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How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

Reality Strikes Back

How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“This time feels different.” I’ve been hearing this from innovation practitioners and partners for months We’ve seen innovation resilience tested in times of economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. We’ve seen it flourish when markets soar and capital is abundant. We’ve seen it all, but this time feels different.

In fact, we feel a great disturbance in the innovation force.

Disturbances aren’t always bad. They’re often the spark that ignites innovation. But understand the disturbance you must, before work with it you can.

So, to help us understand and navigate a time that feels, and likely is, different, I present “The Corporate Innovator’s Saga.”

Episode I: The R&D Men (are) Aces

(Sorry, that’s the most tortured one. The titles get better, I promise)

A long time ago (1876), in a place not so far away (New Jersey), one man established what many consider the first R&D Lab. A year later, Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park colleagues debuted the phonograph.

In the 20^th century, as technology became more complex, invention shifted from individual inventors to corporate R&D labs. By the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed 15,000 people, including 1,200 PhDs. In 1970, Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opened.

Episode II: Attack of the Disruptors

For most of the twentieth century, R&D labs were the heroes or villains of executives’ innovation stories. Then, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

He revealed that executives’ myopic focus on serving their best (most profitable) customers caused them to miss new waves of innovation. In example after example, he showed that R&D often worked on disruptive (cheaper, good enough) technologies only to have their efforts shut down by executives worried about cannibalizing their existing businesses.

C-suites listened, and innovation went from an R&D problem to a business one.

Episode III: Revenge of the Designers

Design Thinking’s origins date back to the 1940s, its application to business gained prominence with l Tim Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

This book introduced frameworks still used today’s: desirability, feasibility, and viability; divergent and convergent thinking; and the process of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Innovation now required business people to become designers, question the status quo, and operate untethered from the short-termism of business,

Episode IV: A New Hope (Startups)

The early 2000s were a dizzying time for corporate innovation. Executives feared disruption and poured resources into internal innovation teams and trainings. Meanwhile, a movement was gaining steam in Silicon Valley.

Y Combinator, the first seed accelerator, launched in 2005 and was followed a year later by TechStars. When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses in 2011, the US was home to nearly 100 startup accelerators.

Now, businesspeople needed to become entrepreneurs capable of building, and scaling startups in environments purpose-built to kill risk and change.

In response, companies spun up internal accelerators, established corporate venture capital teams, and partnered with startup studios.

Episode V: Reality Strikes Back

Today, the combination of a global pandemic, regional wars, and a single year in which elections will affect 49% of the world’s population has everyone reeling.

Naturally, this uncertainty triggered out need for a sense of control. The first cut were “hobbies” like innovation and DEI. Then, “non-essentials” like “extra” people and perks. For losses continued into the “need to haves,” like operational investments and business expansion.

Recently, the idea of “growth at all costs” has come under scrutiny with advocates for more thoughtful growth strategies emerging There is still room for innovation IF it produces meaningful, measurable value.

Episode VI: Return of the Innovator (?)

I don’t know what’s next, but I hope this is the title. And, if not, I hope whatever is next has Ewoks.

What do you hope for in the next episode?

Image credit: Pexels

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SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification

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GUEST POST from Pete Foley

This capture from a recent SpaceX tweet is a stunning visual example of smart innovation and simplification.

While I’m not even close to being a rocket scientist, and so am far from familiar with all of the technical details, I’ve heard that breakthroughs incorporated into this include innovative sensor design that allows for streamlined feedback loops. But this goes beyond just impressive technical innovation. To innovate at this level requires organizational and cultural flexibility as well as technical brilliance. That latter flexibility is probably far more broadly transferable and adoptable than specific advances in rocket science, and hence more useful to the broader innovation community. So let’s dig a little deeper into that space.

Secret Sauce? Organizationally SpaceX is well known for less formal hierarchies, passion, ownership and engineers working on the production floor. This hands on approach creates a different, but important kind of feedback, while passion feeds intrinsic motivation, ownership and engagement, which is so critical to consistent innovation.

Learning from Failure – An Innovation Superpower? But perhaps most important of all is the innovation culture. Within SpaceX there is a very clear willingness to experiment and learn from failure. Not lip service, or the sometimes half-hearted embrace of failure often found in large, bureaucratic organizations, where rewards and career progression often doesn’t reflect the mantra of learning by failing. This is an authentic willingness to publicly treat productive failure of individual launches as a learning success for the program, and to reward productive failure and appropriate risk taking. Of course, it’s not always easy to walk the talk of celebrating failure, especially in spacecraft design, where failures are often spectacular, public, and visual gold for the media. And no doubt this is compounded by Musk’s controversial public profile, where media and social media are often only too keen to highlight failures. But the visual of Raptor 3 is for me a compelling advertisement for authentically embedding learning by failure deeply into the DNA of an innovative organization.

Stretch Goals: Musk is famous for, and sometimes ridiculed for setting ambitious stretch goals, and for not always achieving them. But in a culture where failure is tolerated, or if done right, celebrated, missing a stretch goal is not a problem, especially if it propelled innovation along at a pace that goes beyond conventional expectation.

Challenging Legacy and ‘Givens’: Culturally, this kind of radical simplification requires the systematic challenge of givens that were part of previous iterations. You cannot make these kind of innovation leaps unless you are both willing and able to discard legacy technical and organizational structures.

At risk of kicking Boeing while it is down, it is hard not to contrast SpaceX with Boeing, whose space (and commercial aviation) program is very publicly floundering, and facing the potentially humiliating prospect of needing rescue from the more agile SpaceX program.

Innovation Plaque: But in the spirit of learning from failure, if we look a bit deeper, perhaps it should not be a surprise that Boeing are struggling to keep up. They have a long, storied, and successful history as a leader in aerospace. But history and leadership can be a blessing and a curse, as I know from P&G. It brings experience, but also bureaucracy, rigid systems, and deeply rooted culture that may or may not be optimum for managing change. Deep institutional knowledge can be a similar mixed blessing. It of course allows easy access to in-domain experience, and is key to not repeating past mistakes, or making naïve errors. But is also comes with an inherent bias towards traditional solutions, and technologies. Perhaps even more important is the organizationally remembered pain of past failures, especially if a ‘learn by failure’ culture isn’t fully embraced. Failure is good at telling us what didn’t work, and plays an important role in putting processes in place that help us to avoid repeating errors. But over time these ‘defensive’ processes can build up like plaque in an artery, making it difficult to push cutting edge technologies or radical changes through the system.

Balance is everything. Nobody wants to be the Space Cowboy. Space exploration is expensive, and risks the lives of some extraordinarily brave people. Getting the balance between risk taking and the right kind of failure is even more critical than in most other contexts. But SpaceX are doing it right, certainly until now. Whatever the technical details, the impact on speed, efficiency and $$ behind the simplification of Raptor 3 is stunning. I suspect that ultimately reliability and efficiency will also likely helped by increased simplicity. But it’s a delicate line. The aforementioned ‘plaque’ does slow the process, but done right, it can also prevent unnecessary failure. It’s important to be lean, but not ‘slice the salami’ too thin. Great innovation teams mix diverse experience, backgrounds and personalities for this reason. We need the cynic as well as the gung-ho risk taker. For SpaceX, so far, so good, but it’s important that they don’t become over confident.

The Elon Musk Factor: For anyone who hasn’t noticed. Musk has become a somewhat controversial figure of late. But even if you dislike him, you can still learn from him, and as innovators, I don’t think we can afford not to. He is the most effective innovator, or at least innovation leader for at least a generation. The teams he puts together are brilliant at challenging ‘givens’, and breaking out of legacy constraints and the ‘ghosts of evolution’. We see it across the SpaceX design, not just the engine, but also the launch systems, recycling of parts, etc. We also see an analogous innovation strategy in the way Tesla cars so dramatically challenged so many givens in the auto industry, or the ‘Boring company in my hometown of Las Vegas.

Ghosts of Evolution I’d mentioned the challenges of legacy designs and legacy constraints. I think this is central to SpaceX’s success, and so I think it’s worth going a little deeper on this topic. Every technology, and every living thing on our planet comes with its own ghosts. They are why humans have a literal blind-spot in our vision, why our bodies pleasure centers are co-located with our effluent outlets, and why the close proximity of our air and liquid/solid intakes lead to thousands of choking deaths every year. Nature is largely stuck with incrementally building on top of past designs, often leading to the types of inefficiency described above. Another example is the Pronghorn antelope that lives in my adopted American West. It can achieve speeds of close to 90 mph. This is impressive, but vastly over-designed and inefficient for it’s current environment. But it is a legacy design, evolved at a time when it was predated upon by long extinct North American Cheetah. It cannot simply undo that capability now that it’s no longer useful. So far, it’s survived this disadvantage, but it is vulnerable to both competition and changing environment simply because it is over-designed.

Bio-Inspiration: I’ve long believed we can learn a great deal from nature and bio-inspired design, but sometimes learning what not to do is as useful as ‘stealing’ usable insights. It’s OK to love nature, but also acknowledge that evolution has far more failures than successes. There are far, far more extinct species than living ones. And virtually every one was either too specialized, or lacked the ability to pivot and adapt in the face of changing context.

As innovators, we have unique option of creating totally new 2.0 designs, and challenging the often unarticulated givens that are held within a category. And we have the option of changing our culture and organizational structures too. But often we fail do so because we are individually or organizationally blind to legacy elements that are implicitly part of our assumptions for a category or a company. The fish doesn’t see the water, or at least not until it’s dangling from a hook. By then it’s too late. Whatever you think of Musk, he’s taught us it is possible to create innovation cultures that challenge legacy designs extremely effectively. It’s a lesson worth learning

Image credits: Twitter (via SpaceX)

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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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Breaking Free From Stagnation

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Breaking Free From Stagnation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

As a leader in your organization, you’re under tremendous stress. Not only do you need to deliver against a “growth strategy” that demands constant increases in revenue and profit, but you also need to cut costs and support employees who are more disengaged and burned out than ever before. If it feels like you’re working harder and running faster than ever to maintain the status quo, then I have good and bad news for you.

Bad news: You’re right.

The feeling of working harder or moving faster simply to stay in the same place is called the Red Queen effect or hypothesis. The hypothesis asserts “that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species.” Its name is inspired by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, who explains to Alice, “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

You probably feel the same need to adapt to survive “while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species” every time you see new technologies, read about another new management framework, or hear news from your competitors. You also understand that your organization needs to grow and often hear that it needs to do so at all costs, so you buckle down, work hard, and pull off quarterly miracles.

Good for you! You’re reward? You get to do it all over again, and faster, this quarter. And, to add insult to injury, all that growth you’re working harder and harder to achieve is a mirage.

75% of companies do not grow.

HBS professor Gary P. Pisano examined the growth rate of 10,897 publicly held US companies between 1976 and 2019. When adjusted for inflation, the top quartile grew 11.8% yearly, but the other 75% showed little to negative growth.

Being in that top quartile was no guarantee of success, as only 15% (3% of the total sample) were able to sustain a growth rate of 0.3%+ for 30 years. In fact, only SEVEN companies—Walmart, UPS, Southwest, Publix, Johnson & Johnson, Danaher, and Berkshire Hathaway—were top-quartile growth companies throughout the thirty years studied.

If you worked at one of those 7 companies, congrats! Your hard work delivered real and repeatable growth. If you worked at any of the other 10,890, I hope they offer great benefits?

We know why.

Every good academic knows you can’t just throw out some data without trying to find a causal link, and Professor Pisano is a good academic

“I have found that while the usual explanations for slow or minimal growth—market forces and technological changes such as disruptive innovation—play a role, many companies’ growth problems are self-inflicted. Specifically, firms approach growth in a highly reactive, opportunistic manner. When market demand is booming, they go on hiring binges, throw resources at developing new capacity, and build out organizational infrastructure without thinking through the implications… In the process of chasing growth, companies can easily destroy the things that made them successful in the first place, such as their capacity for innovation, their agility, their great customer service, or their unique cultures. When demand slows, pressures to maintain historical growth rates can lead to quick-fix solutions such as costly acquisitions or drastic cuts in R&D, other capabilities, and training. The damage caused by these moves only exacerbates the growth problems.”

(Bold text added by me)

Good news: You Can Do Something About It

In fact, as a leader in your organization, you’re among the few who have any prayer of pulling your organization out of the Red Queen’s race and putting it on track to real and sustainable growth. Achieving this incredible success requires you (and your colleagues) to decide three things:

How fast to grow (target rate of growth)
Where to find sources of new demand (direction of growth)
How to assemble the resources required to grow (method of growth)

Together, these three decisions comprise your growth strategy and enable your organization to achieve the “delicate balance” between demand and supply required to sustain profitable growth.

Getting to these decisions isn’t easy, but neither is slaying the Jabberwocky. So, as this brief rest stop in your race comes to an end, who do you choose to be – Alice, who works hard and deals with a bit of nonsense to progress, or the Red Queen, content to work harder to stay in the same place?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Creating Value from Nothing

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Creating Value from Nothing

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.

Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?

Don’t blame the status quo.

The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines. The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action.

But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.

We’re stopping ourselves.

Blame one (or more) of these.

Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:

There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:

When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow

Four different states. Only one of them is positive.

I don’t love those odds.

Yet we live them every day.

Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages. Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82^nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.

Round and round we go.

The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.

Anxiety. Boredom. Apathy.

One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild. They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request. In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.

Then overcome them

I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.

I am telling you not to get stuck there.

Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:

When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
When you feel bored, find a new challenge
When you feel apathetic, change everything

Your thoughts and ideas are valuable. Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.

You have the fuel. Now, need to be brave.

We need you to act.

Image credit: Pexels

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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.

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Nike Should Stop Blaming Working from Home for Their Innovation Struggles

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GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“But even more importantly, our employees were working from home for two and a half years. And in hindsight, it turns out, it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe on Zoom.” – John Donahoe, Nike CEO

I am so glad CNBC’s interview with Nike’s CEO didn’t hit my feed until Friday afternoon. It sent me into a rage spiral that I am just barely emerging from. Seriously, I think my neighbors heard the string of expletives I unleashed after reading that quote, and it wasn’t because it was a lovely day and the windows were open.

Blaming remote work for lack of innovation is cowardly. And factually wrong.

I’m not the only one giving Mr. Donahoe some side-eye for this comment. “There were a whole bunch of brands who really thrived during and post-pandemic even though they were working remotely,” Matt Powell, advisor for Spurwink River and a senior advisor at BCE Consulting, told Footwear News. “So I’m not sure that we that we can blame remote work here on Nike’s issues.”

There’s data to back that up.

In 2023, Mark (Shuai) Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Yuye Ding, a PhD student at the university’s Katz Graduate School of Business, set out to empirically determine the causes and effects of a firm’s decision to mandate a return to work (RTO). They collected RTO mandate data from over 100 firms in the S&P 500, worked backward to identify what drove the decision, and monitored and measured the firm’s results after employees returned to work.

Their findings are stark: no significant changes in financial performance for firm value after RTO mandates and significant declines in employee job satisfaction. As Ma told Fortune, “Overall, our results do not support these mandates to increase firm values. Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for firm bad performance.”

Or to justify spending more than $1B to double the size of its Beaverton, OR campus.

When you start blaming employees, you stop being a leader.

CEOs make and approve big, impactful, complex, high-stakes decisions. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. It’s also why, as Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.”

Let’s examine some of the decisions Mr. Donahue made or supported that maybe (definitely) had a more significant impact on innovation than working from home two days a week.

Ignoring customers, consumers, and the market: Nike has a swagger that occasionally strays into arrogance. They set trends, steer culture, and dictate the rules of the game. They also think that gives them the right to stop listening to athletes, retailers, and consumers, as evidenced by the recently revealed Team USA Track & Field uniforms, the decision to stop selling through major retailers like Macy’s and Olympia Sports, and invest more in “hype, limited releases, and old school retro drops” than the technology and community that has consumers flocking to smaller brands like Hoka and Brooks.

Laying off 2% of its workforce: Anyone who has ever been through a layoff senses it’s coming months before the announcement and the verdicts are rendered. Psychological safety, feeling safe in your environment, is a required element for risk-taking and innovation. It’s hard to feel safe when saying goodbye to 1500 colleagues (and wondering if/when you’ll join them).

Investing too much in the core: Speaking of safety, in uncertain times, it’s tempting to pour every resource into the core business because the ROI is “known.” Nike gave in to that temptation, and consumers and analysts noticed. Despite recent new product announcements like the Air Max DN, Pegasus Premium, and Pegasus 41, “analysts point out these ‘new’ innovations rely too much on existing franchises.”

Innovation is a leadership problem that only leaders can solve

Being a CEO or any other senior executive is hard. The past four years have been anything but ordinary, and running a business while navigating a global pandemic, multiple societal upheavals, two wars, and an uncertain economy is almost impossible.

Bosses blame. Leaders inspire.

Mr. Donohue just showed us which one he is. Which one are you?

One MORE thing

This is a losing battle, but STOP USING “DISRUPTIVE” INCORRECTLY!!!! “Disruptive Innovation,” as defined by Clayton Christensen, who literally coined the phrase, is an innovation that appeals to non-consumers and is cheaper and often lower quality than existing competitors.

Nike is a premium brand that makes premium shoes for premium athletes. Employees could spend 24/7/365 in the office, and Nike would never develop and launch a “boldly disruptive shoe.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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Time is a Flat Circle

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Jamie Dimon’s Comments on AI Just Proved It

Time is a Flat Circle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over and over again – forever.” –- Rusty Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, in True Detective

For the whole of human existence, we have created new things with no idea if, when, or how they will affect humanity, society, or business. New things can be a distraction, sucking up time and money and offering nothing in return. Or they can be a bridge to a better future.

As a leader, it’s your job to figure out which things are a bridge (i.e., innovation) and which things suck (i.e., shiny objects).

Innovation is a flat circle

The concept of eternal recurrence, that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, was first taught by Pythagoras (of Pythagorean theorem fame) in the 6^th century BC. It remerged (thereby proving its own truth) in Friedreich Nietzsche’s writings in the 19th century, then again in 2014’s first season of True Detective, and then again on Monday in Jamie Dimon’s Annual Letter to Shareholders.

Mr. Dimon, the CEO and Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co, first mentioned AI in his 2017 Letter to Shareholders. So, it wasn’t the mention of AI that was newsworthy. It was how it was mentioned. Before mentioning geopolitical risks, regulatory issues, or the recent acquisition of First Republic, Mr. Dimon spends nine paragraphs talking about AI, its impact on banking, and how JPMorgan Chase is responding.

Here’s a screenshot of the first two paragraphs:

JP Morgan Annual Letter 2017

He’s right. We don’t know “the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business—or how it will affect society at large.” We were similarly clueless in 1436 (when the printing press was invented), 1712 (when the first commercially successful steam engine was invented), 1882 (when electricity was first commercially distributed), and 1993 (when the World Wide Web was released to the public).

Innovation, it seems, is also a flat circle.

Our response doesn’t have to be.

Historically, people responded to innovation in one of two ways: panic because it’s a sign of the apocalypse or rejoice because it will be our salvation. And those reactions aren’t confined to just “transformational” innovations. In 2015, a visiting professor at Kings College London declared that the humble eraser (1770) was “an instrument of the devil” because it creates “a culture of shame about error. It’s a way of lying to the world, which says, ‘I didn’t make a mistake. I got it right the first time.’”

Neither reaction is true. Fortunately, as time passes, more people recognize that the truth is somewhere between the apocalypse and salvation and that we can influence what that “between” place is through intentional experimentation and learning.

JPMorgan started experimenting with AI over a decade ago, well before most of its competitors. As a result, they “now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud, and risk” that are producing quantifiable financial value for the company.

It’s not just JPMorgan. Organizations as varied as John Deere, BMW, Amazon, the US Department of Energy, Vanguard, and Johns Hopkins Hospital have been experimenting with AI for years, trying to understand if and how it could improve their operations and enable them to serve customers better. Some experiments worked. Some didn’t. But every company brave enough to try learned something and, as a result, got smarter and more confident about “the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business.”

You have free will. Use it to learn.

Cynics believe that time is a flat circle. Leaders believe it is an ever-ascending spiral, one in which we can learn, evolve, and influence what’s next. They also have the courage to act on (and invest in) that belief.

What do you believe? More importantly, what are you doing about it?

Image credit: Pixabay

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AI Strategy Should Have Nothing to do with AI

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AI Strategy Should Have Nothing to do with AI

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You’ve heard the adage that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Well, AI is the fruit bowl on the side of your Denny’s Grand Slam Strategy, and culture is eating that, too.

1 tool + 2 companies = 2 strategies

On an Innovation Leader call about AI, two people from two different companies shared stories about what happened when an AI notetaking tool unexpectedly joined a call and started taking notes. In both stories, everyone on the calls was surprised, uncomfortable, and a little bit angry that even some of the conversation was recorded and transcribed (understandable because both calls were about highly sensitive topics).

The storyteller from Company A shared that the senior executive on the call was so irate that, after the call, he contacted people in Legal, IT, and Risk Management. By the end of the day, all AI tools were shut down, and an extensive “ask permission or face termination” policy was issued.

Company B’s story ended differently. Everyone on the call, including senior executives and government officials, was surprised, but instead of demanding that the tool be turned off, they asked why it was necessary. After a quick discussion about whether the tool was necessary, when it would be used, and how to ensure the accuracy of the transcript, everyone agreed to keep the note-taker running. After the call, the senior executive asked everyone using an AI note-taker on a call to ask attendees’ permission before turning it on.

Why such a difference between the approaches of two companies of relatively the same size, operating in the same industry, using the same type of tool in a similar situation?

1 tool + 2 CULTURES = 2 strategies

Neither storyteller dove into details or described their companies’ cultures, but from other comments and details, I’m comfortable saying that the culture at Company A is quite different from the one at Company B. It is this difference, more than anything else, that drove Company A’s draconian response compared to Company B’s more forgiving and guiding one.

This is both good and bad news for you as an innovation leader.

It’s good news because it means that you don’t have to pour hours, days, or even weeks of your life into finding, testing, and evaluating an ever-growing universe of AI tools to feel confident that you found the right one.

It’s bad news because even if you do develop the perfect AI strategy, it won’t matter if you’re in a culture that isn’t open to exploration, learning, and even a tiny amount of risk-taking.

Curious whether you’re facing more good news than bad news? Start here.

8 culture = 8+ strategies

In 2018, Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, and his colleagues published “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture,” a meta-study of “more than 100 of the most commonly used social and behavior models [and] identified eight styles that distinguish a culture and can be measured. I’m a big fan of the model, having used it with clients and taught it to hundreds of executives, and I see it actively defining and driving companies’ AI strategies*.

Results (89% of companies): Achievement and winning

AI strategy: Be first and be right. Experimentation is happening on an individual or team level in an effort to gain an advantage over competitors and peers.

Caring (63%): Relationships and mutual trust

AI strategy: A slow, cautious, and collaborative approach to exploring and testing AI so as to avoid ruffling feathers

Order (15%): Respect, structure, and shared norms

AI strategy: Given the “ask permission, not forgiveness” nature of the culture, AI exploration and strategy are centralized in a single function, and everyone waits on the verdict

Purpose (9%): Idealism and altruism

AI strategy: Torn between the undeniable productivity benefits AI offers and the myriad ethical and sustainability issues involved, strategies are more about monitoring than acting.

Safety (8%): Planning, caution, and preparedness

AI strategy: Like Order, this culture takes a centralized approach. Unlike Order, it hopes that if it closes its eyes, all of this will just go away.

Learning (7%): Exploration, expansiveness, creativity

AI strategy: Slightly more deliberate and guided than Purpose cultures, this culture encourages thoughtful and intentional experimentation to inform its overall strategy

Authority (4%): Strength, decisiveness, and boldness

AI strategy: If the AI strategies from Results and Order had a baby, it would be Authority’s AI strategy – centralized control with a single-minded mission to win quickly

Enjoyment (2%): Fun and excitement

AI strategy: It’s a glorious free-for-all with everyone doing what they want. Strategies and guidelines will be set if and when needed.

What do you think?

Based on the story above, what culture best describes Company A? Company B?

What culture best describes your team or company? What about your AI strategy?

*Disclaimer. Culture is an “elusive lever” because it is based on assumptions, mindsets, social patterns, and unconscious actions. As a result, the eight cultures aren’t MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive), and multiple cultures often exist in a single team, function, and company. Bottom line, the eight cultures are a tool, not a law (and I glossed over a lot of stuff from the report)

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Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

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The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and nowhere is that more true than in innovation.

Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

That’s one of the insights I took away from InnoLead’s Q1 report on corporate innovation priorities. The report is an eye-opening look at the impact of AI on corporate innovation as experienced by corporate entrepreneurs themselves. But before deep diving into that topic, the report’s authors shared intriguing data about member companies’ innovation structure, leadership engagement, organizational connections, and results. Nestled amongst the charts were several that, when taken together, got my Spidey senses tingling.

61.0% of innovation teams are “directly under a high-visibility leader with a broad company focus.”

This is great because innovation needs senior leaders’ support and active engagement to survive, let alone survive for long enough to produce meaningful results. Add this to the fact that 45% of senior leadership teams frequently discuss the “progress and value of the innovation program,” and all signs point to innovation as a strategic priority.

But (you knew there was a but, didn’t you)…

If “broad company focus” means “no P&L responsibility,” we have a problem. In every for-profit company I’ve worked for and with, people with P&L responsibility have greater power, influence, and access to resources than people without a P&L. This division may not feel fair, but it makes sense – the people who bring in profit and revenue will always be more influential than people who represent “cost centers.”

You can see the impact of P&L owners who are, understandably, focused entirely on delivering short-term results throughout the report – 75% of companies have shifted their focus more towards near-term priorities, and 61% shifted their innovation portfolio away from Horizon 3 (also known as radical, breakthrough, or disruptive innovation).

As for all those discussions, it’d be great if they focused on walking the talk of innovation. But suppose it’s only innovation platitudes or, worse, questioning innovation’s ROI. That doesn’t bode well for the “high-visibility leader with broad company focus,” the innovation team, or the company’s culture.

71.2% of innovation teams’ customers or business partners are unaware of the team’s existence, don’t engage, or engage only occasionally.

Welcome to Innovation Island! Where the cool people work on cool things in cool offices while all you drones slave away doing the same thing you’ve always done and making the money that pays for the cool people to do cool things in their cool offices.

I’m sure this isn’t the message the innovation team intends to send, but it’s the one received by most organizations.

When arguing for Innovation Island, managers often point to the organizational antibodies likely to swarm and kill H3/radical/breakthrough innovation and even some H2/adjacent innovations. They’re right, and those innovations must be “protected.” But not every innovation needs protection. H2 and certainly H1 innovations, where most portfolios are now, should be shared with the core business because the core business will eventually run them.

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that innovation teams don’t seem to be reaching out to others in the organization. Like the P&L owners they report to, people in the core business are busy running the business and generating revenue. Very few have the time or energy to seek out the innovation team to discuss and explore innovation. Companies that want to build a culture of innovation need to turn their innovators into evangelists, not residents of an island connected to the mainland by a single drawbridge.

23.4% of innovation teams are considered outsiders or actively undermined by other functions and business units.

This may not sound bad, but add to it the 55.0% that are “somewhat integrated with occasional collaboration” with other departments and business units, and you may be tempted to believe that Innovation Island would be wise to invest in a surface-to-air missile defense system.

Sadly, this perception of the innovation team as “The Others” isn’t surprising when considering that the most important tactic for building a relationship between innovation and the functions or business units is already having strong relationships and interpersonal trust (75.3% of respondents). The least effective (4.7% of respondents) is “writing down shared objectives and expectations.” So, no, the email you sent is not enough to win friends and influence people.

Bottom line

Well-intended companies appoint a senior executive to lead the innovation team because they’ve been told that doing so is powerful proof that innovation is a strategic priority. They hire outsiders to inject new thinking into the organization because they know that “what got you here won’t get you there.” They cordon the team and their work off from the rest of the organization because they read that separation is essential to preserving innovation’s disruptive nature.

But if the senior executive doesn’t have the organizational power and influence that comes with P&L ownership, the team doesn’t have strong personal relationships with others in the business, and other functions and business units don’t know the team exists or how to interact with it, innovation will go nowhere.

But that’s better than where it could go.

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