Category Archives: Creativity

Creating an Open Environment for Ideation

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

By embracing empathy, inclusivity, and collaboration, organizations can foster a culture that energizes ideation processes and supports creativity. Drawing from my years of experience in change leadership and innovation facilitation, it’s evident that the environment plays a critical role in determining the quality and quantity of ideas generated within a team. Below, I explore key strategies and provide case study examples to illustrate successful ideation environments.

The Pillars of Open Ideation

At the foundation of any successful ideation initiative is a commitment to openness—a company-wide ethos where all employees feel invited and empowered to contribute ideas. The following are core pillars to support an open environment for ideation:

Psychological Safety: Foster a non-judgmental space where individuals feel comfortable sharing bold and novel ideas without fear of criticism or ridicule.
Diversity of Thought: Encourage a broad spectrum of perspectives by cultivating diverse teams in terms of skills, backgrounds, and experiences.
Structured Freedom: Combine flexibility with frameworks to guide ideation sessions, ensuring creativity thrives within a purposeful context.

Case Study 1: Google’s “20% Time” Initiative

Overview

Google, renowned for its innovation culture, introduced the “20% time” policy, permitting employees to devote a fifth of their working hours to passion projects not directly related to their primary responsibilities.

Outcome

This policy has spawned several successful products, including Gmail and Google News. The initiative encouraged autonomy and experimentation, allowing employees to explore and refine ideas in line with company objectives without bureaucratic constraints.

Lesson Learned

Google’s approach underscores the value of investing in personal curiosity while allowing structured boundaries to focus efforts, illustrating how allowing freedom within a framework can lead to groundbreaking innovations.

Case Study 2: Pixar’s Daily “Braintrust” Meetings

Overview

Pixar Animation Studios holds regular “Braintrust” meetings during the production of its films. In these sessions, directors and producers present their works-in-progress to fellow creative team members who provide candid feedback.

Outcome

This iterative feedback loop was instrumental in refining narratives and animation techniques, contributing to Pixar’s reputation for high-quality storytelling and innovation in film-making.

Lesson Learned

Pixar’s method emphasizes the impact of collaborative feedback within a psychologically safe space. By soliciting diverse opinions and being open to criticism, teams can elevate the quality of their ideas.

Creating Your Open Environment

To cultivate an open environment for ideation, start by assessing the existing culture and identifying barriers to open expression. Encourage leadership to model open-mindedness and inclusivity, and ensure that systems and processes support fluid idea-sharing and iterative feedback. Remember, the goal is to make every voice heard and valued.

Ultimately, by creating a carefully balanced environment of freedom, safety, and collaboration, organizations can ignite a powerful engine for continuous innovation.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Re-Thinking for a New Era

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Re-Thinking for a New Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last blog, we proposed, rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt a rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, and experience failure as an opportunity for change, unlearning, and re-thinking? Adopting this approach supports your human-centricity and enables you to become future-fit through developing your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19. This is reinforced by Adam Grant, in his book “Think Again” (the power of not knowing what you don’t know) where he states that we are living in a time vital for re-thinking to help us become adaptive and agile and develop our future fitness to thrive in a disruptive, uncertain world.

Critical Art of Re-Thinking

The critical art of re-thinking involves being actively open-minded, hearted, and willed:

To learning, and possibly re-learning how to effectively question your own beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits;
Through connection, association, detachment, and discernment to these qualities in other people’s minds and hearts;
And to then put our “mental pliability” and “emotional agility” to the test by creating the time and space for re-thinking with a new “set of goggles” and revising our views based on what we learn.

This potentially benefits everyone because it allows us to upgrade and update our points of view and expand our understanding of the world, we are all living in today and build our future fitness.

It also positions us for change innovation and excellence in the way we transform our approach to work and share our wisdom in life.

Making time and space for re-thinking

The vital role of unlearning

Embracing human-centricity and a future-fit focus involves unlearning and letting go of many of our old beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits embedded in our habitual feeling and thinking systems.

Being able to discern which of these are now incomplete, ineffective, and irrelevant as we adapt, and serve people, teams, and organisations to survive, grow, and develop future fitness to thrive in the post-Covid-19 world.

Unlearning is not about forgetting, it’s about paying deep attention and developing the awareness to see, and safely and courageously step outside of our old thinking systems, mental models, biases, and paradigms.

Being intellectually humble

Being intellectually humble involves “knowing what we don’t know” and being inquisitive and curious enough to explore new discoveries, and pay deep attention, and be consciously aware of the rich and valuable rewards to be found in the “unknown”.

Most of us are unconsciously motivated to move away from change and learning as a result of “blindness” to our learning or survival anxieties (Schein), and the need to cover up our “learning incompetence” (when people pretend to know things they don’t).

The willingness to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed and embrace intellectual humility helps us see things clearly and moves us towards overcoming our blind spots and weaknesses.

Re-Thinking in a Disconnected and Disruptive Era

Thinking, fast and slow

Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes the “machinery of … thought,” dividing the brain into two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which “respectively produce fast and slow thinking.”

For our purposes, at ImagineNation™, in our group, leadership, and team coaching programs, these can also be thought of as intuitive and deliberate thought.

Introducing System 3 thinking

My colleague, Peter Webb (www.peterjwebb.com), has added to this work by researching and validating a System 3 which he describes as considerative, which is complementary to our approach to thinking differently at ImagineNation™.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. it is intuitive, quick, and emotional.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. It is deliberative in that is rational and calculated.
System 3 thinking is more considerative, thoughtful, and consequential in that it enables you to focus on what really matters, discern what makes common sense, make small decisions and take small actions to find out what works best, be compassionate, regulate your emotions and develop a tolerance for divergent values.

You can explore more these three thinking systems, and initiate your own re-thinking process by contacting Peter at https://www.peterjwebb.com/

Initiating Your Re-Thinking Strategy

Developing a habit of reflective practices

Our innovation coaching, leading, and teaming learning programs involve developing a regular reflective practice –which according to Turner, Lucas & Whitaker, in the learning and coaching context is:

“the ability to step away from your work and identity patterns, habits, strengths, and limitations in your work, and/within the system you work in.”

Pause-retreat-reflect cycle to catalyse re-thinking

At ImagineNation™ to initiate the re-thinking process, through partnering with clients to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed through our “pause-retreat-reflect-reboot” cycle.

To support the development of the new habit, we include:

A personal reflection practice involves initiating or continuing a mindfulness activity.
A set of regular reflection activities which include different sets of reflective and generative questions.
Journaling processes, incorporating the CCS Cards for play and critical reflection for our clients to experiment with.

This involves practicing a set of regular retreat and reflection activities involving safely and intentionally enabling people to deeply listen and question and paradoxically dance across the 3 thinking systems simultaneously.

Enhancing your own and your team’s capability to do this will transform your approach to work, harness people’s collective intelligence to share their wisdom in life with the world, and develop future fitness to master challenges and solve problems as they arise.

Shifting to re-thinking

Interrupt their habitual “do-feel-think” cycles (doing stuff that may not deliver the results you want, feeling the awful emotions that result from mistakes, imperfection, and failure, then thinking what to do about it).
Create “stop signals” to affect a pause, long enough to stop doing stuff and become present to the range of emotions to calm down their nervous system.
Connect, associate with and acknowledge how they might be feeling at this unique and specific moment in time.
Pay deep attention to observing their operating thought patterns, with detachment and discernment.
Intentionally choose a desired future state or outcome.
Consider the impact of their feelings and thoughts on the results they are getting.
Deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful visceral and feeling states that compels (pulls) and mobilise them to achieve the desired future state or outcome.
Finally, deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful thought and feeling patterns to choose the most intelligent actions to take to achieve the desired future state or outcome.

The result is usually the development of a re-thinking process that has evolved from “do-think-feel” to “feel-think-do” (connecting to a desirable outcome, feeling present, thinking about the most intelligent thoughts and actions to embody and enact to get there, saving both time and money on wasted activities, avoiding mistakes and failures, to get to their desired future state.)

A Final Word on the Benefits of Re-Thinking

Taking just a moment to pause-retreat-reflect catalyses our rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern and creates opportunities for change, unlearning, and re-thinking. It is also a vital ingredient towards developing peoples’ future fitness.

Enabling us to appreciate the value of tuning into ourselves and into others, to leverage our emotional and mental muscles, towards actively creating the space for evoking and provoking different options and creative choices. Which better enable and empower us to re-think about being, thinking, and acting differently in a new age, impacted by the technologies created by accelerated digitization.

We can then perform at higher levels, achieve our desired outcomes and goals, interact, lead and team more effectively and develop functional and highly valued collaborative relationships with others, as well as with stakeholders and customers.

To leverage the current turning point, and develop our 21st-century superpowers, to co-create a more equitable, resilient, sustainable, human-centric, and future-fit environment, within an ever-changing landscape.

Join Our Next Free “Making Innovation a Habit” Masterclass to Re-Engage 2022!

Our 90-minute masterclass and creative conversation will help you develop your post-Covid-19 re-engagement strategy. It’s on Thursday, 10th February at 6.30 pm Sydney and Melbourne, 8.30 pm Auckland, 3.30 pm Singapore, 11.30 am Abu Dhabi and 8.30 am Berlin. Find out more.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Everyone hates to fail, why do you?

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Everyone hates to fail, why do you?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

If you have ever had a significant setback, made a serious mistake, or failed at completing an important task, you will have experienced some kind of deep emotional and visceral, largely unconscious, negative, reactive response to it.

By becoming passively or aggressively externally defensive and blaming and punishing others for the outcome, or by withdrawing internally, and attributing self-blame and self-punishment for what may have happened.

Everyone hates to fail because either type of reactive response stings and causes discomfort, dissonance, sorrow, suffering, and pain since you are feeling ashamed, judged, and shamed by yourself and by others. We need to re-think how we approach and digest failure, to scale and leverage it as one of our 21st-century superpowers.

Sabotaging your chances of success

According to a recent article in Psychology Today, this reactive response triggers your avoidance motivation, which then often exceeds your motivation to succeed!

Describing that the fear of failure causes us to then unconsciously sabotage our chances of success, as well as our ability to cultivate and manifest the superpowers necessary to thrive in the 21^st century.

Self-doubt settles us into a denying the need to experiment, and a reluctance, full of excuses, to experiment further with adopting, iterating, and testing new and novel ideas. Or in taking smart risks, that help you connect, explore and discover and design opportunities for making important and necessary, personal and professional changes.

Pivot and adapt to disruptive events

Yet, our ability to experiment, test, validate and iterate creative ideas is critical to surviving and thriving through the current decade of both disruption and transformation – which more of us are viewing as a series of relentless, continuous, and exponential changes, requiring unlearning and radically new learning processes.

In a 2021 Deloitte survey of 2,260 private – and public-sector CXOs in 21 countries, 60% of the respondents said that they believe disruptions like those seen in 2020 will continue. The resulting challenge is underscored by another of the survey’s findings:

Seventy percent of the CXOs do not have complete confidence in their organisation’s ability to pivot and adapt to disruptive events.

This confidence can be developed by re-thinking how we approach and digest failure, to scale and leverage it as a 21st-century superpower.

Developing 21st-century superpowers

Here are the four key superpowers, to be supported by digital technologies:

Nimbleness: The ability to quickly pivot and move. (“We used to do this, and now we do that.”)
Scalability: The ability to rapidly shift capacity and service levels. (“We used to serve x customers; we now serve 100x customers.”)
Stability: The ability to maintain operational excellence under pressure. (“We will persist despite the challenges.”)
Optionality: The ability to acquire new capabilities through external collaboration. (“Our ecosystem of partners allows us to do things we couldn’t do previously do.”)

Rethinking our fears of failure

None of these 21st-century superpowers can be developed without experimentation and collaboration.

Where you are able to self-regulate your fears of making mistakes and failure, by becoming a smart risk-taker who willingly, stretches the envelope and steps outside of your safety and comfort zones.

This helps maximise your potential and ability to learn and develop in the growth zone, where we stop self-sabotaging our chances of adapting and learning, succeeding, and growing in an uncertain and unstable world.

Everyone hates to fail because it’s hard to self-regulate the basic emotions of disappointment, anger and frustration, and deep shame. Resulting from and the distorted thinking patterns that accompany failure, often immobilising you which results in an unwillingness and inability to disrupt yourself and take intelligent actions.

Slow down to rethink, respond, regroup, play and thrive

It all starts with leading, teaching, mentoring, and coaching people to slow down, to learn, and appreciate the value of taking “time-out” for retreat and reflection.

At ImagineNation, in last week’s blog, we described how this involves developing regular reflective practices, where people can pay deep attention, and learn how to master these basic emotions and unresourceful thought patterns. How this allows them to be playful and experimental in developing new mindsets, rethinking habits, and resourceful emotional states, which are foundational for developing 21st-century superpowers.

Failure can become valued as a process and resource for effecting significant human-centric change, deepening learning, and improving your future fitness.

Consequences of avoiding failure

According to the same article in Psychology today – “shame is a psychologically toxic emotion because instead of feeling bad about our actions (guilt) or our efforts (regret) shame makes us feel who we are”.

By getting to the core of your egos, your identities, your self-esteem, and your feelings of emotional well-being and resourceful thinking habits.

Because everyone hates to fail, we all unconsciously seek ways of mitigating the implications of a potential failure – “for example, by buying unnecessary new clothes for a job interview instead of reading up on the company – which allows us to use the excuse, “I just didn’t have time to fully prepare.”

Benefits of embracing failure

Rather than succumbing to the notion that everyone hates to fail, it is much more useful to develop healthier ways of embracing and flowing with it which might:

Motivate you to reflect deeply to consider and deliberate as to what might be the most intelligent and brave actions to take under the range of circumstances you find yourself in.
Inspire you to risk-taking those intelligent actions through developing sound risk anticipation, management, and mitigation strategies that help boost your confidence.
Commit to doing just a bit more, in inventive ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives as well to your customer’s experience of your product or service.
Encourage you to access your multiple and collective intelligence, be more courageous, compassionate, and creative in co-sensing, co-discovering, co-designing, and co-creating innovative solutions to complex problems.
Enable you to learn from others, and harness people’s collective intelligence to adapt and grow, through teaming, in ways that serve the common good.

Tips for rethinking and self-regulating fears of failure

A few tips to support you to rethink, respond, regroup and thrive that we will explore more deeply, through real-life stories and examples, in our next two ImagineNation™ blog posts (November and December):

Be willing to redefine and reframe failure as what it means in your unique context, review past failures and see if you can find benefits that resulted from them.
Set approach goals and not avoidance goals to view failure as a challenge that can be mastered.
Control the controllable by intentionally managing your mindsets, shifting any negative perspective, and unpacking distortion and generalisations about failures and their negative consequences.
Imagine yourself doing well, achieving your goals by composing and painting a picture or image of a desirable and compelling future success.
Develop healthy self-compassion for when you do mess up, make mistakes and fail, by being kind and understanding, and empathic to your won humanness.
Focus on every experience, no matter what it brings is an opportunity for deep learning and creative and inventive change.

Rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt the rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, be future-fit and develop your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19?

Where it is expected that the business environment, over the next three to five years, will be the most exciting and innovative period that many of us may learn from and experience in our lifetimes?

Want to know why you might have a fear of failure?

Participate in our online research study “Ten Signs you may have a fear of failure” which we adapted from the article “10 Signs That You Might Have Fear of Failure… and 2 ways to overcome it and succeed” by Guy Winch Ph.D. in Psychology Today. Click here to access the survey.

We will happily share the results and findings with you if you leave your name and email address on the form provided. By sharing these details, you will also qualify for a complimentary 30 minute one on one online innovation coaching session, with one of our global professionally certified coaches to help you overcome your own anxieties and fears about failure and develop your 21st-century superpowers.

Join our next free “Making Innovation a Habit” masterclass to re-engage 2022!

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You Must Play and Experiment to Create and Innovate

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You Must Play and Experiment to Create and Innovate

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Growing up in the fashion industry, in 1980’s Paris, I forged an exciting global career and experienced, first hand, a diverse range of the most amazingly innovative fashion presentations ever. It was the dawn of an explosive era where fashion really mattered and wonderful events became really fantastic happenings featuring a lot of playful and experimental theatrical performances and fabulous guest stars on the catwalk. “From Claude Montana to Thierry Mugler, from Giorgio Armani to Franco Moschino, from Jean Charles de Castelbajac to Christian Lacroix, there were many designers who shaped the aesthetics of the era with their creations and shows” – whose creativity, still impact us across the arts and other key industries today.

Being playful and experimental

Reinforcing that in the arts and other industries, and in our professional and personal lives, newness, creativity, and innovation only happen through people being willing to be both playful and experimental.

This is useful to know, especially with the range of constraints and restrictions occurring globally as a result of fierce governmental reactive response to managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Coupling these with the challenges and limitations of a remote and hybrid workplace, are combining to cause many of us to achingly long for more freedom, fun, play, and adventure. Yet, many of us, are feeling bound to our laptops, TV’s and kitchens, and are locked within the boundaries of our homes and local neighbourhoods.

It is possible to shift the range of negative feelings that lockdowns produce by exploring possibilities and opportunities for expanding our knowledge and learning, by knowing how to be more playful and experimental, and especially by taking up a set of regular reflective practices.

A unique moment in time

Using this unique moment in time to take up a set of reflective practices to ignite our creative juices and expand our appetite and capacity for creativity.

At the same time, use this moment to explore opportunities to learn and expand our knowledge, because, knowledge plays an important role in the productivity and prosperity of economies, organisations, and individuals and the post-Covid-19 world is going to need a lot of new knowledge in the coming decade of both disruption and transformation.

Expanding our knowledge

Most of us are aware that, our desire to create, and actually be playful and experiential usually involves learning from some kind of direct experience. Like painting, where our hands are likely to get dirty, where we may produce a number of poor efforts (which we often hide) before we eventually create one, we can accept and live with.

Learning from a direct experience is more effective if coupled with reflection – that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.

Where research reveals that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by a greater perceived ability to achieve a goal in that it improves your confidence, self-belief, and conviction that you can achieve it.

Learning from reflecting on experience

Making the learning experience a playful and experimental one allows us to have fun, in ways that engage our multiple intelligences – our cognitive brains, and heart and gut brains in ways that create meta-shifts that challenge our mental maps.

This also helps us develop our learning agility – “learning what to do when you don’t know what to do” especially important in a world of constant and disruptive change.

Which will especially be a very vital and critical skill set to cultivate in the post-Covid-19 world, where there is no playbook, or reliable template for long-term planning the results we might want, in a disruptive and uncertain future.

Starting with elastic thinking

It starts with developing our elastic thinking skills, where according to Leonard Mlodinow – it is now prime time for people to harness the power of “elastic thinking” to navigate an unstable world and underpins our ability to adapt and be creative.

And involves “developing the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction; the capability to rise above conventional mindsets and to reframe the questions we ask; the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms; the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas; and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure.”

At ImagineNation™ we developed a four-step cognitive process to help people stretch their mental maps, feelings, thinking, behaviours, and actions, enabling them to be playful and experimental by focussing on these key elements that enable reflective practice:

Discovering
Sensemaking
Internalising
Applying

Exploring the role of failing fast

Getting to the creative and innovative outcomes, when playing and experimenting with thinking or acting differently, usually involves some kind of failure, where we fail flat on our faces!

Yet when being brave playful and courageous, and experimenting, you have to be willing to make mistakes and fail. The key is to try out things, and experiment, like children, do, and not worry about what others think and say about you, when you make a mistake or fail.

At the same time, adopting a reflective practice supports our willingness to let go and come from a beginners mind, to unlearn what may have worked previously, whilst being vulnerable and open-hearted, minded and willed to deeply reflect on what happened and what knowledge you may gain and what you might learn from it.

Continuously learning from reflective practice

This means that “work must become more learningful” where an organisations’ or teams’ collective aspiration is set free and people have permission, safety, and trust to be playful and experimental.

To “learn by doing and reflecting” through being:

Encouraged to continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire,
Re-educated to elasticize their thinking and develop new mental maps and where expansive patterns of feeling and thinking are nurtured,
Committed to continuously learning how to learn together, at a speed faster than the competition.

Resulting in the intelligence of the organisation or team exceeding the intelligence of individuals in the team and in the organisation, and by harnessing the collective’s capacity to create, invent and innovate through enacting a set of habitual reflective practices.

CCS Cards for play and critical reflection:

As a side note, it’s worth mentioning a tool we like to use that can provide both a sense of play and an opportunity for critical reflection. As many of you may know, CCS Cards are image cards containing a special set of photos, illustrations, and words. Just holding them, sorting them, and talking about what particular cards might mean for you, is an enjoyable, playful activity that often leads to fresh, creative responses.

Furthermore, as a tool for reflective practice, CCS Cards give people a powerful way to recall and recreate their lived experiences by incorporating their feelings and emotions. The cards provide participants with self-selected representations that they can link to all the associated concepts, feelings, words, and actions that were part of the lived experience. Armed with this clearer picture, they are better able to reflect upon and learn from their experience. The cards also provide an easy way to share and compare their reflections with others, which is vital for effective collaboration.

Bringing together theory and practice

Enacting a set of reflective practices helps us effectively bring together and integrate theory and practice, where through reflection, people are able to:

Discover new mental maps, feelings, thoughts, and ideas,
Make sense of these in their own context or situation,
Internalize and assimilate the impact of these mental maps, thoughts, feelings, and actions by introducing options and choices for being, thinking, and acting differently,
Apply that information to add to their existing knowledge base and reach a higher level of understanding,
Adapt how they feel, think and act as resources in new, unknown, unexpected, and disruptive situations, as well as in how they plan, implement, and review their actions.

Surely, these might comprise a helpful set of strategies to embrace to help you thrive in these challenging times?

Isn’t there an inherent opportunity for all of us to discover and explore new ways of having more fun, by being playful and experimental?

Perhaps we might discover new ways of adapting and thriving individually and collectively co-create more individual freedom, wonderful fun, and exciting adventures that we are all craving, and become future-fit, in our constantly changing, uncertain, and unstable world.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, February 1, 2022. 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, to upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique context.

Join our next free “Making Innovation a Habit” masterclass to re-engage 2022!

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Teaching to Win the 4th Industrial Revolution

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Teaching to Win the 4th Industrial Revolution

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The Coronapocalypse is forcing us to rethink who, how and what we teach. Regardless of how we do it, college students don’t learn much and the teacher experience is eroding.

Many not for profits are directing their efforts to provide equitable access to public education. However, putting more students in a broken, dysfunctional system won’t yield the outcomes and impact we want. Instead, the very structure and process of education will need to change if we are to provide students with the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies they need for jobs that have yet to be created.

What’s more, unless we address the gender social and cultural stereotypes, the 4IR could make gender inequity worse, not better.

Companies like Infosys still hire lots of engineers. But today, Ravi Kumar, the Infosys president, is not looking just for “problem solvers,’’ he says, but “problem-finders,’’ people with diverse interests — art, literature, science, anthropology — who can identify things that people want before people even know they want them.

If for nothing else than the future of your children, take 12 minutes to watch this:

If you agree, then thriving in the 4th industrial revolution will require nothing short of restructuring public education at all levels, not just k-12. Even doctors will need to change how they educate their young. How many things can you do with a paperclip?

One goal should be to create entrepreneurial schools and universities, and by that I don’t mean teaching children how to start businesses. Instead, creating the entrepreneurial mindset is about the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation. Creating a successful business in but one of many ways to do that.

Here are 10 different ways to encourage youth entrepreneurship. The same techniques might apply to graduate students as well.

Other learning objectives and curriculum themes are emerging:

Encouraging private, public and academic collaboration to define market based competencies
Teaching horizontally, not vertically, in limiting smokestack domains
Developing soft skills that are in high demand
Experience cultural competence, diversity and inclusion
Alternative pathways for teacher training and development
Job searching techniques that are state of the art
Mandatory experiential learning opportunities
Developing and testing alternative intelligence measures
Replacing memorization with creative problem solving, problem seeking and divergent thinking.
Hiring for creativity and finding and supporting educational reform champions
Like sick care, recognizing and addressing the socioeconomic determinants of academic failure, like housing, illness, disability and nutrition.
Rehabilitating the brand image of teachers
Teaching STEAMpathIE and rethink STEM as BMETALS
Preparing students for the jobs of the future that have not yet been created.
Teach them how to work in and manage virtual international teams.

Here’s another short list:

public speaking
writing well
storytelling (see 1-2)
critical thinking (not cynicism)
good manners
active listening (hear with your eyes)
networking (trust and giving)
good customer service
how to sell
to fight against entitlement

Curriculum redesign for medical students and residents will need to include:

Data literacy
Interprofessional bioentrepreneurship
Digital health policies and practice
Care coordination between the medical team and the patient care circle
Cost-effectiveness analysis
The pharmaceutical value chain and drug pricing
Customer service
Ethics and professionalism
Personal financial literacy and planning
Nutrition

Here is how automation will affect economies around the world.

Here are some recommendations to Promote digital education and workforce development

“As AI applications accelerate across many sectors, it is vital that we reimagine our educational institutions for a world where AI will be ubiquitous and students need a different kind of training than they currently receive. Right now, many students do not receive instruction in the kinds of skills that will be needed in an AI-dominated landscape. For example, there currently are shortages of data scientists, computer scientists, engineers, coders, and platform developers. These are skills that are in short supply; unless our educational system generates more people with these capabilities, it will limit AI development.”

Our economy and standard of living hinges on meeting these wicked challenges. But, like medicine, government and other risk-averse and sclerotic industries, the resistance to change will be substantial. Only bottom-up pressure led by creative, courageous innovators who teach what they practice, in collaboration with non-profits and government agencies, will remove the obstacles in our path. Many of those obstacles are in the classroom next door or the corner office or the halls of government.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Rapid Prototyping: Bringing Ideas to Life Quickly

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Rapid Prototyping: Bringing Ideas to Life Quickly

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the fast-paced world of innovation, speed is often synonymous with success. Rapid prototyping has emerged as a crucial strategy in bringing ideas to life promptly and efficiently. This methodology not only accelerates the design process but also significantly reduces the risk of failure by fostering an iterative and flexible approach to product development.

What is Rapid Prototyping?

Rapid prototyping is a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part or assembly using three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) data. It enables innovators to explore and visualize concepts, test ideas, and gain timely feedback from stakeholders. The resulting prototypes can range from simple sketches to 3D-printed models, each providing valuable insights that inform future iterations.

Case Study 1: Revolutionizing Healthcare with 3D Printing

XYZ Medical Corp, a leading innovator in the healthcare industry, faced the challenge of designing custom prosthetics that were both affordable and efficient. By implementing rapid prototyping, they harnessed the power of 3D printing to create prosthetic models in a fraction of the time traditional methods would take.

Through iterative testing and feedback from patients, XYZ Medical Corp was able to refine their designs rapidly. This approach not only reduced production time but also increased the customization options available to patients, ultimately enhancing user experience and trust in the company’s products. This case demonstrates how rapid prototyping can lead to revolutionary advancements in product design and patient care.

Case Study 2: Transforming Automotive Design at FastCar Inc.

FastCar Inc., a pioneering name in the automotive sector, aimed to drastically enhance their vehicle design process. By adopting rapid prototyping, they were able to shift from traditional clay modeling to digital modeling and 3D printing.

FastCar Inc. utilized virtual reality and augmented reality to create immersive prototypes that allowed designers, engineers, and customers to interact with car models before physical production commenced. This deepened understanding highlighted design flaws and areas for improvement early on, ultimately cutting down development cycles by over 30%. This case highlights how rapid prototyping can adapt businesses to new market demands quicker, staying ahead in competitive industries.

The Impact of Rapid Prototyping

Rapid prototyping democratizes the innovation process, creating a more inclusive environment where cross-functional teams can collaborate effectively. By visualizing ideas early and often, teams can align more easily on goals and priorities. Furthermore, the ability to quickly test and iterate reduces risk and fosters a culture of learning and adaptation.

Whether it’s revolutionizing healthcare or transforming automotive design, rapid prototyping proves to be a powerful tool in the innovator’s toolkit. As industries continue to evolve and customer demands change, the capacity to bring ideas to life swiftly will mark the difference between leaders and followers in the market.

Embracing rapid prototyping is not just about keeping up with competition—it’s about setting a new pace for innovation. This forward momentum catalyzes creativity, encourages experimentation, and ultimately leads to products that not only meet but exceed user expectations.

SPECIAL BONUS: The very best change planners use a visual, collaborative approach to create their deliverables. A methodology and tools like those in Change Planning Toolkit™ can empower anyone to become great change planners themselves.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Gamification in the Workplace

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Using Game Elements to Boost Engagement and Creativity

Gamification in the Workplace: Using Game Elements to Boost Engagement and Creativity

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, companies are constantly looking for innovative ways to engage and motivate their employees. One method that has gained popularity in recent years is gamification – the use of game elements and principles in non-game contexts to drive desired behaviors. By incorporating elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards into everyday tasks and processes, organizations can increase employee engagement, productivity, and creativity.

Case Study 1: Salesforce

One company that has successfully implemented gamification in the workplace is Salesforce. The global customer relationship management software company uses a gamified platform called “Trailhead” to train and motivate its employees. Trailhead allows employees to earn points, badges, and rewards for completing training modules and challenges, creating a sense of accomplishment and friendly competition among teams. As a result, employees are more invested in their learning and development, leading to increased productivity and retention.

Case Study 2: Microsoft

Another example of gamification in the workplace is Microsoft’s “The Ribbon Hero” game. Designed to help employees improve their skills in using Microsoft Office applications, the game challenges players to complete tasks and challenges within the programs, earning points and moving up levels as they progress. By making learning fun and interactive, Microsoft has seen a significant increase in employee engagement and proficiency with their software tools.

Conclusion

Incorporating gamification into the workplace can have numerous benefits for organizations, including increased employee engagement, motivation, and creativity. By tapping into employees’ natural desire for competition, recognition, and achievement, companies can create a more dynamic and fulfilling work environment. As technology continues to advance and the workforce becomes increasingly diverse and digital, gamification will play an essential role in driving innovation and success in the modern workplace.

Image credit: Pixabay

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CEOs Say Creativity is the Most Critical Factor for Future Success

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CEOs Say Creativity is the Most Critical Factor for Future Success

GUEST POST from Linda Naiman

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which surveyed 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, CEOs believe that,

“More than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.”

IBM CEO Study: Creative Leadership

CEOs say creativity helps them capitalise on complexity

“The effects of rising complexity calls for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organisations for twenty-first century success.”

Amen to that! If we are going to find solutions in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and complex, we cannot rely on traditional ways of leading and managing.

Creativity is the most important leadership quality

Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.

High-performing CEOs practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes.

They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.

95 percent of top performing organizations identified getting closer to customers as their most important strategic initiative over the next five years – using Web, interactive, and social media channels to rethink how they engage with customers and citizens. They view the historic explosion of information and global information flows as opportunities, rather than threats.

Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners.

They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources. 54 percent of CEOs from top performing companies indicated they are learning to respond swiftly with new ideas to address the deep changes affecting their organizations.

Source:

IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success — May 18, 2010

My reflection

As a practitioner in the world of business creativity and innovation over the past twenty years, I am heartened by this encouraging news. We’ve all been tracking the success of innovators at companies like Google and Apple, and now it looks like a second wave of creativity and innovation is penetrating C-level leadership. We truly have entered the Age of Creativity.

Develop creative leadership in your business:

Discover your Creativity and Innovation styles
Leverage the four intelligences of creative thinking in your team
Develop a language and structure for managing the creative process
Create a climate conductive to fostering creativity and innovation
Design and conduct high-performance idea-generation/problem-solving sessions
Recognize when and how creativity is stifled and be able to prevent this
Build innovation and critical thinking into individual and teamwork processes.

Image credits: Pixabay and Linda Naiman

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10 Clever Ways to Stop Ideation Bullies from Hogging Your Brainstorming Sessions

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10 Clever Ways to Stop Ideation Bullies from Hogging Your Brainstorming Sessions

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Whether you’re responsible for digital transformation or just trying to improve a product, process or marketing program, coming up with ideas is almost always an important part of success.

And one way you can create ideas is by bringing everyone together in some sort of brainstorming activity.

But sometimes you find that you’ve invited someone who’s not going to let anyone else talk — someone who is so certain they have the right answers that they take all the oxygen in the room — the ideation bully.

The Ideation Bully has an idea of how “it” should be done and they are so insistent about it that it’s almost not worth having a session because nobody has the energy or the desire to fight with this person.

Fortunately, there are certain tactics that you can use to diffuse the problem and prevent those troublemakers from throwing a monkey wrench into everything you’re trying to do.

Here are 10 ways to Handle Ideation Bullies

1. Choose your Brainstormers

One option is to simply not invite somebody who is known to be a troublemaker if you predict that that person is going to tank the effort to bring people together and generate ideas.

If their ideas are important, there’s always an opportunity to give them input in another way, such as asking them to send you a list of their ideas.

But there can be downsides to this as your primary approach. If that person is politically very important, then excluding them may not be wise.

Additionally, that individual may actually have good ideas to contribute, it’s just that they have a habit of “over-contributing.”

And lastly, sometimes you don’t know in advance who will show up as an “ideation bully.”
Someone who is otherwise quite reasonable and collaborative may get “triggered” by a given topic and transform into a problem.

2. Align on the Goals of the Meeting

Sometimes people who are trying to throw out ideas and who are behaving like bullies aren’t on the same page of what you’re there to ideate about.

Focus on what you want to accomplish and make sure everyone understands what the definition of victory is.

Set some ground rules so that if people start to pull you off topic, you can call them out while still being respectful of the point that they’re making.

3. Leave Rank at the Door

It’s best if the most senior person in the room lets everybody know that we really want everyone’s ideas and definitely doesn’t use their rank to influence the discussion (once all the ideas are on the table they can always later use their position of authority to determine which ideas will be implemented).

In fact, we have a fun acronym we use to highlight this challenge: HIPPO (Highest Paid Person On-hand).

Of course, not just because you’re the highest paid person doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bully.

But you can be if you come in there and prevent your team from generating a lot of ideas.

It’s a good idea if the HIPPO speaks last because once they’ve spoken, it can be hard for people to feel like they should contradict.

Another strategy is to have the senior person wait for everyone to finish the session and then just bring them the results of the meeting to assess.

4. Insight Before Ideas

You want to seed people with information beforehand.

One way that people bully during ideation is they come in with supposedly their own set of facts, which may or may not really be facts.

It’s very easy to bully people with fake facts when others don’t have them.

You’re not going to have every insight, every piece of information, but nevertheless thinking about what’s the key information that the group should be fed in advance will help neutralize the ideation bullies.

5. Define the Goal of Generating a Set Number of Ideas

Acknowledge that your goal is to create a whole bunch of different ideas so that you can later assess them.

So when the ideation bully comes, they won’t be able to drown out everybody else because you are compelled to keep going until you get your target number of ideas.

You can always assure the bully that if their ideas are really the best, then you’ll probably wind up picking it.

6. The Possibility Frame

You can always say to somebody, is it possible there’s another idea?

Is it possible there’s a better idea?

Is it possible there’s a way of improving on this idea?

And it’s very difficult even for a bully to say absolutely not.

They just have to basically be willing to down-and-out insult every single person in the room if they want to say there’s no one there that could possibly come up with an idea that’s better than that.

Usually in most corporate environments, someone is not going to go that far.

When you can acknowledge that it’s always possible that there’s another idea, a better idea, or a way of improving the idea, then you have diffused the bully’s ability to crowd out other ideas.

7. The Hypothesis Frame

Any idea is just a hypothesis. It’s just a theory that it might be the solution to a problem.

So whatever idea you have, you don’t know for sure that it’s going to work until you test it through some kind of market research.

When you accept the hypothesis frame, the bully will not be able to shut down other ideas without presenting informational points that suggest their own idea is the best solution.

8. Evidence Quantity per Idea

Identify all the data and see how much evidence we have for each idea.

Sometimes the bully has a strong opinion that their idea is the right answer even when they have no data to support that claim.

We have a fun acronym for those sub variety of ideation bullies as well. We call them the ZEBRAs (Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant).

We want to give ZEBRAs the opportunity to present their facts but also do the same for other ideas.

This helps you prioritize and evaluate the ideas that your team generates.

9. Use Breakouts to Avoid Filibusters

When you have 10, 15, 20 or even more people that are ideating, it can be good to break them into teams and let each team brainstorm separately.

They can later come back together and each team can share what they’ve come up with.

That can be a healthy way of ideating if you have somebody who tries to bully everybody not follow the rules.

At least if you put them in breakouts, they can only do that with part of the group.

It may not solve the problem 100%, but at least then you have groups which don’t have that person and therefore can be productive.

Hopefully, some of these other strategies will help manage that person in the breakout that they’re in.

10. Create Structures with Timing and Turns

Instead of just having a freewheeling conversation, there’s this structure where everyone waits their turn and has their say.
But then there’s a process of making sure that that’s timeboxed and we move on to the next person.

That’s another way of making sure that each person gets their time and that the person who otherwise would want to take over and dominate will find it harder to bully everybody because there are rules.

You don’t need all of those tactics. You can pick just a few, even depending on your situation.

And I’m confident that you will find that you can master handling ideation bullies so that they can potentially still have their say, but it doesn’t disrupt everything you’re trying to do in terms of coming up with great ideas.

Check out my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Winning Digital Customers, where I go into great length on a wide range of ideation practices in the context of product development and the creation of great customer experiences. It will show you the step-by-step process for coming up with ideas that lead to successful products in the market. You can download the first chapter for free by clicking this link https://WinningDigitalCustomers.com.

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Creating 21st Century Transformational Learning

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Creating 21st Century Transformational Learning

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

I was privileged to attend one of the first Theory U; Presencing Leadership for Profound Innovation and Change Workshops presented by the Sloane School of Management, in Boston in 2008. This means that I have been able to observe, engage with and participate, from both Israel and Australia, in the evolution of Presencing and Theory U as powerful resources and vehicles for effecting profound transformational change and learning.

Intentional Change and Learning

I have seen and experienced the growth of the global Presencing community, as it transformed from a small, diverse, thought-leading group in the USA, seeding a range of deeply disruptive core concepts, as described in their groundbreaking book – Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future into a global movement.

Where they introduced a radical new theory about change and learning, I also participated in its evolution into its current manifestation, as a global movement for profound transformational change. Which seeks to create, within the whole system, intentional shifts that break old patterns of seeing and acting that continually create results, on a planetary level, that are no longer needed or wanted. Achieving this by encouraging deeper levels of attention and intention, as well as deep and continuous learning, to create an awareness of the larger systemic whole, ultimately leading to us to adopt new and different mindsets, behaviors, actions, and systems that can help to shape our evolution and our futures.

A Turning Point

It is suggested by many, that we are at a turning point, a critical moment in time, where all of us, individually and collectively, have the chance to focus our attention toward activating, harnessing, and mobilizing transformational change and learning to shape our evolution and our futures intelligently. To maximize the emergence, divergence, and convergence of new patterns of consumer and business behaviors that have emerged at extraordinary speed and can be sustained over long periods of time because digitization, coupled with the impact of the global pandemic, have accelerated changes faster than many of us believed previously possible.

Paradoxically, we are facing an uncertain future, where according to the World Economic Forum Job Reset Summit – “While vaccine rollout has begun and the growth outlook is predicted to improve, and even socio-economic recovery is far from certain” no matter where you are located or professionally aligned.

Leveraging the Turning Point

This turning point, is full of possibilities and innovative opportunities potentially enabling organizations, leaders, teams, people, and customers to embrace the opportunity to change and learning in creative and inventive ways to shape our evolution and to co-create our futures, in ways that are:

Purposeful and meaningful,
Embrace speed, agility, and simplicity,
Scale our confidence, capacity, and competence through unlearning, relearning, and innovation.

Resulting in improving equity for all, resilience, sustainability, growth, and future-fitness, in an ever-changing landscape, deeply impacted by the technologies created by accelerated digitization, by putting ourselves into the service of what is wanting to emerge in this unique turning point and moment of time.

Forward-looking leadership

This is validated by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), who outlined, in a recent article the key strategies employed by most innovative companies in 2021 that “forward-looking leaders soon looked to broader needs affecting their companies’ futures, such as resilience, digital transformation, and customer relevance”.

Realizing, like the authors of Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, the need to build the systemic ability to drive change, learning and innovation, by transforming their ambitious aspirations into real results through:

Clarifying a clear ambition: that is meaningful and purposeful, compelling and engaging that aligns to people’s values and helps build “one team” mindsets.
Building systemic innovation domains: that are strategically and culturally aligned, enabling people and technology to connect, explore, discover, design, and deliver the ambition through making changes and learning, collective and ecosystems approach that provides clear lines of sight to stakeholders, users, and customers.
Performance management: that acknowledges and rewards collaborative achievements, results in transformational change and learning through smart risk-taking, experimentation and drives accountability, and celebrates success.
Project management: that provides rigor and discipline, through taking a human-centered, and agile approach that allows people and teams to make the necessary shifts in assigning and delivering commercially astute, ambitious, radical, and challenging breakthrough and Moonshot projects.
Talent and culture: by exercising leadership that brings people and teams together, collaborating by fostering openness, transparency, permission, and trust so people can safely unlearn, relearn, adapt and innovate. By supporting and sponsoring change initiatives, by harnessing and mobilizing collective genius, by granting prestige to innovation roles and valuing radical candor, generating discovery and challenges to the status quo.

A Moment in Time

Some thirteen years later, in a recent Letter, Otto Scharmer, one of the original authors of the Presence book, shared with the global Presencing community, that it:

“feels as if we have collectively crossed a threshold and entered a new time. A time that was there already before, but more as a background presence. A time that some geologists proposed to refer to as the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Living in the Anthropocene means that basically all the problems, all the challenges we face on a planetary scale are caused by… ourselves”.

He then stated that “Being alive at such a profound planetary threshold moment poses a critical question to each and every one of us: What is my response to all of this, what is our response to this condition, how am I – and how are we – going to show up at this moment?

Showing up at this moment

Change and learning today involve people, developing their knowledge, mindsets, and behaviors, skills and habits. So, making a fundamental choice about how you wish to show up right now, as a leader or manager, business owner or employee, consultant, trainer, or coach, is crucial to making your contribution and commitment to shaping your own individual, and our collective evolution and our futures.

Taking just a moment

It may, in fact, be beneficial, to take just a moment – to hit your pause button, retreat into reflection, stillness, and silence and ask yourself Otto’s question – how am I, and how are we as a business practice, team or organization going to show up at this moment?

Drawing on my experience as an innovative start-up entrepreneur in Israel, people can either be forced to change and learn through necessity, conflict, and adversity in order to survive. Alternately, they can choose to change through seeing the world with fresh eyes, full of possibility, positivity, optimism, and self-transcendence, to innovate and thrive.

How might you develop the courage to make transformational and systemic changes and learning and innovation your key priorities to survive through necessity and adversity, or thrive through unleashing possibilities, optimism, and positivity?
How might you develop the compassion to focus on developing both customer and human centricity in ways that are purposefully meaningful and aligned to people’s values and contribute to the good of the whole (people, profit, and planet)?
How might you be creative in transforming your time, people, and financial investments in ways that drive out complacency, build change readiness and deliver the deep and continuous change and learning that equips and empowers people to deliver tangible results that are valued, appreciated, and cherished, now and in the future?

Not only to take advantage of the moment in time but to also use transformational change and learning to extend your practice or organizations future fitness and life expectancy, because, according to a recent article in Forbes – “Half of the giants we now know may no longer exist by the next decade. In 1964, a company on the S&P 500 had an average life expectancy of 33 years. This number was reduced to 24 years in 2016 and is forecast to shrink further to 12 years by 2027”.

This is the final blog in our series of blogs, podcasts, and webinars on Developing a Human-Centric Future-Fitness organization.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centered approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more

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