Category Archives: Creativity

Innovating for Social Good

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Innovating for Social Good

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:

  1. Innovation is like drinking water; it is essential for life and belongs to all life to sustain it in all contexts.
  2. Innovation is a duty; people have no right to pollute and destroy all life and the planet.
  3. 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.

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: Pixabay

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Innovation is Dead. Now What?

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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:

  1. 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
  2. Take a deep breath, put our heads down, and keep going because this, too, shall pass.
  3. Put on our big kid pants, muster some courage, ask questions, and start experimenting
  4. 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

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Collaboration Being Killed by Collaboration Software

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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

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What We Can Learn from MrBeast’s Onboarding

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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.

  1. Clearly define what success looks like (and doesn’t) for your employees and projects.
  2. Establish frameworks that encourage bold ideas while maintaining focus.
  3. 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

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Humanizing Agility

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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.

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Who is More Creative – Women or Men?

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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?

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Igniting Innovation with Deep Dialogue

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Igniting Innovation with Deep Dialogue

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I have just returned from a short sabbatical in Bali, Indonesia, a place of unparalleled beauty, lushness, and deep spirituality. Bali invites and fosters opportunities for retreat, reflection, and replenishment and is a vital space for restoration and renewal. As you may know, a sabbatical is an extended period away from work for study, travel, or personal growth. In my case, it was in response to an invitation to attend a deep dialogue session that included high-level leaders from many countries and sectors of society across the Asia Pacific region.  This entailed days spent in deep listening and inquiring processes involving quietening the mind, accessing the heart and respecting the body within a unique environment. It supported people through their change fatigue, unleashed their emotional energy, and sparked collective intelligence to emerge hopefulness, unity, faith, and possibility in the future of humanity.

It allowed people to emerge, diverge, and converge their positive and creative change choices to transform their worlds.

What is deep dialogue?

Dialogue can be defined as “a sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that structure everyday experience”. The word “dialogue” originates from two Greek roots, ‘dia’ and ‘logos’ suggesting “meaning flowing through.”

It’s important to understand that dialogue is not the same as the often unproductive and mechanistic debates we are familiar with. Deep dialogue is a sustained collective inquiry that sparks collective intelligence through a facilitated process that delves into the values, needs, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, assumptions and certainties that shape our everyday experiences, feelings and thoughts about the future.

Deep dialogue is not just a creative conversation; it involves strategic, collective and insightful inquiry, detached observation, attention and intention, and multi-faceted listening processes.

It requires a willingness to suspend and let go of reactive and defensive exchanges and delve into their systemic causes. It helps to spark people’s collective intelligence to create moments of clarity in resolving complex and critical problems creatively and differently.

In contrast with more familiar modes of inquiry, deep dialogue involves an emergence process. It begins without an agenda and a ‘leader’ but with an accomplished facilitator and without a specific task or decision to make.

One key element in fostering productive dialogue is the role of the facilitator. The facilitator’s task is to co-create a collective holding space that encourages participants to disrupt and safely challenge their habitual thinking processes. This approach is based on the understanding that our problems cannot be solved using the same thinking that created them.

Knowing that we can’t keep on producing the results we want.

Deep dialogue evokes collective intelligence, opening new possibilities for shared thinking and fostering a sense of authenticity, unity and shared purpose in any endeavour.

What are the barriers that often hinder deep and meaningful dialogue?

The constant, relentless impact of accelerating change, disruption, and uncertainty, as well as the ongoing impact of our post-COVID isolation and people’s lack of belonging, never allows or permits us the key moments that enable us to engage in and reap the benefits that deep dialogue offers.

This lack of belonging and isolation are significant barriers to meaningful dialogue that evoke the positive changes we seek in our personal and professional lives.

As a seasoned corporate trainer, facilitator, coach, and consultant, I have observed that many people unconsciously still suffer from emotional overwhelm, causing them to lose their ‘spark’ or emotional energy. They also unconsciously suffer from cognitive overload, with little mental or thinking space to explore the impact of their thoughts and feelings on who they are, which diminishes any positivity, hope, and optimism for themselves, their teams, and organisations today and in the future.

Alternately, it is much easier and more comfortable for some people to be unconsciously reactive, defensive, and singularly focused, never developing their pause power.

By avoiding taking any personal responsibility or being accountable for interrupting their busyness and shifting their inner being, and developing the deliberate calm required to be, think, and act differently in the face of any instability, insecurity, sorrow, or unwellness, they may be experiencing in their hearts and minds.

Upon arrival, I discovered I was also unconsciously doing this despite my regular wellness routine and habits.

During the three-day process, I was encouraged to pay attention and notice how energetically, emotionally, and physically exhausted I felt and how my mind had been kidnapped and overloaded by my unconscious fears and anxiety over the state of the world.

Like many others, I had also unconsciously been wilfully pushing myself as a human doing rather than as a human being.   

This left no space or safe moments for sparking moments of clarity, never mind socialising or connecting with others to spark collective intelligence and consciously effect positive change.

Why is deep dialogue critical in today’s uncertain and disrupted world?

Fortunately, I was supported to enter and engage in deep dialogue, which allowed our group of global leaders to safely interrupt our ‘busyness’, stop, and emerge a range of vital and subtle moments.  

To cultivate and nurture our inner awareness by retreating and reflecting through mindfulness, contemplation, meditation, and silence.  

It awakened us to become conscious of the subtle world that connects our unique cognitive and emotional inner structures of thoughts and feelings to the outer world we mostly unconsciously created and experienced. 

It was a powerful, transformative experience for every one of us.

Because when we change, the world changes.

Choosing to cross the bridge consciously

We can engage in deep dialogue when we are empowered, enabled and equipped to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect.

By being curious, compassionate, and courageous in opening our hearts, minds, and will, we can spark regeneration, replenishment, and renewal of the range of options, choices, and intentions.

We can cross the bridge, individually and collectively, to re-create or co-create a compelling, sustainable, inclusive, and equitable future for everyone.

Anyone can be proactive and evoke creative sparks collectively and collaboratively to unleash our options, choices, and intentions by being in the present and bridging the past with a desirable future.

It is foundational to creating, inventing, and innovating our futures and reclaiming our inner dignity and power over our lives.

To spark our collective intelligence, all leaders must commit to consciously using this moment to create what is possible rather than reacting and passively accepting what might appear inevitable to some of us.

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 personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customised 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 focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Three Reasons Nobody Cares About Your Ideas

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Three Reasons Nobody Cares About Your Ideas

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written (he didn’t) and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all those ideas, the original “snap trap,” invented by William Hooker in 1894, remains the most popular.

We’ve come to glorify ideas, thinking that more of them will lead to better results. This cult of ideas has led to a large cottage industry of consultants that offer workshops to exercise our creative capabilities with tools like brainstorming and SWOT analysis. We are, to a large extent, still chasing better mousetraps.

Still, one thing I constantly hear from executives I work with is that no one wants to hear about their ideas. The truth is that, just like all those mousetrap patents, most ideas are useless, very few are original and many have been tried before. So if you’re frustrated that nobody listens to your ideas, here’s why that happens and what you can do to fix it.

1. Your Ideas Aren’t Original

Having a new idea is thrilling, because it takes us to new places. Once we get an idea, it leads to other ideas and, as we follow the logical chain, we can see important real-world implications. The process of connecting the dots is so exhilarating — and so personal — that it seems unlikely, impossible even, that someone else had the same thoughts at the same time.

Yet history clearly shows that’s exactly what happens. Newton and Leibniz simultaneously invented calculus. Darwin and Wallace discovered the principles of evolution at about the same time. Alexander Graham Bell just narrowly beat Elisha Gray to the patent office to receive credit for inventing the telephone. Einstein beat David Hilbert to general relativity by a matter of weeks.

In fact, in a landmark study published in 1922, sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas identified 148 major inventions or discoveries that at least two different people, working independently, arrived at the same time. And those are historic successes that are well documented. Just imagine how often it happens with normal, everyday ideas.

The truth is that ideas don’t simply arise out of some mysterious ether. We get them by making connections between existing ideas and new things we observe ourselves. So it shouldn’t be surprising that others have seen similar things and drawn the same conclusions that we have.

2. Others Had The Same Idea — And Failed

Jim Allison spent most of his life as a fairly ordinary bench scientist and that’s all he really wanted to be. He told me once that he “just liked figuring things out” and by doing so, he gained some level of prominence in the field of immunology, making discoveries that were primarily of interest to other immunologists.

His path diverged when he began to research the ability of our immune system to fight cancer. Using a novel approach, he was able to show amazing results in mice. “The tumors just melted away,” he told me. Excited, he ran to go tell pharmaceutical companies about his idea and get them to invest in his research.

Unfortunately, they were not impressed. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand Jim’s idea, but that they had already invested — and squandered — billions of dollars on similar ideas. Hundreds of trials had been undertaken on immunological approaches to cancer and there hadn’t been one real success.

Nonetheless, Jim persevered and today, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as major field of its own. Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists are combining their ideas with Jim’s to create amazing breakthroughs in cancer treatment and tens of thousands of people are alive today because of it.

3. You Can’t Make An Idea Work By Yourself

One of the most famous stories about innovation is that of Alexander Fleming. Returning to his lab after a summer vacation, he found that a mysterious mold had contaminated his petri dishes, which was eradicating the bacteria colonies he was working to grow. He decided to study the mold and discovered penicillin.

It’s one of those stories that’s told and retold because it encapsulates so much of what we love about innovation — the power of a single “Eureka! moment” to change the world. The problem is that innovation never really happens that way, not generally and certainly not in the case of penicillin.

The real story is decidedly different. When Alexander Fleming published his findings, no one really noticed because it had little, if any, medical value. It was just a secretion from a mold that could kill bacteria in a petri dish. The compound was unstable and you couldn’t store it. It couldn’t be injected or ingested. You also couldn’t make enough of it to cure anyone.

Ten years later, a completely different team of scientists led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain rediscovered Fleming’s work and began adding their own ideas. Then they traveled to America to work with US labs and improved the process. Finally, pharmaceutical companies worked feverishly to mass produce penicillin.

So it wasn’t just a single person or a single “Eureka! moment,” but a number of different teams of people, working on different aspects of the problem and it took nearly 20 years to make penicillin the miracle cure we know today.

The Fundamental Difference Between Ideation and Creation

While most ideas lead to nothing, some create enormous value. Calculus, the theory of evolution and the telephone made our lives better no matter who came up with them first. That’s not because of the idea itself, but what was built on top of it. Ideas only create a better future when they mix with other ideas. Innovation, to a large degree, is combination.

The stories of Alexander Fleming and Jim Allison are instructive. In Fleming’s case it was scientists at another lab that picked up the initial idea and did the work to make it into a useful cure. Then they went to America to work with other labs and, eventually, pharmaceutical companies to do the work needed to go from milliliters in the lab to metric tons in the real world.

One thing that struck me in talking to Jim Allison was how he described having the idea for cancer immunotherapy. He didn’t talk about a flash of brilliance, but said he slowly began to piece things together, combining the work of others with what he saw in his own lab. His breakthrough discovery was the culmination of a life’s work.

That was in 1995. It then took him three more years to find the small biotech company to back his idea. Clinical trials didn’t begin until 2004. FDA approval came through in 2011. Today, 20 years after the initial idea, he still goes to the lab every day, to combine his ideas with others and enhance the initial concept.

Kevin Ashton, who himself first came up with the idea for RFID chips, wrote in his book, How to Fly A Horse, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.”

A good idea is not a mere moment of epiphany, but a call to action. It proves its value not by its elegance or through the brilliance of its conception, but in its ability to solve problems in the real world. So if you want people to start listening to your ideas, focus less on the fact that you have them and more on what value they can deliver to others.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pexels

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Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI

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Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

The impact of disruption, hyper-connectivity, and uncertainty, coupled with the pace of change, is causing many people to feel fearful and anxious. They become defensive and reactive and ‘go under’ emotionally and ‘go inwards’ cognitively by ruminating about their past and what bad things may happen in the future.  Dwelling on past mistakes, failures, and poor performance also causes them to disengage emotionally, take flight and move away, avoid taking action, fight, or freeze and become inert, paralyzed, and immobilized. The outcome is resistance to the possibilities and creative changes using Generative AI might bring. Because they lack the vital creative and emotional energy to generate creative thinking in partnership with AI, they will resist innovation-led change and stay ‘stuck’ in their habitual, safe and conventional roles, capabilities and identities.

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels the creative process. Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

When a person’s emotional energy has contracted, it results in constrained, negative, pessimistic, and even catastrophic thinking habits.

Where there is no space, doorway, or threshold to take on anything new, novel, or different or to imagine what might be possible in an uncertain future to evolve, advance, or transform their personal or professional lives.

Emotional energy catalyzes people’s hope, positivity and optimism to approach their worlds differently.

When people are constrained from becoming hopeful, positive, and optimistic, they cannot apply foresight to explore future possibilities and opportunities at the accelerating pace that Generative AI tools offer in unleashing the human ingenuity and generating creative thinking required to solve challenges and increasingly complex problems.

Augmenting human creativity

Generative AI, as highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, How Generative AI can Augment Human Creativity, has the potential to assist humans in creating innovative solutions. Its role is not to replace humans but to augment their creativity, helping them generate and identify novel ideas and improve the quality of raw ideas.

To empower individuals to make intelligent decisions and solve complex problems, it is crucial to notice, disrupt, dispute and deviate from their unresourceful default patterns or habitual ways of doing things.

Because emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels the creative process, it is crucial to help people find ways to re-ignite their emotional energy.

Empowering, enabling, and equipping them to embody and take on new, more resourceful emotional states and traits that allow them to break free from the constraints by identifying and letting go of old, irrelevant roles, capabilities, and identities. To take on new ones to facilitate positive changes, solve challenges, and deliver highly valued innovative solutions in partnership with Generative AI to generate creative thinking.

Generating the power of questions in problem-solving

I applied and implemented three key strategies to partner with Generative AI during the six-month coaching partnership. I used creative thinking strategies to develop a comprehensive life-coaching plan for a coaching client that serendipitously co-created a range of transformational outcomes.

Identify the key challenges, strengths, and systemic nature of the core problem and set a goal for change.

Encouraged to experiment with coaching in partnership with Generative AI, I created a comprehensive summary of what my client and I agreed her core problem was.  We defined a goal for effecting positive and constructive change and outlined evidence of achieving a successful outcome. I incorporated these elements into a descriptive paragraph and uploaded it into the Generative AI platform.

Develop a range of catalytic questions.

I focused on designing four key catalytic questions, to evoke and provoke creative thinking strategies. I requested the platform to design and develop a life-coaching plan to achieve our goal and solve her unique problem:   

Integration involves showing that two things which appear to be different are actually the same:

  • What might be some key existing transformational coaching elements that can be integrated into the new life-coaching plan I am trying to create to solve this problem?
  • Splitting involves seeing how two things that look the same might actually be different and can be divided into useful parts, like an assembly line:
  • What might be some key components of transformational coaching plans that can be combined to connect with a life-coaching plan to help solve this problem?
  • Figure-ground reversal involves realizing that what is crucial is in the background and not in the foreground, like the invention of Slack.
  • What might be some of the missing parts in the transformational and life coaching processes that might be included to help solve this problem?
  • Distal thinking involves imagining things different from the present, like the Tesla electric car.
  • What could be possible without boundaries, rules or limitations in harnessing the emotional energy required to partner with my client in our coaching relationship?
  • How might I create value for my client? What key constraints in her whole system relate to life coaching, and how might I leverage these to solve the problem differently?

It took less than a minute and consisted of a comprehensive, step-by-step, detailed plan that would have taken me at least half a day to consider and construct.

I was delighted to have an evidence-based example of successfully augmenting human creativity, partnering with Generative AI to generate creative thinking to advance my coaching partnership.

Partner with applying a transformational process.

It took less than a minute and consisted of a comprehensive, step-by-step, detailed plan that would have taken me at least half a day of using my pause-power to construct. I was delighted to have an evidence-based example of successfully augmenting human creativity to experiment with when partnering with Generative AI to generate creative thinking in my coaching partnership:

  • Generating and identifying a range of novel ideas towards improving her well-being.
  • Exploring and improving the range and quality of the initial raw ideas by applying pause power to incubate, illuminate, and generate creative thinking.
  • Identifying and developing a range of options for my client to choose from, allowing her to let go of what was depleting her emotional energy and retain her hopefulness, positivity, and optimism.
  • Identifying and developing a range of options for my client to choose from, to take on to manifest the desired future state of well-being and re-energize her emotional energy.

What was the outcome?

By co-creating a safe and collective holding space with my client, we supported her in re-energizing emotionally and applying future-oriented creative thinking strategies. We partnered with Generative AI to innovate my coaching approach and maximize our intelligence.

The outcome was personally transformative and sustained by:

  • Ensuring she re-ignited and identified strategies and new habits to sustain her emotional energy and make the necessary changes and future choices.
  • Applying circuit breakers and divergent thinking strategies to disrupt and dispute unresourceful beliefs, biases and behavior patterns.
  • Creating a safe space allowed her to deviate from her feelings, thoughts, and mindset to identify what new roles, capabilities, and identities to take on in the future and how they could benefit her and add value to the quality of her life.
  • Assisting in creating various ideas and options to refine when making significant lifestyle change choices.

It was a powerful learning experience for both my client and myself, reinforcing and validating that “Generative AI’s greatest potential is not replacing humans; it is to assist humans in their individual and collective efforts to create hitherto unimaginable solutions. It can truly democratize innovation.”

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Check out our 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 personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks and can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Many of my coaching clients have recently shared their struggles with feeling tired, emotionally overwhelmed, and cognitively overloaded and are close to burnout.  They attribute these issues to the pervasive and addictive nature of technology, exacerbated by the pandemic and divisive global conflicts, accelerating change and the rise of AI and hybrid work. As a result, many have retreated and frozen into a state of habitual, reactive ‘busyness.’ This affects their overall emotional, physical, and mental health and wellness. It also inhibits their ability to focus, create, invent and innovate and restricts their optimism, hope, and positivity about their future in an unstable and uncertain world.

The Coaching Opportunity

Coaching creates a unique opportunity to partner with people to develop their pause-power to identify the transformative actions to reverse this pervasive phenomenon to flourish in a world of unknowns.

A coaching session usually serves as a first step towards cultivating the pause-power needed to stop, observe, reflect and take valuable time out to rest, replenish, re-energize and reboot. This allows people to courageously notice, attune to, and express their true feelings and thoughts, to disrupt, dispute and deviate them to develop the pause-power required to heal and provide relief, hope and optimism for a better future.

Everyone must cultivate intentional pause-power to empower them to observe and understand their inner and outer worlds. This practice helps them remove distractions, stop multitasking, and break free from the ‘busyness’ that depletes their cognitive, emotional, and visceral resources, putting them in the driver’s seat of their mental and emotional well-being.

Self-reflection and reflective practice become potent tools, enabling people to move away from reactivity and short-term focus and towards taking the transformative actions to adapt, create, invent, and innovate. 

Hitting Your Pause Button

Being adaptive, creative, inventive and innovative involves consciously taking your hands off the controls and encouraging yourself and others to notice and disrupt your habitual and addictive ‘busyness’ (time scarcity + task focus).

This awareness is the first step towards reclaiming your focus and attention so that you can engage with and interpret the modern world rather than try to control it or withdraw from it.

Being willing to take a break and hit the ‘pause button’ stops your continuous cycle of doing. It focuses your attention on breaking limiting beliefs or unresourceful patterns and provides a support structure for applying rigorous perception practices to our daily lives.

Using pause-power to create a place, as recently described by Otto Scharmer from the Presencing Institute:

 “Between action and non-action, there is a place. A portal into the unknown. But what are we each called to contribute to the vision of the emerging future? Perhaps these times are simply doorways into the heart of the storm, a necessary journey through the cycles of time required to create change”.

What Does Pause-Power Involve?

A pause is created when you suspend activity, a time of temporary disengagement when you no longer move towards any goal. It can occur amid almost any activity and can last for an instant by taking a deep breath to get grounded, for minutes to become mindful or to take a rest, for hours to enjoy a well-deserved break, or for years to experience life in a different culture or place.

Intentionally pausing enables you to take time between your range of habitual, largely unconscious reactive responses; it helps our brain’s executive function utilize the valuable ‘empty spaces’ between stimulus and response and between different ideas. It creates a space open to options and choices for being, thinking and acting differently.

Doing this allows you to notice and disrupt unresourceful and habitual auto ‘stimulus-response’ default patterns, which usually occur when things go wrong, you make a mistake and fail, or you dive into blaming, shaming or avoiding others as part of our naturally wired defence mechanisms.

Radical Acceptance

Learning to pause is one of the critical steps in innovation because it helps you initiate a practice of radical acceptance. This requires embracing uncertainty, or ‘what is’ truly happening in the present moment, relationship, or situation, by accepting things just as they are. 

“During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience or meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance”.

By being willing to dive into an ‘empty space’ from an emergent process, you can unleash possibilities, opportunities, options, and choices towards identifying the transformative actions that create your desired future.  

People who can artfully and skillfully facilitate creative conversations that funnel pause power and co-create valuable ‘empty spaces’ to occur can generate our imagination and curiosity to manifest glorious moments of insights required to emerge creative ideas.  

Pausing also enables you to observe, pay attention, notice, and regulate how your overall nervous system impacts and manages your brain’s functions. This is key to being practical, resourceful, healthy, and productive in the face of volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and accelerating change in our hyper-connected world.  

It also needs rest to do this. By applying our pause-power and giving ourselves some rest, we offer our bodies, hearts, and minds a chance to recharge, keep moving, and work towards taking the transformative actions required to build better workplaces and flourishing futures.

A Valuable Toolkit and Habit

This skill is valuable for everyone to reflect upon, cultivate and master. It is initiated by intentionally stopping by hitting an invisible cognitive ‘pause button’ to observe, pay attention, notice your inner experience, and see yourself as the cause of it.

Developing pause power involves six simple vital steps and questions:

1.Retreat from reacting to the situation – by stepping back into the present moment or time to notice, be with, allow, accept (radical acceptance), and acknowledge ‘what is’ going on internally and externally, and be willing to name it with detachment and discernment.

What is going on for me right now – how am I feeling about it?

2. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

3. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

4. Be willing to introduce and explore options and choices that allow you to deviate and refocus your attention on what really matters – taking a rest, having a holiday, completing a project, being a better person, getting a new job, or getting a promotion.

What are some of my options for change?

5. Be inquisitive, curious and open to reimagining, reinventing, and pivoting – an intention, mindset, behaviour, task, goal, or business focus to re-plenish, re-energize, re-engage and re-boot to mobilize yourself.   

How might I feel, think or act differently to achieve my outcome?

6. Step out into the system’s edges – by being calm, hopeful and optimistic, to identify the transformative actions required to move towards and exploring new creative, inventive and innovative solutions for providing value in ways people appreciate and cherish.

What will I do next?

Engaging in a Looking Lab

As many of our ImagineNation community members know, I am currently writing a book on ‘Being Innovative.’ There is a whole chapter on developing pause power to help people engage what Christian Madsbjerg calls in his latest book “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World” (Riverhead Books) – a Looking Lab, to:

“Get away from your screens, turn off your notifications, go out into the wilds of reality, and look around. Let go of all filters—clichés, conventions, colour corrections, whatever they may be. Try to pay attention to the simple act of seeing.”

He reveals that “if we choose to look for them, there are invisible worlds all around us ready to reveal their magic. The seemingly mundane or average can appear extraordinary, but only if we take the time to notice and see it”.

This is a vital part of our remarkable human capacity to transform through the slow, patient act of observing, attending, noticing, replenishing, re-energizing, re-engaging, and re-booting to take the transformative actions that will help you make the world a better place and achieve your 21st-century growth and success differently.

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 personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customised 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 focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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