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Illuminate to Innovate

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Illuminate to Innovate

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Being consciously innovative involves expanding your awareness and opening your heart and mind to disrupt habitual feelings and thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It allows us to play in the space of possibility by cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences. This encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving.  Developing people’s consciousness involves strengthening a person’s ability to sense and connect with awareness-based systems and respond appropriately to achieve desired outcomes. Conscious innovation is a mandatory way of being, thinking, and acting that makes people matter and enables them to survive and thrive in the emerging, uncertain and disruptive world of AI, where leaders must know how to illuminate to innovate.

What is consciousness?

According to Dr Dan Seigal[1], consciousness has two elements that shape a person’s inner state or interior condition. There is the knowing, which is awareness itself. And there are the knowns, which are everything that enters awareness. To integrate consciousness means to differentiate these two elements from each other, and then to differentiate the knowns from one another.

Knowns consist of people’s thoughts, feelings, and memories, while sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch bring the outside world in as a constant stream of sensation. They also include intuition, inner wisdom, and awareness of mental and emotional processes, such as memories, beliefs, intentions, and hopes. As well as the relational self, the awareness of connection to other people, to living beings, and to something larger than the individual self.

What is conscious innovation?

Our approach to conscious innovation creates the conditions for individuals and teams to move and focus their attention, develop conscious awareness, and become intentional and passionately purposeful in solving challenging problems. People illuminate to innovate by advancing through the three levels of self to make the world a better place by balancing people, profit, and the planet. 

Conscious innovation integrates the key principles and methodologies of emergence, systems thinking, human-centered design, sustainability and technology to empower people to realize their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation.

Conscious innovation includes being able to understand and improve a person’s inner state or interior condition, and illuminate to innovate by:

  • Focusing on expanding who they are as human beings by creating the conditions to develop people’s metacognition[2] and brain health[3], enabling them to experience what it means to be responsible, passionately purposeful, and agile, and to build an adaptive capacity to flourish in an uncertain world.
  • Developing an awareness of the potential of cognitive dissonance and harnessing creative tension that enables people to safely learn and grow as humans who act in ways that build their capability to be creative, inventive, innovative and resilient in the face of chaos and disruption.
  • Creating the conditions by clarifying an aligned strategy and developing a safe, trusted, and aligned culture that enables and supports people and teams to collaborate, experiment, and innovate by willingly partnering human potential with AI.

These invisible elements of conscious innovation affect how people interact with, relate to, and lead people and teams; how they communicate, learn, make decisions, solve problems, manage, implement, and embed change; and how they execute innovation or transformational projects and initiatives.

Illuminate to Innovate – The three levels of self

The three levels of self-illustrate the deep learning and change journey involved in illuminating and harnessing human potential on the people side of innovation. At a time when companies are required to rethink the very nature of the corporation, especially how to integrate human accountability with virtual and physical AI agents.

  1. Self-regulation involves developing awareness of one’s automatic responses, understanding their sources and effects on one’s physiology and neurology, owning one’s responses, and ensuring they have a positive impact on oneself and those with whom one interacts.
  2. Self-management involves close observation and management of people’s knowns: being attentively present to neurological and physiological factors, including emotional states, traits, thoughts, feelings, mindsets, behaviours, and skills in how people use time to make decisions, communicate, and resolve business challenges.
  3. Self-leadership involves deepening and illuminating known skills: open awareness, knowledge, and the ability to intentionally master one’s own neurology and physiology, as well as others’, in interactions and challenging situations, to mindfully evaluate and successfully create, invent, deliver, and execute innovative solutions.

The intent is to create strategic and cultural alignment that delivers execution excellence by enabling leaders and engaging people to solve problems in generative ways, consciously prioritizing human relationships through collaboration and experimentation in partnership with AI, and steadily moving towards goals in deliberate, focused, systemic, kind and honorable ways.

What are the benefits of being consciously innovative?

Being consciously innovative involves learning to be, think, and act differently; people learn to stop trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it and to stop reproducing the same results they no longer want.

At the same time, the emergence of AI requires a major brain shift to maximize human potential by building foundational cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and technological literacy abilities that enable people to adapt, relate, and contribute meaningfully, integrating an awareness-based systems approach and a holistic focus.

The benefits of being consciously innovative include improving leaders’ and people’s abilities to:

  • Replace short-term, reactive, and conventional linear thinking processes that initially created and now sustain problems, and embrace change as a circular, creative, continuous, and systemic process.
  • Courageously adopt long-term, sustainable strategies for the organization’s growth and the impact it seeks to have on clients or customers and wider communities.
  • Make better-informed decisions by considering potential scenarios, anticipating risks, identifying interdependencies, and making decisions that meet needs while keeping the bigger picture in view.
  • Cease overlaying new structures onto people’s unchanged ways of perceiving and experiencing their world by creating the conditions for people to help people make sense of new structures and processes, show up differently, and take new and right actions.
  • Combine futures thinking and systems thinking, emphasizing ethical considerations, social responsibility, and sustainability.
  • Be empathetic and compassionate by discerning, understanding, and considering the needs, values, and perspectives of all stakeholders involved in a problem or a system, not just those present in a room.
  • Improve people’s capacity to attend, observe, inquire, listen to each other, and differ in generative ways, and to feel empowered to think independently and act differently.
  • Embrace AI strategically, using AI and new technologies to assist, help, and empower human agency, to partner, collaborate, and experiment with AI to rebuild engagement and deliver execution excellence.  

Illuminate to innovate

Being consciously innovative requires actively illuminating and integrating the ways leaders and coaches bring clarity, creativity, compassion, courage, and meaning to their decisions, roles, and teams. This involves expanding your awareness and opening your hearts and minds to disrupt habitual thinking, allowing for deeper, more holistic decision-making and innovative problem-solving. It involves cultivating consciousness – illuminating the state of being aware of your surroundings, internal thoughts, and subjective experiences and encompasses everything you perceive, feel, and think, ranging from basic sensory awareness to complex self-reflection, decision-making and problem-solving.

[1]The Developing Mind (The foundation of Interpersonal Neurobiology) [1]

[2] Metacognition is “thinking about thinking”—the awareness, understanding, and control of one’s own cognitive processes, like learning and problem-solving, to improve performance.

[3]https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/the-human-advantage-stronger-brains-in-the-age-of-ai?cid=mgp_opr-eml-nsl-ofl-mgp-glb–&hlkid=507fe91b220d4915bbcd198daaeb857a&hctky=1766168&hdpid=bfbfe441-95e5-45b4-9dc7-c32cd1789c2f#/

Image Credit: Pexels

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A New Innovation Sphere

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A New Innovation Sphere

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

I’m obsessed with the newly opened Sphere in Las Vegas as an example of Innovation.   As I write this, U2 are preparing for their second show there, and Vegas is buzzing about the new innovation they are performing in.  That in of itself is quite something.  Vegas is a city that is nor short of entertainment and visual spectacle, so for an innovation to capture the collective imagination in this way it has to be genuinely Wow.  And that ‘Wow’ means there are opportunities for the innovation community to learn from it. 

For those of you who might have missed it, The Sphere is an approximately 20,000 seat auditorium with razor sharp cutting edge multisensory capabilities that include a 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen, speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technology, and 4D haptic physical effects built into the seats. The exterior of the 366 foot high building features 580,000 sq ft of LED displays which have transformed the already ostentatious Las Vegas skyline. Images including a giant eye, moon, earth, smiley face, Halloween pumpkin and various underwater scenes and geometric animations light up the sky, together with advertisements that are rumored to cost almost $500,000 per day.  Together with giant drone displays and giant LED displays on adjacent casinos mean that Bladerunner has truly come to Vegas. But these descriptions simply don’t do it justice, you really, really have to see it. 

Las Vegas U2 Residency at the Sphere

Master of Attention – Leveraging Visual Science to the Full:  The outside is a brilliant example of visual marketing that leverages just about every insight possible for grabbing attention. It’s scale is simply ‘Wow!’, and you can see it from the mountains surrounding Vegas, or from the plane as you come into land.   The content it displays on its outside is brilliantly designed to capture attention. It has the fundamental visual cues of movement, color, luminescence, contrast and scale, but these are all turned up to 11, maybe even 12.  This alone pretty much compels attention, even in a city whose skyline is already replete with all of these.  When designing for visual attention, I often invoke the ‘Times Square analogy’.  When trying to grab attention in a visually crowded context, signal to noise is your friend, and a simple, ‘less is more’ design can stand out against a background context of intense, complex visual noise.  But the Sphere has instead leapt s-curves, and has instead leveraged new technology to be brighter, bigger, more colorful and create an order of magnitude more movement than its surroundings.  It visually shouts above the surrounding visual noise, and has created genuine separation, at least for now. 

But it also leverages many other elements that we know command attention.  It uses faces, eyes, and natural cues that tap into our unconscious cognitive attentional architecture.  The giant eye, giant pumpkin and giant smiley face tap these attentional mechanisms, but in a playful way.  The orange and black of the pumpkin or the yellow and black of the smiley face tap into implicit biomimetic ‘danger’ clues, but in a way that resolves instantly to turn attention from avoid to approach.  The giant jellyfish and whales floating above the strip tap into our attentional priority mechanisms for natural cues.  And of course, it all fits the surprisingly obvious cognitive structure that creates ‘Wow!’.  A giant smiley emoji floating above the Vegas skyline is initially surprising, but also pretty obvious once you realize it is the sphere! 

And this is of course a dynamic display, that once it captures your attention, then advertises the upcoming U2 show or other paid advertising.  As I mentioned before, that advertising does not come cheap, but it does come with pretty much guaranteed engagement.  You really do need to see it for yourself if you can, but I’ve also captured some video here:

The Real Innovation Magic: The outside of The Sphere is stunning, but the inside goes even further, and provides a new and disruptive technology platform that opens the door for all sorts of creativity and innovation in entertainment and beyond. The potential to leverage the super-additive power of multi-sensory combinations to command attention and emotion is staggering.

The opening act was U2, and the show has received mostly positive but also mixed reviews. Everyone raves about the staggering visual effects, the sound quality, and the spectacle. But others do point out that the band itself gets somewhat lost, and/or is overshadowed by the new technology.

But this is just the beginning.   The technology platform is truly disruptive innovation that will open the door for all sorts of innovation and creativity. It fundamentally challenges the ‘givens’ of what a concert is. The U2 show is still based on and marketed as the band being the ‘star’ of the show. But the Sphere is an unprecedented immersive multimedia experience that can and likely will change that completely, making the venue the star itself. The potential for great musicians, visual and multisensory artist to create unprecedented customer experience is enormous.  Artists from Gaga to Muse, or their successors must be salivating at the potential to bring until now impossible visions to life, and deliver multi-sensory experience to audiences on a scale not previously imagined. Disruptive innovation often emerges at the interface of previous expertise, and the potential for hybrid sensory experiences that the Sphere offer are unprecedented. Imagine visuals created and inspired by the Webb telescope accompanied by an orchestra that sonically surrounds the audience in ways they’ve never experienced or perhaps imagined. And of course, new technology will challenge new creative’s to leverage it in ways we haven’t yet imagined.  Cawsie Jijina, the engineer who designed the Sphere maybe says it best:

“You have the best audio there possibly can be today. You have the best visual there can possible be today. Now you just have to wait and let some artist meet some batshit crazy engineer and techie and create something totally new.” 

This technology platform will stimulate emergent blends of creative innovation that will challenge our expectations of what a show is.  It will likely require both creative’s and audiences to give up on some pre-conceptions. But I love to see a new technology emerge in front of my eyes. We ain’t seen nothing yet. 

Las Vegas Sphere Halloween

Image credits: Pete Foley

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In 2019 we experienced the shock and the pain that resulted from the globally disruptive global Covid 19 pandemic. To both survive and thrive in the new decade of uncertainty, many people still need help and guidance to connect to, understand and manage their anxieties, fears, inertia, and confusion about the future to effectively ride the waves of disruptive change. Yet, according to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book – Stolen Focus, all over the world, our focus and attention have been stolen, and our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we need to be intentional in reclaiming it.

He describes the wide range of consequences this has on our lives, which are further impacted by pervasive and addicting technology we are being forced to use in our virtual world, exasperated by the pandemic and the need to work virtually, from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet, and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate.

He suggests that if we want to get back our ability to focus, stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Also, if we want to kickstart change and help people feel confident in their readiness, competence, and capacity to change and innovate in a world of unknowns, it all starts with improving our ability to pay deep attention to what is really going on.

Yet, in the thesaurus there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as: listen, and giving heed, so what might be the key first steps to take in reclaiming your focus and attention?

Power of focus and attention

  • Energy flows where attention goes

Placing our focus and attention activates our energy, and our energy flows where our attention goes.

So, if you have been feeling tired and lethargic, or overwhelmed and burned out, then take a moment to consider how you might score yourself on an attentive-distractive continuum and consider how similar, or different you are to US college students who can now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and where office workers on average manage only three minutes?

  • Being intentional

Involves getting clear upfront about what you want to achieve, by setting an intention to achieve a specific outcome or result in the future that is important to you.  In a world of unknowns, paying deep attention and being intentional are the key foundations for recovery, rebalance, and transformation.

Limiting ways of seeing, being, and acting in the world  

Many people are still experiencing unconscious intrinsic, or reactive responses to their pandemic-induced work situations and are suffering from stress overload, overwhelm, and burnout.

This is because our autonomic nervous systems, which control our cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and reproductive functions, and responses to stress, operate outside of our conscious control in two different and co-dependent and often competing systems.

  • Parasympathetic fight or flight system

Put very simply, our sympathetic nervous systems get overloaded by heightened stress levels, which ignite our protective fight or flight system, which normally allows our bodies to function under stress and danger, and, as a result, impacts significantly on our levels of tiredness, exhaustion, and burnt-out emotional, mental and physical states.  This exasperates our inherent, unconscious needs to self-preserve (gut), feelings of isolation and loneliness (heat), and having the limited presence of mind (head) and reverts many of us into survival mode, and shift out of alignment, where we become physiologically incoherent (out of balance).

Which is not conducive to knowing and activating what we can truly, really, and actually influence and control in our lives, which requires us to effectively balance chaos with order.

  • Reduced capacity

When operating in survival mode, we are unable (like the US College students) to take the sacred pauses we need to make the space to attend and observe, through retreat, and reflection.

We are no longer able to access our inner knowing, play in the space of possibility, create a normalized state of equilibrium and calm, and be coherent and congruent in our daily lives.

Our overall capacity to set clear goals, make smart decisions, creatively solve problems, courageously take the right actions, harness our intuition, compassionately cultivate understanding and perception, develop good relationships, learn and develop, and finally, our health and well-being, are significantly reduced.

Initiate reclaiming focus and attention

Because we don’t know if companies will ever return to their pre-pandemic-like worlds, and become future-fit, people need to be reskilled in how to focus, how to observe, how to deeply focus and attend, and how to be intentional.

Developing daily habits to be focused and productive

  1. Being intentional about breathing

 To help balance and initiate harmonizing our autonomic nervous systems, develop physiological coherence, to respond optimally to the world, starts with developing focus and attention on your breath.

Doing this helps your neurology to relax, reduce stress and anxiety, increase calmness, and reconnect to the self.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients would often turn up feeling overwhelmed and incoherent, so we would begin the session with a “box breathing” exercise. This involves breathing while you slowly count to four for a total of four times – four counts of breathing in, four counts of holding your breath, four counts of exhaling, and four more counts of holding after your exhale. We could both be grounded, and coherent, to partner and connect in high-impact and productive sessions.

  1. Being intentional in stepping away from your screens

According to one 2019 survey of 1,057 U.S. office workers, 87 percent of professionals spend most of their workday staring at screens: an average of seven hours a day. Closing your laptop and taking a quick walk outside, in nature allows your brain to recharge for your next task, and enables your autonomic nervous system to take a well-deserved break and calm down.

Sounds simple, yet in my global coaching practice, clients found this very difficult to do, this might involve no TV screens in bedrooms, leaving phones outside bedrooms, turning phones off at 8.00 pm, buying an alarm clock, setting and sticking to a dedicated start and finish work times, taking regular lunch breaks outside in nature and coffee breaks with friends. Be playful and allow your mind to enjoy wandering into wondering.

  1. Working in focused intervals

A recent article in Inc stated that –  “In addition to the seven or eight hours of adequate sleep that so many entrepreneurs and CEOs neglect, taking smart breaks during your workday, and having longer periods of downtime are keys to being more productive”.

Sounds simple, again in my global coaching practice I had to negotiate with clients to be intentionally disciplined and methodical in planning their days, weeks, and months. This involved scheduling time to initiate or sustain a mindfulness or meditation practice, engage in a regular exercise program, go shopping to buy and eat healthy foods (eliminating desk-side snacks), being clear on key deliverables and breaking down key tasks into bite-size bits, and saying no to meetings that don’t contribute towards achieving these.

When we change the way we attend, a different world can come forth, for ourselves, others we are interacting with, and the environment we are operating within. When we know how to really, truly, and deeply attend, and observe, we can go to our place of deeper knowing, rethink and then act swiftly and inflow to effect the transformational breakthroughs that change the world as we know it.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 6, 2012

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“It isn’t the incompetent who destroy an organization. The incompetent never get in a position to destroy it. It is those who achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up.”

– F.M. Young

“Any disruptive innovation requires a company to imagine for the customer something they can then imagine for themselves. Go too far past your customers’ ability to imagine how the new product or service solves a real problem in their lives, and your adoption will languish.”

– Braden Kelley

“History can’t give attention to what’s been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success.”

– Scott Berkun

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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