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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

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

The Coaching Opportunity

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

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

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

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

Hitting Your Pause Button

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

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

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

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

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

What Does Pause-Power Involve?

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

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

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

Radical Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Valuable Toolkit and Habit

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

Developing pause power involves six simple vital steps and questions:

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

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

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

What can I learn from this situation?

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

What can I learn from this situation?

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

What are some of my options for change?

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

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

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

What will I do next?

Engaging in a Looking Lab

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

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

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

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

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

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

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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How to Make Virtual Experiences Feel Real

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Designing for Presence

LAST UPDATED: December 6, 2025 at 11:05AM

How to Make Virtual Experiences Feel Real

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In the world of Human-Centered Innovation, the most powerful tool is often one that can induce a profound psychological shift. Virtual Reality (VR) promises this, but only if it can successfully convince the brain that the experience is real. This is the concept of Presence, and it is defined by the degree to which a user’s consciousness ignores the physical world and accepts the virtual world as the immediate, sensory reality.

Why does this matter for business strategy? When presence is achieved, training is dramatically more effective, collaboration fosters stronger empathy, and therapeutic interventions yield lasting results. When the brain is truly present, the resulting learning and behavioral changes are transferred more reliably back into the real world. We must unlearn the focus on simple immersion and embrace the deep, psychological design principles that create Authentic Presence.

Visual representation: A diagram illustrating the key factors contributing to Virtual Presence: Fidelity, Consistency, and Interactivity.

The Three Pillars of Authentic Presence

Designing for presence requires mastering three non-negotiable psychological and technical pillars. A failure in any one can shatter the illusion of reality, breaking the user’s immersion and effectiveness.

1. Sensorimotor Consistency (No Sickness, No Lag)

The brain’s biggest alarm system is vestibular mismatch (the feeling of motion sickness). If the visual input (seeing motion) does not perfectly match the inner ear’s input (feeling motion), the sense of presence collapses. Therefore, the absolute priority is low-latency tracking (minimal lag) and a high, stable frame rate. When designing a physical training environment, any lag in hand tracking or head movement instantly reminds the user they are wearing a headset. Consistency is not a feature; it is the foundation of reality.

2. Interpersonal Fidelity (The Uncanny Valley of Avatars)

Presence is intensely social. In collaborative VR environments, your avatar and the avatars of your colleagues must move beyond cartoony representations toward Interpersonal Fidelity. This means realistic eye contact, micro-expressions, and hand gestures. The moment you look at a colleague’s avatar and their eyes don’t track your movement correctly — the Uncanny Valley — the emotional connection and, thus, the sense of co-presence are lost. True innovation in virtual meetings must prioritize realistic social cues to enable Authentic Collaboration.

3. Real-Time Physical Agency (The Power to Affect the World)

Presence is cemented when the user can act on the virtual world and receive an immediate, consistent, and logical response. This is Physical Agency. If you reach out to grab a virtual pen and your hand passes straight through it, the brain registers the environment as fake. Every object the user is expected to interact with must have realistic physics, weight, and haptics (via controllers). The ability to truly manipulate the environment is what transforms passive viewing into active engagement and learning.

Case Study 1: High-Stakes Crisis Training

Challenge: Ineffective Role-Playing for Emergency Responders

A national fire and rescue service (“FirstResponse”) found traditional simulation and role-playing exercises to be costly, logistically complex, and emotionally insufficient. Trainees knew they were “faking it,” leading to limited transfer of knowledge when faced with a real-world crisis.

Presence Intervention: Emotional Immersion

FirstResponse implemented VR training for high-stakes emergencies (e.g., collapsed buildings, active hazards). The design team focused heavily on Sensorimotor Consistency (perfect tracking and low lag to prevent sickness during fast movement) and, critically, added immersive audio cues (the sound of debris falling, realistic panic, and muffled radio communications).

  • Trainees reported experiencing the fight-or-flight response identical to real-world scenarios, a direct result of strong presence.
  • The virtual environment allowed for failure consequence (e.g., virtual casualty count), which built muscle memory for managing extreme emotional stress — a key learning outcome impossible to simulate safely otherwise.

The Innovation Impact:

Because the brain experienced the virtual environment as real (Presence), the cognitive and emotional stress responses were authentic. This led to a measured 40% reduction in response time errors during subsequent real-world exercises. The innovation successfully focused on emotional fidelity to drive lasting behavioral change.

Case Study 2: Architectural Co-Design and Empathy

Challenge: Misalignment and Lack of Empathy Between Architects and Clients

A global architectural firm (“FutureBuild”) struggled with design reviews, often finding that clients couldn’t visualize blueprints, leading to late-stage, costly change orders. Furthermore, architects lacked empathy for how a space would truly feel to a non-expert.

Presence Intervention: Shared Physical Agency

FutureBuild adopted shared, mixed-reality co-design sessions. Both the architect and the client (as realistic avatars) could walk through a holographic projection of the building on the physical table.

  • The system prioritized Interpersonal Fidelity by accurately tracking head gaze and pointing gestures between the two people.
  • They emphasized Real-Time Physical Agency: the architect could virtually grab a wall and move it, and the client could “paint” a surface with a different texture, instantly seeing the change.

The Innovation Impact:

By giving the client physical agency within the design, the sense of co-presence allowed for a level of communication and feedback impossible on a flat screen. Clients identified problems (e.g., “The ceiling feels too low when I stand here”) that were based on true spatial feeling, not just interpretation of lines on a page. The firm saw a 60% reduction in late-stage design modifications because they successfully utilized shared reality to accelerate mutual understanding and Human-Centered Decision Making.

Conclusion: Presence as the ROI of Spatial Computing

The return on investment (ROI) for spatial computing is not measured in hardware units sold, but in the intensity of Presence achieved. When you design a virtual experience, you are not building a game; you are constructing a temporary, alternate reality. To be effective, this reality must adhere to the neurological laws of the human mind.

Leaders must mandate that their innovation teams unlearn the focus on simple graphical output and prioritize the three pillars: Sensorimotor Consistency, Interpersonal Fidelity, and Real-Time Physical Agency. When the technology fades into the background, and the reality of the environment takes over, Authentic Presence is achieved—and that is where true, lasting change begins.

“The goal of VR is not to simulate reality; it is to create a reality that is perceived as authentic.”

Frequently Asked Questions About Designing for Presence

1. What is “Presence” in the context of virtual experiences?

Presence is the subjective, psychological phenomenon where a user’s consciousness fully accepts the virtual environment as their immediate, sensory reality, causing them to temporarily forget their actual physical surroundings. It is the key factor enabling effective learning and behavioral transfer from the virtual world to the real world.

2. Why is Sensorimotor Consistency the most critical pillar for Presence?

Sensorimotor Consistency (low lag, high frame rate) is critical because vestibular mismatch — when visual movement doesn’t match inner ear motion — immediately triggers the brain’s alarm systems, causing motion sickness and shattering the illusion of presence. If the brain detects inconsistency, it cannot accept the virtual environment as real.

3. What is the “Uncanny Valley” effect in VR design?

The Uncanny Valley refers to the unsettling feeling that occurs when avatars or synthetic human representations are *almost* perfectly realistic but have small, subtle flaws (like poor eye tracking or delayed micro-expressions). These flaws break Interpersonal Fidelity and cause emotional discomfort, instantly destroying the sense of “co-presence” in a shared virtual space.

Your first step toward designing for Presence: Hold a review session for your existing VR/MR training program. Instead of asking, “Did the user complete the task?” ask, “Did the user physically flinch, hesitate, or exhibit any signs of motion or social discomfort?” Use these physical cues to identify and eliminate the moment where Presence was broken.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Unsplash

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