us at ImagineNation™.

I wonder if we all invested more time, resources and energy creating the Playspaces, she describes, we will in fact expand our individual and collective capacity for innovation agility?

If doing, this will, in turn, maximize the diversity, differences and connectivity in our people and teams, make innovation part of everyone’s jobs every day and finally enable business enterprise to build, grow and compete more fluidly, and perhaps even make the world a better place?

Where “connecting happens through the implicit shared experience and intention and building happens in the moment on stage, as new worlds are co-created and explored”.

Invitation to join the webinar

Find out more by joining ImagineNations™ next free 60 minute webinar in our ‘Making Innovation a Habit’ Series; it’s with Connective Intelligence and the Organizational Growth Indicator (OGI) on Friday, 31st March 2017 in Asia and East Coast Australia, and on Thursday, 30th March in the USA, South America, and Canada. Register now at https://www.imaginenation.com.au/free-monthly-webinars/

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Having been in the corporate learning and development space now for more than 25 years, it’s been really useful to invest time immersing myself in researching recent developments and emerging trends. It seems that a “new world of work” is emerging in the 21^st century disrupting the corporate learning paradigm. It’s turning old instructional, episodic & live training models upside down, as technology, financial, people and competitive pressures drive necessary change and introduces new possibilities for achieving 21^st century corporate success, growth and sustainability.

Our research indicates that business enterprises globally have the opportunity to meet the needs of the modern learner by responding strategically, and speedily to the diverse and complex range of trends impacting corporate learning.

These include four key trends;

1. Time scarcity; having less time to spend absorbing more knowledge and skills to complete more complex tasks faster.
2. The war for attention; being distracted and often overwhelmed by a profusion of electronic and online devices available 24/7.
3. Focus on the bottom line; securing ROI in uncertain and unstable times, questioning whether learning a short term cost or a longer term investment and lever for future competitiveness?
4. Focusing the learning content and process mix; applying design thinking processes to empathize with modern learners to create contextualized experiences.
5. Maximizing the use of technology and creating customized blended solutions; integrating broad range of technologies with other digital, interactive and on the job learning experiential methodologies.

So what is really going on?

In their recent industry report – “Ten Trends Shaping Corporate Learning”, Deloitte disclose that

• Learning and development spending has grown in double digits for four years in a row.
• Leadership development spending grew by 14% in 2014, the highest growth in a decade.
• Learning technology spending grew by 21% in 2014, representing a major“technology replacement cycle beginning.
• More than $6.4 billion of financing invested in education and training companies in 2015 (up from $3.5billion in 2011).

They also highlighted that today only 16% of Learning and Development spending is allocated to instructor delivery vs. 21% in 2011 and 33% in 2006.

There is also a huge shift in content strategy, which is shifting resources away from instructor lead training towards online and on the job learning where in 2015;

• 32% of training was instructor led and is shrinking,
• 13% was virtual instructor led,
• 26% was online self study and is finally working,
• 15% on the job and 13% through collaboration which are also rapidly growing areas.

These trends and this data suggest that we are at a tipping point!

Reinforcing the critical importance of a corporation becoming, what Peter Senge termed the Learning Organization; an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

This is the real lever for unleashing and harnessing people’s potential and collective genius by strategically and systemically applying new agile learning strategies and technologies as enablers for business growth, competitiveness and sustainability.

Interestingly, the confluence of the five trends disrupting the conventional corporate learning paradigm is also seeing the emergence of very cost effective learning platforms, promising to be “the solution” yet, when tested, are mostly still at the minimal viable product stage.

And, here’s the point; if innovation is one of the key competitive strategies in today’s corporate environment, and if one of the key critical success factors for corporate success is to focus on creating value through change, then corporations have the opportunity to use a “both (technology)/and (people)” approach.

To strategically and systematically use innovation processes to see (discover) problems and opportunities, create ideas (design) and then execute (deliver) innovative learning solutions that people love and cherish. 

Doing this strategically, systemically and effectively will unlock, mobilize and harness people’s collective genius, and empower people and teams to successfully drive and deliver the changes that result in breakthrough innovation.

This suggests that corporations can choose to enhance their internal capability and shift towards;

• Empowering and enabling people and teams to become “agile learners” bringing content specific and experiential learning processes into daily working operations to encourage peer, and team learning and development that they own and control.
• Fuel, empower and mobilize every link of the corporate value chain through online connectivity to empathize with users problems and create learning communities who use technology to network across boundaries, functions and geographies to solve them.
• De-content and contextualize core leadership, management and other key learning programs to diffuse knowledge and solve multi faceted problems in practical, quick and simple ways incorporating on the job learning methodologies.

Yet, historically, the majority of corporate learning programs seem to have not progressed much further from the “classroom” and academic disciplined approaches that have little relationship to the real world. In that have often been subject and event based, and run in isolation to the business enterprises’ mission, strategic intent and delivery of goals and/or concrete outcomes.

What are the possibilities, opportunities and methodologies?

The ultimate and most impactful corporate learning solution will embody a contextualized blend and combination of the most relevant content, delivery options and experiential choices outlined below;

• Facilitative and coaching processes, more mentoring and on the job apprenticeships.
• Bite sized learning solutions delivered through a range of accessible technologies.
• Mobile learning solutions that drive mindset and behavior change as well as skills development, integration and measurement.
• Virtual and live simulations of real life experiences using online game methodologies.
• Gamification built into all online learning methodologies aligned to demographic styles.
• Using social media to assess and predict personality types and learning styles.
• Small wearable computers that record physiological state to self manage and regulate emotional and reactive responses to complex problems and difficult situations.

Taking the first steps

At ImagineNation™ we believe that corporations who commit to meeting the needs of the modern learner requires strategic, systemic and agile responses to the diverse and complex range of trends potentially impacting corporate learning’s’ ability to enable the delivery of the business strategy.

1. Defining your goal for change; research and empathize with your value chain, agree from what to what and make it measurable, be convinced of the role and importance of change and learning, role model it relentlessly.
2. Understand your core culture; know and identify the key drivers and messages about the way things are being done, explore how these can inhibit or support the desired change, commit to reinforcing the positives and reducing the negatives, empower champions to boldly lead teams to define and recommend desired changes, listen & hear what they have to say and support them fiercely.
3. Identify and fill the key learning gaps; foster an agile environment that is conducive to learning, change, risk taking and experimenting, that gives people permission to fail, that fosters creativity, problem solving, quick decision making, that maximizes diversity through teaming, networking, talent pooling and through coaching, mentoring and partnering with industry networks and eco-systems.

Once these foundations have been built, it is then time to focus on closing the gaps.

This can be done by developing the internal capability through contextualized and blended learning solutions that incorporate “both”; content, learning methodologies, on the job action and project based learning, e-learning and virtual forums, “and” apply differing technologies as enablers.

The outcomes are the creation, acquisition, and transference of knowledge, skills and experience and at modifying mindsets and behaviors to reflect new knowledge, insights and change goal.

Doing this intentionally and effectively will increase peoples’ management and leadership capabilities, organizational competitiveness and ultimately increase business growth, value and sustainability.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and retreat, reflect, immerse myself in and percolate the generative learning’s from my 6-year misadventure in Israeli start-up land. When I managed to identify, summarize and edit the 5 key learning’s I was surprised at how profound they were and how essential they are, as foundations, to ultimate 21st-century business enterprise innovation and leadership success.

The 5 Key Learnings in Detail

1. Innovation emerges from colliding Necessity with Possibility

I discovered that Israel defies any kind of conventional culture model definitions, whilst it is essentially driven by a strong survival need; this is balanced by an equally strong inherently need for self-actualization and self-transcendence.  This might create entropy that some suggest is not sustainable for the long term.  However, it manifests as a collision between the “necessity” (survival) need and “possibility” (making the world a better place need) that creates the intrinsic motivation required to effect an explosion of creativity that results in radical and disruptive innovations.

Why is this important for successful enterprise innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we believe that innovation is the result of a COLLISION between different programming perspectives and thought patterns (specifically our necessity and possibility metaprograms). Typically, most organizations tend to focus only the “necessity” and “survival” perspectives – “innovate or perish”. This causes them to see innovation as a lever for “moving away” from some kind of undesirable current reality or future state. This often results in what we describe as a “push” approach, that tells people what they must do and how to do it.  This energy often results in a more conventional, conformist and hierarchical type of response, because people will conform to what is required of them as well disengage because they are denied any autonomy.

Organizations who choose to focus their attention more on the “possibility” and “opportunity” perspectives on innovation, causes them to see innovation as a lever for “moving toward” some kind of more desirable future state. This results in what we describe a “pull” energy, that inquires and asks them what could be done and how it could be done.  This creates a more engaged, committed, collective and creative response because people have the opportunity to retreat, reflect, explore options for change in an autonomous way that draws on their mastery, and encourages smart risk taking and experimentation on the change journey.

We encourage our clients to take a “both/and” approach, to intentionally collide necessity (need for organizational survival) with possibility (the need to make a difference to the world) as a basis for directing and harnessing their intrinsic motivation.  To articulate this as a Passionate Purpose (why frame) for innovation, resulting in an explosion of creativity mobilized by a sense of passionate urgency that ultimately leads to innovative breakthroughs and solutions!

2. Constructive Nonconformity & Disagreement drive creativity that results in innovation

The Israeli culture is exemplified by a state of constant “conflict” and argumentativeness at all levels; between individuals, peoples, groups the government and neighboring territories.  In a unique way, this makes Israel and many Israeli’s expert and masterful in deviating from a “business as usual” ways of doing things; by dissenting and using dissonance to challenge the status quo (no matter what it is), by defying convention and by generating imaginative higher level “out of the box” thinking through their assertive, candid creative problem solving provocative debates.

Why is this important for successful enterprise innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we teach our clients how to be safely disruptive and provocatively competent, which means they develop the creative confidence and generative discovery skill set (listening, inquiring and debating – constructive non-conformity) to be, think and act differently.   This means that they know how to see, respond to, disrupt and deviate from organizational norms, other people’s actions, and expectations, to use dissonance and dissent constructively to make the difference they want to make in the world in ways that people value and cherish.

3. The power of adversity, positivity, optimism and individuality

Israel has a seemingly traumatized population, with a deep sense of self-centeredness and an overall impatience, all with a population of approximately 8.5 million people. It is often marginalized globally, is surrounded by hostile neighbors, at the edge of chaos and in the face of complexity and is yet contained in a land the size of Tasmania. Yet most Israeli’s embody an incredible ability to be agile, adaptive, resilient and defiant in the face of risk and adversity. They are able to deal with adverse situations whilst sustaining an inherently optimistic outlook, positive mindset and ability to improvise under often extenuating circumstances.

Why is this important for successful enterprise innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we have drawn inspiration from how Israel provides the world with a microscopic, adaptive and replicable example of how to be agile in adapting to adversity, uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility as levers for resilience, collaboration, creativity, invention, and change. We enable our clients to see, respond to, and solve wicked, business and customer problems as “blue ocean” possibilities; to operate defiantly in the face of opposition, resistance and constraints. They cultivate the core traits of passion, optimism, self-efficacy, individualism, achievement, accountability and positivity which are at the core of every Israeli start-up entrepreneurs’ success story.

4. Emerging a new paradigm for 21st-century leadership

When I arrived in Israel in 2010, I faced a harsh new reality which defied all of my previous organizational roles, as well as most of what I had been taught and experienced about high-performance organizational cultures, leaders, and teams. Aptly illustrated by Dov Frohman founder of Intel Israel in his book ‘Leadership the Hard Way’ where he states that “leadership in today’s economy is a lot like flying a plan through a thunderstorm” and defines innovation as “the ability to take risks and create fundamentally new ways of doing things.”

I quickly realized that some of the current approaches to organizational learning and development were irrelevant to future potential clients inside and outside of my then new homeland.  I was curious as to what could potentially constitute learning new ways of successful transformative innovative 21st-century leadership as leaders face “new kinds of risks and new kinds of threats- not only to their organizations but sometimes to the very lives of their employees”.

Why is this important for enterprise innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we follow the advice of Albert Einstein who aptly stated that “you can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it”. For an organization to be able to innovate people must have great leaders, these are people who understand how they impact on others and how they impact on the business enterprise culture. Leaders who drive innovation by taking a strategic and systemic approach, and by making it safe and possible for people to innovate. The most effective leaders lead from behind to harness and mobilize people’s collective genius because they know that most innovation is the result of a collaborative effort by a diverse group.

5. Creating an innovation eco-system to co-operate internally and compete externally

One of the key critical success factors behind Israeli innovation and entrepreneurship is the successful Israeli innovation eco-system.  This is described as the cluster of world-class universities, government agencies, venture capitalists, large organizations, the (IDF) Israel Defense Forces, Start-Ups, and the collaborative eco-system that connects them.

Israel has developed the concept of an “economic cluster” into a unique collaborative and competitive internal state driven, innovative eco-system. This is a result of its unique set of cultural attributes including maximizing diversity, willingness to experiment and fail, creative teaming and “networks for life” as well as government support initiatives. Israel has created a business environment where all of the key pieces and important parts work together to support and enable their start-up business enterprises to be nimble and adaptive, innovative and successful in an uncertain and unstable world.

Why is this important for successful enterprise innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we encourage our clients to take a longer term, non-linear and perspective and emergent approach innovation. To apply it as a strategic and systemic lever to adapt to the disruption and variation involved in innovation as positive factors simultaneously. We have deciphered, defined, modeled and replicated the key attributes that enable the innovation ecosystem concept to be adapted to suit specific individual and organizational needs. This means that individuals, functions, business units, organizations and even industries can take advantage of globalization and our interconnected world to collaborate effectively to see and solve customer problems and deliver greater user experiences.

So what does all this mean really?

For organizations to respond, flow and flourish with the wide range of 21st-century challenges, business wicked and customer problems we suggest they focus on developing their capability in three key areas;

• Developing innovative leadership, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial capacities, innovation focused organizational strategies, cultures and innovative ecosystems!
• Transforming possibilities, constraints, challenges and wicked, business and customer problems by harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective genius into user-friendly creative inventions and innovative solutions, products, and services that people value and cherish.
• Fearlessly experimenting and calculated risk taking to discover, design and deliver innovative prototypes that cause them to fail fast to learn quickly that result in radical and disruptive solutions.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

“The traditional way we’ve thought about leadership—which I would describe as leading from the front, this idea that someone is at the top making all of the decisions—is not the most effective way of unlocking the creativity of an organization, whether it’s a traditional design organization, like an Ideo, or a company that’s trying to be more creative in the future,” he says. “The pace of change, the level of volatility, and the level of disruption across every industry requires that all organizations either constantly evolve, or they get out-competed by someone that’s fitter than they are.”

Tim Brown, CEO of the design consultancy Ideo, believes that all organizations should be run creatively and that 21^st century leadership is like a ‘dance’. This suggests that leaders (and their people) need to cultivate the skills to move between the stances required to adapt and respond to the moment and to the circumstances to achieve the outcomes they want to have.

If innovation is defined as CREATIVITY + IMPLEMENTATION and requires us to deal with both DISRUPTION and VARIATION simultaneously, then knowing how to master the ‘dance’ is critical to 21^st century enterprise success.

At ImagineNation™ we have learnt that mastering the dance requires interplay between strategy and systems and between people and technology.

This disrupts the status quo and creates the connectedness that achieves the desired agility and simplicity.

It requires a shift from regulated, compliance based process oriented work cultures to more human centred cultures and value adding project based work that unlocks people’s collective genius in ways that customers value and cherish.

This requires designing and aligning 4 key pivotal dance steps to see and creatively solve 21^st century wicked and business problems;

1. Vision

The first step in the dance is to clarify an inclusive vision as to what the world will look like in the future when the business enterprise is innovative.  In such an inspiring, engaging and compelling way that it acts as a ‘north star’ that focuses and aligns leadership, resources and efforts towards implementing the desired value in ways that users and customer value and cherish. With clear lines of sight to customers enabling the value chain of interdependencies to collaboratively deliver a great customer experience to produce the ultimate financial benefit to the business enterprise.

Tim Brown suggests that the leaders key role is an Explorer; “There are moments when you as a leader need to point to the horizon and say let’s go explore in that direction, but that’s mostly about asking the question rather than having the answer,” he says. “The most effective way of leading from the front in an organization if you want to be exploratory is to ask the best questions. Sometimes that’s a question about what our purpose is. Why are we here? Sometimes it’s about a particular opportunity. In traditional design terms, it’s about setting the brief.”

2. Culture

Is about creating an environment that unlocks people’s creative potential and facilitates ease of implementation so that innovation can flourish and become part of the way things are done in the organization. Where disruption and provocation are safely applied as vehicles for effecting perceptual shifts and collisions that result in creative ideas.  Where variation occurs without the boundaries and constraints of hard and fast beliefs, messages and rules. In such a way that people collaborate by networking, teaming and operating their interdependencies; to see, empathize with and solve business and customer problems and to implement what needs to be done to deliver the desired value to customers.

Tim Brown suggests that the leader’s key role is a Gardener; “It’s about nurturing the conditions in which creativity is most likely to happen,” Brown says. “That’s really about culture, environment, rituals—the sorts of things that give people permission to explore, that encourages open-mindedness, collaboration, experimentation, and risk taking. Those sorts of things that we know are important for creativity.”

3. Learning

Is about developing and mobilizing people’s collective genius to see, understand and analyze problems through learning, support, encouragement and empowerment.

Where people cultivate the emotional agility and accountability to stay focused and resilient in the face of complexity, uncertainty and adversity. Where people take responsibility for cultivating innovative mindsets, behaviors and skills that enable them to be different, think and act differently to make the difference they want to make to the world. Where people have permission to play, take smart risks, experiment and make mistakes. Where people know how to integrate start-up methodologies with design thinking to prototype creative ideas, to fail fast and learn by doing, iterating and pivoting, quickly. Where people value and embrace deviance and diversity in ways that co-create provocative, disruptive and creative ideas and innovative solutions.

Tim Brown suggests that the leader’s key role is a Player Coach; “The best coaches today in sports are often ones that played themselves,” Brown says. “They understand what the players are going through. They can empathize, and we think that’s pretty important.”

4. Technology

Is about installing ‘best fit’ technology as integrative innovation management and implementation levers to collect, evaluate and process creative ideas as well as to align strategy and goals and drive accountability.  Where software, enterprises and people streamline the journey of one idea to market, accelerating the innovation process and responding to the customer need faster than the competition. By maximizing people creative abilities and unlocking their innovation potential, in being, thinking and doing things differently people are engaged and enabled to embed innovation into everyday activity. Where innovation becomes a habitual part of the ‘way things get done’ in the business enterprise.  Where people feel and are free to self express, co-operate, collaborate and reciprocate in applying their learning’s within a supportive enterprise culture to identify and creatively solving business challenges and implement them as true innovations.

Some guidelines – how and where to make a start?

At ImagineNation™, we have learnt (most often the hard way) Innovation works best when;

• Leaders work with, understand and acknowledge ‘what is’ in terms of understanding your unique current enterprise cultural messages and range of business problems.
• Leaders strategically choose what type of innovation to pursue, because innovation is fluid and not a one type fits all solution.
• Leaders boldly dare to engage people in exploring blue oceans and articulating ‘what could be’ in terms of improving your customer’s experience of your products, processes and services.

How have we handled it?

At ImagineNation™ we embraced a strategic and systemic approach to add value to our client’s knowledge, leadership, management and experience of innovation by created a global innovation eco-system of leading edge strategic, diagnostic and technology partners.

This enables leaders and business enterprises to make the moves between the stances required to adapt and respond to the moment, and to master the circumstances of the ‘dance’ critical to 21^st century enterprise success.

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GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Just in case you haven’t seen the latest Star Trek movie yet, here is one of its key messages;

“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there’s no such thing as the unknown– only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood”

Our approach to innovation at ImagineNation™ enables you to generate discovery to see the things that are temporarily hidden, and temporarily not understood.  To enable you to transform them into creative ideas and innovative solutions that people value and cherish. This is because creativity and innovation are the key vehicles for empathizing and knowing how to see and solve your smart, savvy 21st century customers or clients problems.   As the new way of adding value to the quality of people’s lives, and also as an effective way of dealing with, and potentially solving the range of wicked and business problems occurring in our uncertain, volatile, ambiguous and complex business environment and worlds.

What does it mean to Generate Discovery?

Generative Discovery involves being able to listen and inquire from the temporarily hidden or emerging field of the future by;

• Deepening our attending, observing and discerning capabilities to consciously discover creative ideas that will challenge and disrupt the status quo.
• Creating cracks, openings and creative thresholds that push the boundaries, challenge assumptions and mental models to unleash boldly creative ideas.
• Seeing possibilities, and opportunities for innovative solutions to problems that may not have been previously imagined.

Why is Generative Discovery Important?

Most business planning processes tend to be linear or vertical in their attempt to provide behavioral or reactive short term solutions that fill the gap between the current reality and a desired future state. They are often developed by applying the same mental models, and the same thinking processes that generally created the current, often undesirable reality.

Knowing that you can’t solve the problem, with the same thinking, or world views that created it, we need a new set of mental models that allows us to perceive the problem differently. Experimenting with the generative discovery skill-set enables us to juggle multiple theories, models and strategies to plan in an emergent way – which will emerge new, most likely unexpected, creative ideas that can be transformed into innovative solutions.

This enables us to create the bridge between the visible world (what we see) as it meets the invisible world (the source or place from which we perceive it).

How do we Generate Discovery?

Initially adapted from the work of Clayton Christensen from ‘The Innovators DNA’, at ImagineNation™ we evolved our approach to Generating Discovery into a Four-Step Cycle incorporating generative listening, inquiring and debating skills to;

1. Problem and fact find to discover and find the generative nature of the problem wanting to be solved.
2. Explore the casual factors to discover the systemic nature of the problem.
3. Disrupt the current reality, challenge conventional thinking by creating safe intentional collisions.
4. Elicit truly, previously unknown, creative ideas from the emerging future.

The 4 step Cycle of Generative Discovery

Step One – Elicit a description of the territory;

The first step involves eliciting a description of the territory or in what is called the social field of attention by exploring, understanding and describing the specific (cognitive, emotional, and visceral) territory the problem is in. Knowing that the ‘map is not the territory’ because it is only a picture or a representation of the actual territory, our focus is towards;

• Problem Finding
• Fact Finding

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

To really know the territory we have to immerse ourselves in it to generate a deep understanding of the business problem, to see the forces that are diverging and converging and how current and potential customers or users are impacted by it. So our focus is on;

• Problem Defining

Step Three – Disrupt the territory;

It’s important now to make the shift from specific and descriptive questions towards generating intentionally disruptive ones to generate safe debate. This is where the temporarily hidden ideas emerge through cracks and openings in the field so the focus is on;

• Ideas Emerging
• Ideas Exploring
• Ideas Colliding

Step Four – Elicit creative ideas;

This step is intended to create conflict, disagreement and dissonance to generate a deeper, provocative and creative debate so the focus is on;

• Idea Refining
• Idea Deciding

How is this different to conventional problem solving?

You have probably noticed by now when applying the four-step cycle that we have made a very deep space between what we may have thought the problem to initially be, and in generating an ultimate solution! That at no point have we been focussed toward taking action by identifying options, making choices and by developing solutions as people most often tend to in a transactional relationship or conventional problem-solving situation.

What we have successfully achieved by applying the four-step cycle is;

• Development of a new set of mental models which allows us to perceive and see the initial problem at its core, as well its whole systems level.
• A way of juggle multiple perspectives to plan in an emergent way – which ultimately emerges unexpected, often disruptive, creative ideas that ultimately lead to innovative breakthrough solutions.

By intentionally embodying and enacting a generative listening, inquiring and debating skill-set that create the bridge between the visible worlds (what we see and know) as it meets the invisible world (the hidden place from which we now know how to perceive it).

image credit: paramountpictures.com

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