Category Archives: Creativity

Invention Through Co-Creation

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It was an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” by Steve Blank, that caught my attention more than ten years ago and caused me to shift my mindset about entrepreneurship and innovation. He described a lean start-up as “favoring experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over big design up front” developments. It sparked my fascination and ignited my curiosity about start-ups and how the start-up approach could be applied to creating a collaborative, intrapreneurial, entrepreneurial, and innovative learning curriculum that supported learning new ways of co-creation in the invention and innovation processes.

Why co-creation matters

One of the essential keys to success in innovation, whether as a start-up entrepreneur, corporate intrapreneur, innovation team, aspiring innovative leader, or organization, is your ability to collaborate, experiment, create, invent, and innovate. This involves actively embracing and incorporating the lean start-up approach alongside design thinking, adult learning principles, experiential learning techniques, and change management disciplines, especially in a world that is quickly becoming dominated by AI, to both create and capture value in ways people appreciate and cherish.

What is co-creation?

Invention through co-creation involves a collaborative design process in which stakeholders and customers work together to create and invent innovative solutions. It is a challenging process because it requires people to co-create a shared purpose, ensure equal contribution, and make collective decisions to guarantee that the final product meets the needs and preferences of its users. For these core elements to be successfully implemented, start-up founders and key stakeholders must have high levels of conscious self-awareness, a willingness to accept responsibility for their thoughts and behaviors, strong listening and inquiry skills, and self-mastery to navigate and adapt to the instability and uncertainty of a constantly changing environment.

Failure of innovation educators

With extensive experience in designing and developing bespoke experiential learning programs, I quickly realized that most traditional innovation education programs in tertiary institutions mainly focus on applying project management disciplines to creative ideas. Organizations relied on idea-generation tools, applying design thinking, and agile methodologies to improve efficiency and performance. While these disciplined approaches are vital for the success of start-ups and innovation initiatives, they rarely lead to systemic awareness and continuous learning, which are essential for innovation. Other options tend to involve quick, episodic “innovation theater” or entirely chaotic open innovation initiatives, which also fail to deliver the desired or potential long-term productivity, performance improvements, and growth!

Balancing and integrating chaos and rigidity

When people concentrate on balancing and integrating the chaos of creativity with the rigidity of disciplined methodologies, they can co-create, innovate, and deliver forward-thinking solutions by being agile, adaptable, and emotionally resilient. This forms the essential foundation for start-ups, entrepreneurs, teams, and organizations to achieve balance, focus, and flow while remaining resilient in the post-pandemic era of instability and uncertainty. At the same time, the outcome of integration is harmony; the lack of integration results in chaos, unpredictability, instability, and rigidity, where individuals unconsciously display inflexible and controlling behaviors.

The Start-Up Game™ Story

The Start-Up Game™ is based on the principle that “anyone can earn to innovate”, as it has been co-created as an immersive hybrid board game that combines achievement, competition, and an AI learning component. It is a co-creation tool that guides players to think, behave, and act differently by safely exploring the language, key mindsets, behaviors, and innovative thinking skills of successful intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and innovators within a socially responsible start-up environment. The game provides a safe, playful, and energizing space for players to experiment, take strategic risks, iterate, pivot, and co-create sustainable, future-ready, innovative solutions to survive and thrive on the innovation roller-coaster ride.

TechCrunch’s Innovation initially inspired our co-creation. We wondered how we could bring our vision to life by designing a two-hour board game that delivered value beyond mere engagement. We sought to create an immersive, playful, and interactive experience that participants could enjoy and gain from, within a risk-free learning environment, while generating an unprecedented level of lasting impact. The challenge we faced was heightened by today’s shorter attention spans and the fast-paced nature of our world, all within the constraints of an online learning environment.

Traditionally, business games create an environment where participants can make decisions, take risks, and learn from mistakes, all without real-world consequences. At the same time, they encourage better teamwork, collaboration, networking, and relationship-building opportunities. However, the value we aimed to deliver went beyond that, seeking to broaden players’ horizons, change their ways of thinking, and introduce new language, mindsets, and behaviors of innovation by playing the lean start-up way.

To ensure a lasting impact, we integrated advanced technology and hybrid, blended learning processes designed to enhance delivery. This extended beyond the in-game experience to include pre-game elements, establishing the foundation and providing context for the game. A key feature is the use of Generative AI avatars for content delivery, supported by written versions to accommodate different learning styles. By applying experiential and adult learning principles and techniques, we created team pause points and check-ins to encourage teams to regularly observe and reflect on their performance, while also fostering reflection and deeper discussions on how to improve during their current phase of the game.

Invention through co-creation

Being both creative and methodical

Invention through co-creation is not an easy process; in fact, it can be highly challenging and often chaotic, requiring people to balance creative chaos with disciplined order. Many start-ups, innovation teams, and digital and innovation transformation initiatives frequently fail because they do not mitigate risks by integrating the chaos of creativity with a disciplined and methodical approach. This is why design thinking and agile have become so popular, as they involve robust, structured methodologies that are easy to learn, follow, and implement. Design thinking principles and techniques are vital to the invention process, helping to manage key stages of the co-creation cycle:

Identify the user and their problem,
Ideating a hypothetical solution,
Developing a prototype,
Getting user feedback,
Iterating the prototype,
Getting user feedback,
Pivoting prototype,
Finalising the solution.

One of the most important lessons was recognizing the need to balance the creativity of chaos with disciplined order, which is why it is crucial to introduce creative energy, passionate purpose, and innovative thinking to drive and maintain that balance. To create, invent, and innovate successfully and avoid failure, co-creators must be attentive and intentional in:

a) Developing self-regulation strategies that support co-creation:

Flow with the uncertainty of success in an unstable environment.
Be willing to disrupt their habitual thinking and feeling habits and be cognitively agile in constantly shifting their mindsets and developing multiple perspectives.
Accept responsibility for their operating styles and ensure that they have a constructive impact on each other and their stakeholders.

b) Maintaining self-management strategies that enable co-creation:

Develop conscious and systemic awareness.
Generate both deep and agile thinking processes.
Sustain their emotional energy in capturing and creating value.
Adapt to stay ahead of change; be resilient, hopeful, and optimistic.

This involves the co-creators opening their minds, hearts, and will to unleash possibilities, emerge, diverge, and converge on new ideas, while withholding evaluation and judgement through deep observation, inquiry, and reflective listening practice. To cultivate people’s neuroplasticity through structured play, encouraging new growth, wonder, and a game-based mindset, and building the foundations for thinking differently. To foster honesty, courage, and provocation in using cognitive dissonance, creative tension, and contrarian behaviors to facilitate generative debate.

Key success factors

It involves blending the generative learning process with the discipline and rigor of adopting a methodical design thinking approach. The goal is to be brave and bold, compassionate and empathic when faced with challenges, both in being challenged and challenging others to think, act, and be differently. It includes experimenting through beta testing, managing the risks and demands of limited self-funded options, while co-creating a professionally designed set of user interfaces as the start-up navigates the start-up curve and the innovation roller-coaster, aiming to reach the Promised Land.

The Start-up Game™ is ideal for corporates, academic institutions, business schools and small to medium businesses to introduce the language, key mindsets, behaviors, and innovative thinking skills as an engaging, blended and experiential learning activity at innovation and strategy off-sites and in leadership development programs, cross-functional team-building events, culture change initiatives and sustainability and ESG engagement workshops to:

Promote inclusivity, collaboration, and real co-creation through playful experimentation and equal partnership.
Enable people to make sense of innovation in the context of entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship involves bringing an innovation culture to life.
Build both awareness and the application of innovative thinking and problem-solving to real-life challenges and business problems.

Successful co-creation yields increased engagement, collaboration, experimentation, enhanced understanding, and the delivery of innovative solutions and outcomes.

Through integrating both creative and inventive people with disciplined systems, processes, and methodologies.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in early 2026.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Discover our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that provides a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about The Start-Up Game.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Creative Confidence Beats Market Signals

Leave a reply

And How Johnny Cash Used it to Resurrect His Career

Creative Confidence Beats Market Signals

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The best business advice can destroy your business. Especially when you follow it perfectly.

Just ask Johnny Cash.

After bursting onto the scene in the mid-1950s with “Folsom Prison Blues”, Cash enjoyed twenty years of tremendous success. By the 1970s, his authentic, minimalist approach had fallen out of favor.

Eager to sell records, he pivoted to songs backed by lush string arrangements, then to “country pop” to attract mainstream audiences and feed the relentless appetite of 900 radio stations programming country pop full-time.

By late 1992, Johnny Cash’s career was roadkill. Country radio had stopped playing his records, and Columbia Records, his home for 25 years, had shown him the door. At 60, he was marooned in faded casinos, playing to crowds preferring slot machines to songs.

Then he took the stage at Madison Square Garden for Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary concert.

In the audience sat Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and uber producer behind Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Slayer, amongst others. He watched in awe as Cash performed, seeing not a relic but raw power diluted by smart decisions.

The Stare-Down that Saved a Career

Four months later, Rubin attended Cash’s concert at The Rhythm Café in Santa Anna, California. According to Cash’s son, “When they sat down at the table, they said: ‘Hello.’ But then my dad and Rick just sat there and stared at each other for about two minutes without saying anything, as if they were sizing each other up.”

Eventually, Cash broke the silence, “What’re you gonna do with me that nobody else has done to sell records for me?”

What happened next resurrected his career.

Rubin didn’t promise record sales. He promised something more valuable: creative control and a return to Cash’s roots.

Ten years later, Cash had a Grammy, his first gold record in thirty years, and CMA Single of the Year for his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” and millions in record sales.

“I wasn’t prepared for what I saw, what I had written in my diary was now superimposed on the life of this icon and sung so beautifully and emotionally. It was a reminder of what an important medium music is. Goosebumps up the spine. It really made sense. I thought: ‘What a powerful piece of art.’ I never got to meet Johnny, but I’m happy I contributed in the way I did. It wasn’t my song anymore.” — Trent Reznor

When Smart Decisions Become Fatal

Executives do exactly what Cash did. You respond to market signals. You pivot your offering when customer preferences shift and invest in emerging technologies.

All logical. All defensible to your board. All potentially fatal.

Because you risk losing what made you unique and valuable. Just as Cash lost his minimalist authenticity and became a casualty of his effort to stay relevant, your business risks losing sight of its purpose and unique value proposition.

Three Beliefs at the Core of a Comeback

So how do you avoid Cash’s initial mistake while replicating his comeback? The difference lies in three beliefs that determine whether you’ll have the creative courage to double down on what makes you valuable instead of diluting it.

Creative confidence: The belief we can think and act creatively in this moment.
Perceived value of creativity: Our perceived value of thinking and acting in new ways.
Creative risk-taking: The willingness to take the risks necessary for active change.

Cash wanted to sell records, and he:

Believed that he was capable of creativity and change.
Saw the financial and reputational value of change
Was willing to partner with a producer who refused to guarantee record sales but promised creative control and a return to his roots.

Your Answers Determine Your Outcome

Like Cash, what you, your team, and your organization believe determines how you respond to change:

Do I/we believe we can creatively solve this specific challenge we’re facing right now?
Is finding a genuinely new approach to this situation worth the effort versus sticking with proven methods?
Am I/we willing to accept the risks of pursuing a creative solution to our current challenge?”

Where there are “no’s,” there is resistance, even refusal, to change. Acknowledge it. Address it. Do the hard work of turning the No into a Yes because it’s the only way change will happen.

The Comeback Question

Cash proved that authentic change—not frantic pivoting—resurrects careers and disrupts industries. His partnership with Rubin succeeded because he answered “yes” to all three creative beliefs when it mattered most. Where are your “no’s” blocking your comeback?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

You Already Have Too Many Ideas

1 Reply

You Already Have Too Many Ideas

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation isn’t achieved by creating more ideas. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into commercialized products and services. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into new business models that deliver novel usefulness to customers and deliver increased revenues to the company.

In a way, creating ideas that languish in their own shadow is worse than not creating any ideas at all. If you don’t have any ideas, at least you didn’t spend the resources to create them and you don’t create the illusion that you’re actually making progress. In that way, it’s better to avoid creating new ideas if you’re not going to do anything with them. At least your leadership team will not be able to rationalize that everything will be okay because you have an active idea generation engine.

Before you schedule your next innovation session, don’t. Reason 1 – it’s not an innovation session, it’s an ideation session. Reason 2 – you don’t have resources to do anything with the best ideas so you’ll spend the resources and nothing will come of it. To improve the return on investment, don’t make the investment because there will be no return.

Truth is, you already have amazing ideas to grow your company. Problem is, no one is listening to the people with the ideas. And the bigger problem – because no one listened over the last ten years, the people with the ideas have left the company or stopped trying to convince you they have good ideas. Either way, you’re in trouble and creating more ideas won’t help you. Your culture is such that new ideas fall on deaf ears and funding to advance new concepts loses to continuous improvement.

If you do want to hold an ideation event to create new ideas that will reinvent your company, there are ways to do it effectively. First, define the customer of the ideation event. This is the person who is on the hook to commercialize things that will grow the business. This is the person who will have a career problem if ideas aren’t implemented. This is the person who can allocate the resources to turn the ideas into commercialized products, services. If this person isn’t an active advocate for the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person will not show up to the report out of the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person does not commit to advancing the best ideas, don’t hold the event.

Though innovation and ideas start with “i”, they’re not the same. Ideas are inexpensive to create but deliver no value. Innovation is expensive and delivers extreme value to customers and the company. If you’re not willing to convert the ideas into something that delivers values to customers, save the money and do continuous improvement. Your best people will leave, but at least you won’t waste money on creating ideas that will die on the vine.

If the resources aren’t lined up to run with the ideas, don’t generate the them. If you haven’t allocated the funding for the follow-on work, don’t create new ideas. If the person who is charged with growing the business isn’t asking for new ideas, don’t hold the ideation event.

You already have too many ideas. But what you lack is too few active projects to convert the best ideas into products and services that generate value for your customers and growth for your company.

Stop creating new ideas and start delivering novel usefulness to your customers.

Image credit: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

1 Reply

Diverge and Disrupt Your Way to Success

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I have earned my stripes as a rebellious maverick and serial misfit, who, until today, seldom feels content with complying with the status quo, especially when confronted by illogical, rules-bound, conventional, and conforming behaviors. My constant and disruptive search for new horizons has enabled me to make many professional changes and reinventions – from graphic to fashion designer, retail executive, design management consultant, culture and change management consultant, corporate trainer, group facilitator, executive, leadership and team coach, start-up entrepreneur, innovation coach, and award-winning blogger and author who has thrived by being different and disruptive. We need to reframe disruption to increase the possibilities for game-changing inventions and innovations to succeed in an uncertain and unstable future.

Through real-life experiences and by teaching, training, mentoring, and coaching others to learn, adapt, and grow by conquering high peaks and engaging in stimulating adventures, I have come to understand that being open to continuous disruption and constant reinvention is essential for survival and success in our chaotic and uncertain world.

This sense of restlessness continues to spark disruptive and creative changes in my life; as a result, it has taught me several key distinctions —being braver, daring, courageous, responsible, and accountable — throughout my forty-year professional career, which has spanned a period of being different and disruptive.

Being different and disruptive has allowed me to reach new inflection points, absorb new information, build new relationships, establish new systems and modalities, and elevate my confidence, capacity, and competence as an innovator through consulting, training, and coaching in innovation.

How does this link to being innovative?

This relates to innovation because when people impose barriers and roadblocks to innovation, they unconsciously inhibit and resist efforts to learn new ways of enacting constructive and creative change while being different and disruptive.

The crucial first step in managing this is to accept responsibility for recognizing and disrupting your internal structures, mental models, mindsets, and habitual behaviors.
The next step involves leveraging your cognitive dissonance to create cracks, positive openings, doorways, and thresholds, thus making space for profound changes that enable you to challenge accepted norms.
Finally, safely exit your comfort zone, unlearn, learn, and relearn variations in how you feel, think, and act to remain agile, adaptive, and innovative during uncertain and unstable times.

These three elements help you stand out and be disruptive, maximizing differences and diversity by fostering inquisitiveness and curiosity, and developing self-regulation strategies to manage your unconscious automatic reactions or reactive behaviors when faced with change imperatives, including digital transformation, cultural change programs, and innovation initiatives.

Being brave and different

Some of you come from learning environments that label students who challenge teachers or their learning processes as different, disruptive, and rebellious. These students are often punished, threatened, or ignored until they comply with the accepted norms and conform. This diminishes the possibilities and opportunities of maximizing diversity, difference, and disruption as catalysts for change and creativity in the classroom.

As a result, some individuals develop “negative anchors” due to being labelled as different or disruptive and learn how to act or speak to avoid their teacher’s displeasure and disapproval. This leads many to either rebel or adopt more compliant behaviors that keep them out of trouble. Those who choose to rebel miss the chance to benefit from the diversity and inclusion offered in the classroom and traditional education processes.

Only exceptional teachers and educators are curious and question why some individuals think or behave differently. Often labelled as “troublemakers,” these individuals tend to be alienated from the more compliant students, leading many “disruptive” students to fall by the wayside, unable to progress and achieve their full potential. Many of these “deviants” seek alternative ways of becoming socialized and educated. In contrast, others experience exclusion and social and intellectual alienation rather than maximizing the possibilities of being different and disruptive to the world.

Finding the courage to rebel.

Alternatively, many found the courage and resilience to persist in our rebellion and challenge the status quo. By being different, disruptive, and diverging from the norm, many of us changed our game and, ultimately, the world! People achieved this by thinking thoughts no one else considered and taking actions no one else pursued, flipping conventions on their heads and making the ordinary unexpected through difference and disruption.

The outdated labels and negative associations tied to being different and disruptive have become ingrained in the organizational mindset through schools and educational institutions. These continue to create paralyzing, fear-driven responses to embracing change and adopting innovation. This often hinders organizations from fully embracing people’s collective intelligence, developing the skills and maximizing the possibilities and creativity that disruption, diversity, inclusion, and difference present:

Diversity, inclusion, difference, and disruption are essential tools for thinking differently in ways that change the business landscape!
Disruptive, deviant and diverse teams that differ significantly and challenge the status quo can think the unthinkable, surprising the world with new inventions and unexpected solutions through their disruptive, collaborative, and creative thinking strategies, which are crucial for innovation success.

Being the disruptive change

Choosing the self-disruption path forces you to climb steep foothills of new information, relationships, and systems to take the first steps toward becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

Reframing Disruption

For many, even the word ” disruption ” is perceived as unfavorable and intimidating. When we were confronted at school by disruptive students, we would duck for cover to avoid the teacher’s wrath. Similarly, in group and team projects where one person opposes, argues, dominates the conversation, and doesn’t pay attention to or listen to anyone else’s opinions, we tend to stay silent and disengage from the discussion.

Many situations and problems require changes, upgrades, or removal of systems or processes, which disrupt the norm. The global pandemic significantly disrupted the traditional 9:00 am to 5:00 pm office workday, leading to the advantages of more flexible work environments where people have adapted to numerous challenges and forged a new working world.

This prompts us to reconsider how we might reframe disruption from its typical definition.

Original Definition of Disruption (Oxford Dictionary): “Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.”“Radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation” Reframing Disruption“An opening, doorway and threshold for intentionally disturbing or interrupting an event, activity, or process positively, constructively to effect radical changes that contribute towards the common good (people, profit and planet) differently.

Yet complacent, inwardly focused, conventional business methods result only in continuous or incremental disturbances or changes. In contrast, being different and safely disruptive to activate profound interruptions to business as usual is required to transform the business game.

Disruption without a positive, constructive, value-adding intent and relevant context makes people fearful and anxious. Many individuals have blind spots regarding how their fear-driven learning or survival anxieties negatively affect their effectiveness and productivity. They may even attempt to mask their fears and learning shortcomings by pretending to know things they don’t.

It starts with disrupting yourself.

Personal or self-disruption opens pathways for self-discovery, self-transformation, and innovation in a volatile and chaotic world where disruptive change is constant and inevitable.

This involves becoming emotionally energized and mentally stimulated by engaging in a journey of continuous discovery that maximizes the value and benefits of being different and disruptive. It includes a commitment to ongoing learning and a willingness to identify and take smart risks, reframe, and embrace constraints as catalysts for creative thinking. This approach involves failing fast to learn by doing, generating ground-breaking ideas, and taking unexpected and surprising right turns that lead to new ways forward. Particularly as we explore what AI can do and what it should do, we need to ensure that our courageous and rebellious traits support its development and applications to help build a brighter future for all.

Being different and disruptive shifts the needle, increasing the possibilities for game-changing reinventions and innovations. Co-creative relationships with AI can support us in restructuring and reimagining how we approach customers, markets, communities, and the world in unprecedented ways.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, Anyone Can Learn to Innovate, which is due for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Innovating for Social Good

Leave a reply

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The Coach for Innovators Amplifiers, a small group of global business game changers, started engaging in monthly dialogue sessions in 2022. As alumni of the Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program™, we intended to apply our knowledge, skills, and experience to discover and explore how we might collaborate to support countries, organizations, and education institutions in achieving the World Economic Forum’s Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals by innovating for good.

We are a small, cohesive, committed group of corporate executives, consultants, educators, coaches, and trainers who connected and maximized the differences and diversity of our group by debating how to apply innovation as the glue to achieve sustainable change everywhere. Our mission is to amplify and catalyze innovators, organizations, and communities to stimulate and achieve sustainable development everywhere. It is based on the values of ethical practice, systems thinking, social entrepreneurship, civic change, alignment, deep learning, humanity, collective action, openness, curiosity, courage, experimentation, and well-being by innovating for good.

We set about adding value to the quality of people’s lives by engaging and influencing people to lead the transition towards co-creating societal shifts ethically, equitably and sustainably.

Our target market consists of passionate and energetic young people engaged in learning to teach the core elements of the Being side of social entrepreneurship to enable them to be ecologically resilient by innovating for good.

A different approach to innovation

Our approach was based on three core principles that emerged during our research and testing process:

Innovation is like drinking water; it is essential for life and belongs to all life to sustain it in all contexts.
Innovation is a duty; people have no right to pollute and destroy all life and the planet.
Innovation allows us to consciously manifest different ways of being and doing to co-create a future we want to have and sustain.

This requires people to unlearn old mental models and irrelevant perspectives in a 21st-century disrupted world and relearn and learn to adopt an innovative mindset. Which focuses on supporting sustainable and positive economic growth and de-growth and on developing circular economies to do better with less by:

Challenging people’s illusions and inertia regarding the future, confronting harsh realities, and addressing problems to enhance people’s quality of life.
Transitioning from competition to co-petition within ecosystems, fostering genuine collaboration across boundaries to co-create solutions on a global scale.
Moving away from competition towards co-petition in ecosystems, embracing collaboration across boundaries to co-create global solutions.

Meta-learning model – Innovating for good

This became the basis for developing a meta-learning model constructed on what we had encountered as the key systemic problems that largely inhibited innovation. We tested and validated it using a small, diverse target market sample of global students studying here in Australia.

We incorporated our findings into pivoting The Start-Up Game™ Boardroom Version and into the book Janet Sernack is currently writing – “Conscious Innovation – Activating the Heart, Mind and Spirit of Innovation.” Both are due for release in June 2025,

Concept/Stage	Problem/Explanation	Question
Awakening process Igniting the light of consciousness	People can shift their values, beliefs, and mindsets by applying various approaches and methodologies to develop the new perspectives required to innovate.	How might we alert people to the importance of innovation?
Letting it go Exposing the landmines	Actions speak louder than words. What activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilize people to participate in the innovation challenge?	What do you think people might need to let go of to make the space and time to innovate?
Initiating the shift Embracing new perspectives	Actions speak louder than words. What types of activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilize people to participate in the innovation challenge?	How might we best introduce and engage people with embracing new perspectives on innovation?
Communicating Shifting gears	Communication is key. People need clarity and coherent messages to understand and appreciate the importance and benefits of innovation.	What are the key messages that might resonate with you?
Sharing the story Setting the torch alight	Stories inspire us and provide evidence of success; what stories do you consider important to share to ignite people’s motivation to innovate?	What kinds of stories might inspire you to take up the innovation challenge?
Stories inspire us and provide evidence of success; what stories do you consider essential to share to ignite people’s motivation to innovate?	Actions speak louder than words. What activities, exercises, and challenges will mobilise people to participate in the innovation challenge?	Many people don’t know how to make sense of innovation and are unaware that all change and growth require innovation of some type to be effective and sustainable.

Inner development supports outer development – Innovating for good.

The Inner Development Goal Framework was initiated in 2023 by the 29k Foundation, Ekskaret Foundation, IMD Business School for Management, LUCSUS Center for Sustainability Studies | Lund University, Stockholm Resilience Center | Stockholm University, The New Division, Flourishing Network at Harvard University, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). It has been set up as a not-for-profit initiative to address the pressing need to increase our collective abilities to face and effectively work with complex challenges. Based on the pre-supposition, “without a foundational shift in human values and leadership capacities, external solutions to our global challenges may be limited, too slow, or short-lived”.

Inner Development Goal Framework

The framework consists of five dimensions across twenty-three skills:

Being; relationship to self,
Thinking, cognitive skills,
Relating, caring for others and the world,
Collaborating, social kills,
Acting, enabling change.

This great initiative inspired our group, as it was closely aligned with ImagineNation’s™ approach that the group members had learned in The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program when innovating for good.

Our goal was to enhance the quality of people’s lives, specifically focusing on “being the change” you wished to see in the world. We aimed to develop people’s confidence, capacity, and competence in being change-ready and responsive, accepting responsibility, and becoming emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptive.

These six elements are foundational and learnable in developing an innovation mindset to help people make mandatory, impactful, ethical changes aligned with the seventeen sustainable and five inner development goals dimensions when innovating for good.

We co-created a toolkit to enable us to mentor, teach and coach a tribe of doers/young people to create a movement that:

It encapsulates their dreams and inspires their hopes and optimism about the future.
It fosters a safe space for healing and for their voices to be heard.
It cultivates their potential through innovative uncertainty tolerance to co-create new forms.
It instills a sense of urgency to collectively advocate for the changes essential to shape and own the future they desire for their children and grandchildren.

Power of Agency, Development and Hope

In a recent article, “Five Global Trends in Business and Society in 2025,” Insead identified the top five global trends for 2025: climate change, geopolitical crises, income and wealth inequality and social instability, and inflation or recession. How we react to and manage these five trends by innovating for goodwill tests the resilience of our global society, economy, governments, academic institutions, corporations, and civil societies in an increasingly uncertain, unstable world.

To have any sense of agency in the face of these emerging challenges, our Coach for Innovators Amplifiers group and the Inner Development Goal group have boiled it down to a fundamental principle: “To be the change you wish to see in the world,” develop your skills and be hopeful, believing and even trusting that by innovating for good, things might eventually turn out well for everyone, everywhere.

This is a short section from our new book, Conscious Innovation – Activating the Heart, Mind and Spirit of Innovation, which will be published in 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Innovation is Dead. Now What?

3 Replies

Innovation is Dead. Now What?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation has always had its problems. It’s a meaningless buzzword that leads to confusion and false hope. It’s an event or a hobby that allows executives to check the “Be innovative” box on shareholders’ To-do lists. It’s a massive investment that, if you’re lucky, is break-even.

So, it should be no surprise that interest and investment have dried up to the point that many have declared that innovation is dead.

If you feel an existential crisis coming on, you’re not alone. Heck, I’m about to publish a book titled Unlocking Innovation, which, if innovation is dead, is like publishing Lean Speed: How to Make Your Horse East Less and Go Faster in 1917 (the year automobiles became more prevalent than horses).

But is innovation really dead?

Yes, Innovation is Dead

The word “innovation” is dead, and it’s about time. Despite valiant efforts by academics, consultants, and practitioners to define innovation as something more than a new product, decades of hype have irrevocably reduced it to shiny new objects, fun field trips and events, and wasted time and money.

Good riddance, too. “Innovation” has been used to justify too many half-hearted efforts, avoidable mistakes, and colossal failures to survive.

Except that it is also very much not dead.

While the term “innovation” may have flat-lined, the act of innovating – creating something new that creates value – is thriving. AI continues to evolve and find new roles in our daily lives. Labs are growing everything from meat to fabric to new organs. And speaking of organs, three patients in the US received artificial hearts that kept them alive long enough for donor hearts to be found.

The act of innovation isn’t dead because the need for innovation will always exist, and the desire to innovate – to create, evolve, and improve – is fundamentally human.

Innovation is Metamorphosing (yes, that’s a real word)

Like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, innovation has been inching along, gobbling up money and people, getting bigger, and taking up more space in offices, budgets, and shareholder calls.

Then, as the shock of the pandemic faded, innovation went into a chrysalis and turned to goo.

Just as a caterpillar must break down completely before becoming something new, we’re watching the old systems dissolve:

Old terms like innovation and Design Thinking were more likely to elicit a No than a Yes
Old structures like dedicated internal teams and “labs” were shut down
Old beliefs that innovation is an end rather than a means to an end faded

This is all good news. Except for one tiny thing …

We Don’t Know What’s Next

Humans hate uncertainty, so we’re responding to the goo-phase in different ways:

Collapse in defeat, lament the end of human creativity and innovation, and ignore the fact that cutting all investment in creativity and innovation is hastening the end you find so devastating
Take a deep breath, put our heads down, and keep going because this, too, shall pass.
Put on our big kid pants, muster some courage, ask questions, and start experimenting
I’ve been in #2 for a while (with brief and frequent visits to #1), but it’s time to move into #3.

I’ll start where I start everything – a question about a word – because, before we can move forward, we need a way to communicate.

If innovation (the term) is dead, what do we use instead?

We’ll explore answers in the next post, so drop your words and definitions in the comments.

Image credit: Google Gemini

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Collaboration Being Killed by Collaboration Software

Leave a reply

Collaboration Being Killed by Collaboration Software

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In our race to enable and support hybrid teams, our reliance on collaboration software has inadvertently caused us to forget the art of true collaboration.

The pandemic forced us to rely on digital platforms for communication and creativity. But as we embraced these tools, something essential was lost in translation. Last week, I watched team members sitting elbow-to-elbow spend two hours synthesizing discovery interviews and debating opportunity areas entirely by chat.

What collaboration is

“Collaboration” seems to have joined the ranks of meaningless corporate buzzwords. In an analysis of 1001 values from 172 businesses, “collaboration” was the #2 most common value (integrity was #1), appearing in 23% of the companies’ value statements.

What it means in those companies’ statements is anyone’s guess (we’ve all been in situations where stated values and lived values are two different things). But according to the dictionary, collaboration is “the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing.”

That’s a short definition with a lot of depth.

“The same thing” means that the people working together are working towards a shared goal in which they have a stake in the outcome (not just the completion).
“Working together” points towards interdependence, that everyone brings something unique to the work and that shared goal cannot be achieved without each person’s unique contribution.
“Two or more people” needing each other to achieve a shared outcome requires a shared sense of respect, deep trust, and vulnerability.

It’s easy to forget what “collaboration” means. But we seem to have forgotten how to do it.

What collaboration is not

As people grow more comfortable “collaborating” online, it seems that fewer people are actually collaborating.

Instead, they’re:

Transacting: There is nothing wrong with email, texts, or messaging someone on your platform of choice. But for the love of goodness, don’t tell me our exchange was a collaboration. If it were, every trip to the ATM would be a team-building exercise.
Offering choices: When you go out to eat at a fast-food restaurant, do you collaborate with the employee to design your meal? No. You order off a menu. Offering a choice between two or three options (without the opportunity to edit or customize the options), isn’t collaboration. It’s taking an order.
Complying: Compliance is “the act of obeying a law or rule, especially one that controls a particular industry or type of work.” Following rules isn’t collaboration, it’s following a recipe
Cooperating: Cooperation is when two or more people work together independently or interdependently to achieve someone else’s goal. Collaboration requires shared objectives and ownership, not just shared tasks and timelines.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these activities. Just don’t confuse them with collaboration because it sends the wrong message to your people.

Why this matters

This isn’t an ivory-tower debate about semantics.

When people believe that simple Q&A, giving limited and unalterable options, following rules, and delivering requests are collaboration, they stop thinking. Curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving give way to efficiency and box-checking. Organizations stop exploring, developing, and innovating and start doing the same thing better, faster, and cheaper.

So, if you truly want your organization to grow because it’s filled with creative and empathetic problem-solvers, invest in reclaiming the true spirit of collaboration. After all, the next big idea isn’t hiding in a chat log—it’s waiting to be born in the spark of genuine collaboration.

Image credit: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding

Leave a reply

Lessons from a Leaked Document

What We Can Learn From MrBeast's Onboarding

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the often murky world of corporate communication, a leaked MrBeast document has emerged as a beacon of clarity. Far from being your typical vague, jargon-filled memo, this onboarding document is a crystal-clear recipe for success that’s as refreshing as it is rare.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room. MrBeast’s empire isn’t without its share of controversy. Reports of toxic work environments, unsafe conditions for contestants, and allegations of rigged games cast a shadow over his content creation machine and his leadership capabilities. These are serious issues that merit investigation and discussion. As a result, this post isn’t an endorsement of MrBeast as a leader, it’s an endorsement of an onboarding document that he wrote.

The Secret Sauce: Clarity Meets Innovation

What sets this document apart is its razor-sharp clarity and relentless focus on creativity. Unlike the vague platitudes that plague many corporate communications, job descriptions, and performance matrixes, this document clearly outlines expectations, success metrics, and the strategies and tactics to fuel continuous innovation.

This clarity is transformative for people and organizations. When team members understand both the guardrails and the goals, they channel their creative energy into groundbreaking ideas rather than second-guessing their approach and worrying about repercussions.

Expectations: Always Be Learning

The first principle is a clear directive: always be learning. In MrBeast’s world, this isn’t just about personal growth—it’s about staying ahead in a rapidly changing digital landscape. This commitment to continuous learning fuels innovation by ensuring the team is constantly exploring new technologies, trends, and creative techniques.

While some see the definition of A, B, and C-players as evidence of a toxic workplace, the fact is that it’s the reality in most workplaces. It’s the absence of clarity, usually disguised by claims of family-like cultures that value diversity, that makes workplaces toxic.

Metrics: The Start of a Feedback Loop

The focus on specific success metrics like Click-Through Rate and Average View Duration isn’t just about measurement—it’s about creating a feedback loop for innovation. Clear benchmarks developed over time allow teams to quickly assess the impact of new ideas and iterate accordingly. It also removes the temptation and ability to “move the goalposts” to create the appearance of success.

Strategy: Structure Meets Creativity

After describing what success looks like for employees and how they’ll be measured, the document outlines a structured content formula akin to an innovation strategy. It provides a clear framework of priorities, goals, and boundaries while encouraging creative experimentation within those boundaries.

Starting with a step-by-step guide to making videos with a “wow” factor, the document also emphasizes the criticality of focusing on “critical components” and managing dependencies and

Far from the usual corporate claims that direction and “how to’s” constrain creativity and disempower employees, this approach creates a safety net that allows employees to be successful while still pushing the envelope of what’s possible in content creation.

How to Become Your Version of (a non-controversial) Mr. Beast

You don’t have to be a content creator, social media savant, or company founder to follow MrBeast’s lead. You have to do something much more difficult – communicate clearly and consistently.

Clearly define what success looks like (and doesn’t) for your employees and projects.
Establish frameworks that encourage bold ideas while maintaining focus.
Define objective success metrics and consistently measure, track, and use them.

This leaked MrBeast document offers more than just a glimpse into a YouTube empire; it’s a masterclass in leadership in the era of hybrid workplaces, geographically dispersed teams, and emerging cultures and norms.

The document’s approach shows that innovation doesn’t have to be chaotic. By providing clear expectations and frameworks, leaders can create an environment where creativity thrives, and groundbreaking ideas can be rapidly developed and implemented.

When viewed in the bigger context of the MrBeast organization, however, the document is also a reminder that no matter how clear you think your communication is, you must be vigilant for those who claim that bad behavior is just a “misunderstanding.” Leaders know that no amount of views, clicks, or revenue is worth sacrificing the well-being of their teams.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Humanizing Agility

1 Reply

Humanizing Agility

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?

I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.

As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.

I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.

This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?

Making sense of agility

Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.

Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.

Humanizing agility differently

Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.

It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.

Like innovation, agility is contextual.

Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:

Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.

That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.

Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements

1. Emotional energy

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.

2. Change agility

Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.

It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.

Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.

Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.

3.Cognitive agility

Cognitive agility is the extent to which people can adapt and shift their perspectives and thought processes when doing so leads to more positive outcomes.

Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.

Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving.

4.Innovation agility

Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.

To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.

5.Organizational and leadership agility

Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.

Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.

Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility

Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

Image Credit: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Who is More Creative – Women or Men?

Leave a reply

753 Studies Have the Answer

Who is More Creative – Women or Men?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You were born creative. As an infant, you had to figure many things out—how to get fed or changed, get help or attention, and make a onesie covered in spit-up still look adorable. As you grew older, your creativity grew, too. You drew pictures, wrote stories, played dress-up, and acted out imaginary stories.

Then you went to school, and it was time to be serious. Suddenly, creativity had a time and place. It became an elective or a hobby. Something you did just enough of to be “well-rounded” but not so much that you would be judged irresponsible or impractical.

When you entered the “real world,” your job determined whether you were creative. Advertising, design, marketing, innovation? Creative. Business, medicine, law, engineering? Not creative.

As if Job-title-a-determinant-of-creativity wasn’t silly enough, in 2022, a paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that declared that, based on a meta-analysis of 259 studies (n=79,915), there is a “male advantage in creative performance.”

Somewhere, Don Draper, Pablo Picasso, and Norman Mailer high-fived.

But, as every good researcher (and innovator) knows, the headline is rarely the truth. The truth is that it’s contextual and complicated, and everything from how the original studies collected data to how “creativity” was defined matters.

But that’s not what got reported. It’s also not what people remember when they reference this study (and I have heard more than a few people invoke these findings in the three years since publication).

That is why I was happy to see Fortune report on a new study just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study cites findings from a meta-analysis of 753 studies (n=265,762 individuals) that show men and women are equally creative. When “usefulness (of an idea) is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment,” women’s creativity is “stronger.”

Somewhere, Mary Wells Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf high-fived.

Of course, this finding is also contextual.

What makes someone “creative?”

Both studies defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.”

However, while the first study focused on how context drives creativity, the second study looked deeper, focusing on two essential elements of creativity: risk-taking and empathy. The authors argued that risk-taking is critical to generating novel ideas, while empathy is essential to developing useful ideas.

Does gender influence creativity?

It can. But even when it does, it doesn’t make one gender more or less creative than the other.

Given “contextual moderators” like country-level culture, industry gender composition, and role status, men tend to follow an “agentic pathway” (creativity via risk-taking), so they are more likely to generate novel ideas.

However, given the same contextual moderators, women follow a “communal pathway” (creativity via empathy), so they are more likely to generate useful ideas.

How you can use this to maximize creativity

Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Both focus on creating something new (novel) and valuable (useful). So, to maximize innovation within your team or organization, maximize creativity by:

Explicitly incorporate novelty and usefulness in assessment criteria. If you focus only on usefulness, you’ll end up with extremely safe and incremental improvements. If you focus only on novelty, you’ll end up with impractical and useless ideas.
Recruit for risk-taking and empathy. While the manifestation of these two skills tends to fall along gender lines, don’t be sexist and assume that’s always the case. When seeking people to join your team or your brainstorming session, find people who have demonstrated strong risk-taking or empathy-focused behaviors and invite them in.
Always consider the context. Just as “contextual moderators” impact people’s creative pathways, so too does the environment you create. If you want people to take risks, be vulnerable, and exhibit empathy, you must establish a psychologically safe environment first. And that starts with making sure there aren’t any “tokens” (one of a “type”) in the group.

Which brings us back to the beginning.

You ARE creative.

How will you be creative today?

Image credit: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.