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Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats

Why Successful Innovators Are Curious Like Cats

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our previous blog, we shared how consciousness, imagination, and curiosity are the fundamental precursors to creativity, invention, and innovation. Where consciousness encapsulates our states and qualities of mind, our capacity for imagination and curiosity are the necessary states of mind that stimulate creativity, all of which propel successful innovators to bring the new to the world differently.

Yet, according to a recent article by the Singularity Hub “OpenAI’s GPT-4 Scores in the Top 1% of Creative Thinking”:

“Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious—and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings—and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines.”

We have a “Sputnik moment” to further our creative abilities

Revealing that their recent study into the striking originality of AI is an indication, that AI-based creativity – along with examples of both its promise and peril – is likely just beginning.

“The creative abilities now realized by AI may provide a “Sputnik moment” for educators and others interested in furthering human creative abilities, including those who see creativity as an essential condition of individual, social, and economic growth”.

  • What if we, as humans, could compete with, and perhaps even complement, AI-based creativity and become successful innovators?
  • How might we spark our imagination and curiosity to gain new knowledge that reduces ignorance and sustains our relevance to benefit all of humanity?

How does this link to cats – successful innovators are like cats!

As an animal lover, and the second servant to two sublime household pet cats, I have always wondered why our cats are so curious, always exploring and getting into everything, and yet are also well known for having at least nine lives.

This, in many ways, is a similar experience of many successful innovators, who apply their capacity for imagination and curiosity to explore and navigate the edges of the system and wander into wonder into surprising states of boundarylessness.

In a LinkedIn blog, David Miller shares that:

“Leonardo Da Vinci taught us that curiosity is the basis for creativity and innovation. The more relentless our curiosity, the more likely we will be innovative and creative, and possibly one step closer to perfection. If we want to build innovative organizations, we should start by creating curious organizations which nurture and enhance the curiosity of people”.

  • Exploration and discovery

According to a post in Quora, “Why are cats so curious” the common saying that “curiosity killed the cat,” is not entirely accurate and states that:

“Cats are naturally curious animals, who also have a strong survival instinct that helps them avoid dangerous situations. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved to have a powerful curiosity that drives them to explore and discover new things”.

  • Imagination and curiosity

Suggesting that intentionally applying our imagination and curiosity, potentially enables us humans to become successful innovators, who can both survive and thrive, in today’s globally hyperconnected, constantly uncertain and continuously changing VUCA/BANI world, in ways that benefit all of humanity.

Where we have an opportunity to focus and harness our imagination and curiosity toward becoming successful innovators who cultivate and exploit their curiosity as a radical force.

Curiosity as a radical force for unforeseen bonuses

According to the author, Philip Ball in his book Curiosity – How Science Became Interested in Everything curiosity is a radical force, introduced in the mid-sixteenth century, fuelled within scientists and philosophers with a compulsion to understand why and how.

Enabling curiosity to become the engine that drives both knowledge and power, reduces ignorance and has become a source of “unforeseen practical bonuses” in all of the sciences, and innovations, since then.

Curiosity and creativity spur innovation

Curiosity is derived from the Latin “cura” which means to care. In a sense, this potentially makes successful innovators and innovative entrepreneurs “curators” of curiosities and strangeness.

Richard Freyman, in an article on curiosity, in the FS blog, states that curiosity has to:

“Do with people wondering what makes something do something. And then to discover, if you try to get answers, that they are related to each other – that thing that makes the wind make the waves, that the motion of water is like the motion of air is like the motion of sand. The fact that things have common features. It turns out more and more universal. What we are looking for is how everything works. What makes everything work”.

Someone who evokes and cares for what exists now and for what could exist possibly exists in the future by:

  • Demonstrating the mental acuity, fitness, and readiness to find the peculiar and the unusual in what surrounds them, and an ability to break up familiarities and seek new associations and unlikely connections,
  • Disregarding convention and traditional hierarchies, and allowing their minds to wander into spaces that are unknown, invisible, and intangible,
  • Harnessing their attention and patience to evoke, provoke, incubate, and generate deep and bold questions that they listen to, to result in profound* insights.

What can successful innovators learn from cats?

A recent blog post, Why Are Cats So Curious? The Science Behind Cat Curiosity, explains that a cat’s insatiable curiosity develops as a result of its survival instinct. Cats have mental acuity and fitness, because like successful innovators, they are:

  • Incredibly intelligent, and have the ability to learn from experience and remember it for years.
  • Opportunistic creatures, and are always on the lookout for a chance to explore their environments.
  • Attentive and observant, and have a heightened sense of awareness and constantly observe their surroundings, and listen deeply, to attend to, and discover any new, or missing objects or movements in their environment.
  • Always on the move, and are driven by their need for constant exploration and mental stimulation.
  • Protective in investigating any potential threats to their own and others close to them.

How to cultivate your curiosity like Leonardo De Vinci

The creative brain balances intense focus with relaxed states like daydreaming and the time and space for mind wondering and wandering. Doing this activates both our imagination and curiosity and guides any problem-solving efforts with emergent, divergent, and convergent breakthrough ideas and illuminating insights.

  1. Active minds, and are always asking powerful questions and searching for answers in their minds, through mind wandering and mind wondering in expectation and anticipation of new ideas and increased knowledge related to their questions.

They are grounded, mindful, and attentive in observing and recognizing ideas when they emerge.

Be a successful innovator like Da Vinci ask bold and difficult questions, listen deeply, and use the answers to develop your knowledge, and to inform your creative ideas for invention and innovation:

  • How can I see this situation with fresh eyes?
  1. Open minds, and come from not knowing, are always searching, sensing, and discovering new worlds and possibilities that are normally not visible, in that they are often hidden behind or below the surface of normal life.

They are open to sensing, perceiving, and illuminating possibilities to crystalize new ideas.

Be a successful innovator, like Da Vinci, and keep notebooks and a daily journal by retreating, reflecting, and recording your time mind wandering and wondering in your search for insights and answers to things you don’t yet understand.

  • What might I be assuming about……?
  1. Flexibility, adaptability, provocation and playfulness, and challenging routines, seek excitement, new adventures, and a variety of things that attract attention, increase knowledge and play, and search for a more meaningful life.

They seek learning as a fun way of expanding and applying both knowledge and imagination, as a mechanism for co-creating ideas, staying relevant, and being informed and innovating in ways that illuminate people’s hearts and minds towards effecting positive change.

Be a successful innovator, like Da Vinci and ask provocative and disruptive questions, such as: “Why do shells exist on top of mountains, why is lightning visible immediately, but the sound of thunder takes longer to travel? How does a bird sustain itself up in the air”?

  • What am I missing? What matters most?

Increasing our knowledge for the benefit of humanity

Like cats, and like Albert Einstein, we can apply our imagination and curiosity and become successful innovators who explore and navigate the edges of the system, wander into wonder and surprising states of boundarylessness, in ways that benefit all of humanity, and make cultivating and harness your imagination and curiosity a daily habit:

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.” – Life Magazine 1955

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, starting October 3, 2023.

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. Find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Four Questions That Make Better Innovators

Four Questions That Make Better Innovators

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he later told me.

“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembered. What he meant was that it was only when he got out and talked to customers that he could really get a handle on the business.

We like to think that innovation is about ideas, but it’s really about solving problems. In order to surface problems, you need to ask questions, which is why Steve’s businesses started doing better when he got out of the building to talk to customers. The better questions you ask, the better problems you can identify. Here are four questions that will help you do that.

1.Why?

Problems come in all shapes and sizes. Some problems are relatively minor and can be worked around. Others are more fundamental and represent serious impediments to effective operations. Clearly, the more fundamental the problem you can identify, the greater the impact you can create by solving it.

One very effective technique to do that is called the 5 Whys. For example, when NY Times columnist Charles Duhigg noticed that however much he and his wife wanted to get home on time to eat dinner with their kids, they inevitably ended up getting caught up at work and arriving home late, he began to ask “why?”

The first “why” of he and his wife arriving late to dinner was because they had work to finish. Why? Because there were pesky little tasks, like responding to emails, that they needed to get done. Why? Because they couldn’t get to them during the day. Why? Because they arrived at work just before their first meeting. Why? Because they were busy getting the kids ready for school.

By the fifth “why” he realized that the problem wasn’t so much that they got caught up at work, but that it took too long to get the kids ready for school. The conundrum was solved by having the kids lay out their clothes for school the night before. The Duhiggs soon began having family dinners regularly.

It’s an incredibly powerful technique. Each why takes you a bit deeper into the problem and, as you begin to identify root causes, you’ll be able to come up with more effective solutions.

2. Where’s The Monkey?

When I work with executives, they often have a breakthrough idea they are excited about. They begin to tell me what a great opportunity it is and how they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on it. However, when I begin to dig a little deeper it appears that there is some big barrier to making it happen. When I try to ask about that, they just shut down.

One reason that this happens is that there is a fundamental tension between innovation and operations. Operational executives tend to focus on identifying clear benchmarks to track progress. That’s fine for a typical project, but when you are trying to do something truly new and different, you have to directly confront the unknown.

At Google X, the tech giant’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

The problem is that most people start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.

3. How Will We Fail?

Innovation is not a mere intellectual endeavor. It’s highly emotional. You thrive on your hopes and dreams. That’s what keeps you going and helps you block out doubts, both your own and those of others. Failure is just not something you want to contemplate. It’s just too painful.

Yet thinking seriously about failure can actually help you succeed and there are two techniques that can help you do that productively. The first, called pre-mortems, asks you to imagine that the project has failed and figure out why it happened. The second, called red teaming sets up an independent team to find flaws in the idea.

The idea isn’t to figure out ways to kill the project, but to identify holes to be plugged. For example, when the Obama administration thought it had identified Osama bin Laden’s hideout, it set up a red team to challenge the evidence. Because the red team had no emotional attachment to the initial analysis, they were able to look at it far more objectively.

As we now know, the raid on bin Laden’s compound went ahead, but the red team was able to raise important questions that strengthened the plan. To successfully innovate, you need to do the same. Identify every potential for failure that you can so that you can address those issues before going forward.

4. What Kind Of Problem Are We Trying To Solve?

Go to any innovation conference and you will undoubtedly see a wide variety of innovation experts championing their favored strategy and each will have stories that will amaze you. Design thinking, disruptive innovation, lean startup methods and open innovation have all become buzzwords because they have produced real results.

Yet none of them is a cure-all. Each performs well with some classes of problems, but not so well in others. That’s why in my book, Mapping Innovation, I advocated using the whole innovation toolbox. The trick is to match the right type of problem with the right type of solution.

Innovation Matrix Greg Satell

The truth is that there is no one “true” path to innovation. Many organizations get stuck because they end up locking themselves into a single strategy. They find something that works and say, “this is how we innovate” and end up trying to apply essentially the same solution no matter what the problem is. Eventually, that ends badly.

That’s why it’s so important to ask good questions. Every problem is, to some extent, unique. You can’t simply assume you know the solution beforehand. That’s why Steve Blank’s businesses failed when he stayed “in the building” and prospered when he got out of it. If you want to become a better innovator. Ask better questions.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Questions Asked But Not Always Answered

Questions Asked But Not Always Answered

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

This seems like a repeat of the last time we set a project launch date without regard for the work content. Do you see it that way?

This person certainly looks the part and went to the right school, but they have not done this work before. Why do you think we should hire them even though they don’t have the experience?

The last time we ran a project like this it took two years to complete. Why do you think this one will take six months?

If it didn’t work last time, why do you think it will work this time?

Why do you think we can do twice the work we did last year while reducing our headcount?

The work content, timeline, and budget are intimately linked. Why do you think it’s possible to increase the work content, pull in the timeline, and reduce the budget?

Seven out of thirteen people have left the team. How many people have to leave before you think we have a problem?

Yes, we’ve had great success with that approach over the last decade, but our most recent effort demonstrated that our returns are diminishing. Why do you want to do that again?

If you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t you do it?

Why do you think it’s okay to add another project when we’re behind on all our existing projects?

Customers are buying the competitive technology. Why don’t you believe that they’re now better than we are?

This work is critical to our success, yet we don’t have the skills sets, capacity, or budget to hire it out. Why are you telling us you will get it done?

This problem seems to fit squarely within your span of responsibility. Why do you expect other teams to fix it for you?

I know a resource gap of this magnitude seems unbelievable but is what the capacity model shows. Why don’t you believe the capacity model?

We have no one to do that work. Why do you think it’s okay to ask the team to sign up for something they can’t pull off?

Based on the survey results, the culture is declining. Why don’t you want to acknowledge that?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Five Questions All Leaders Should Always Be Asking

Five Questions All Leaders Should Always Be Asking

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Leaders don’t need to have all the answers.

That sounds counterintuitive. There is a lot of pressure on leaders to have the right answers and to solve problems that team members can’t solve on their own. In fact, most leaders were promoted into a leadership role because they had many more of the right answers than others in the organization. And the further up the hierarchy you go, the bigger the problems and bigger the expectations for answers.

But the more complex work gets, and the more complex problems get, the harder it is to know all the answers. So, it’s okay if you don’t know all the answers. But leaders should always be seeking out answers. To lead well, there’s a few answers leaders should always be working to find.

Which means there’s a few questions leaders should always be asking. In this article, we’ll outline the top five of those questions.

1. What are our real priorities?

The first question leaders should always be asking is “what are our real priorities?” Teams are tasked with all sorts of projects and objectives. And the reward for getting those projects done well is often…more projects. Doing new tasks well results in people asking you to do more work. And when new tasks come up, many teams succumb to the tyranny of the urgent and focus their attention on the newest tasks assigned. But that can often mean diverting focus from what are actually the most important tasks. In addition, when circumstances change or when new problems arise, it can change what tasks matter most. So, leaders need to be asking—and re-asking—what the real priorities are often and then making that answer clear to their team. That way the team stays committed to what matters—and not just what’s new.

2. Where are our potential roadblocks?

The second question leaders should always be asking is “where are our potential roadblocks?” Once you know what the real priorities are, ask what could derail your team from achieving those roadblocks. The concept of leader as roadblock remover is a simple one rooted in trust. Great leaders trust that, once their people know what they need to do, those same people will also know best how to do it. That means a leader’s job isn’t telling them how to work better, it’s finding the barriers that are keeping people from doing their best work and removing them. If you’ve built trust and rapport with your team, they’ll likely just tell you. But the nature of your role as a leader also means you can anticipate some barriers based on what else you see happening in the organization or your environment. But roadblocks can pop up unexpectedly, so don’t just ask once. Keep asking.

3. What am I not hearing?

The third question leaders should always be asking is “what am I not hearing.” There’s a reason the warning “don’t shoot the messenger” became a cliché. It’s because many leaders shoot the messenger. And even if they don’t, many team members fear of being shot keeps them from sharing openly. (I hope it’s clear we’re using “shoot” as a metaphor here…we do not endorse firearms as a management tactic.) That means there’s likely certain bits of information that team members know that you’re completely unaware of. That can undermine your decision-making and your leadership. And reversing that trends starts by asking regularly what you may not be hearing or by extension who you’re not hearing from. Then take the time to amplify those unheard voices and signal your consideration for what they shared. That not only keeps you more informed in the short term but also makes it less likely you’re not hearing important information in the long term.

4. Who isn’t being challenged?

The fourth question leaders should always be asking is “who isn’t being challenged?” People tend to be most motivated and engaged in a task when the demands of the job match their skills and capacity. Too much of a challenge can lead to stress and burnout. But too little of a challenge can lead to boredom and…burnout. And while members of your team may have entered their role in the sweet spot between demands and ability, many of them have likely grown and improved their skills…which means they might be falling out of the sweet spot and being less challenged. Great leaders are proactive not only in creating new growth opportunities for their people, but also new challenges or new projects to keep them in the sweet spot of engagement.

5. How is our motivation?

The fifth question leaders should always be asking is “how is our motivation?” The attitudes and emotions of a team and its members can change quickly, and so can their collective level of motivation. So, leaders need to be monitoring motivation levels constantly and finding ways to keep motivation inside the ideal range. Especially for teams on the front-lines and in the middle of the organization, the flowery speeches and mission statements that come from senior leadership are not enough to keep motivation high all the time. When the day-to-day tasks get demanding, it’s hard to even remember how one person’s work makes a difference. But this is where team leaders are most important. It’s up to the team leader to make that connection and be constantly reminding the team why their work matters.

In the end, people want to do work that matters and that challenges them to grow. And that’s what makes these five questions so important. Because the answers to these questions, even though they change over time, provide leaders with the knowledge they need to help their team know their work matters and help their team find new challenges. And that helps their team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on January 9, 2023.

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2022

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2022Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are November’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Human-Centered Design and Innovation — by Braden Kelley
  2. Four Ways to Overcome Resistance to Change — by Greg Satell
  3. What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do — by Mike Shipulski
  4. 5 Simple Steps for Launching Game-Changing New Products — by Teresa Spangler
  5. Why Small Teams Kick Ass — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Crabby Innovation Opportunity — by Braden Kelley
  7. Music Can Make You a More Effective Leader — by Shep Hyken
  8. Lobsters and the Wisdom of Ignoring Your Customers — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Asking the Wrong Questions Gets You the Wrong Answers — by Greg Satell
  10. Brewing a Better Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in October that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last two years:

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Why Stupid Questions Are Important to Innovation

Why Stupid Questions Are Important to Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

16 year-old girl Gracie Cunningham created a firestorm recently when she posted a video to TikTok asking “is math real?” More specifically, she wanted to know why ancient mathematicians came up with algebraic concepts such as “y=mx+b.” “What would you need it for?” she asked, when they didn’t even have plumbing.

The video went viral on twitter, gathering millions of views and the social media universe immediately pounced, with many ridiculing how stupid it was. Mathematicians and scientists, however, felt otherwise and remarked how profound her questions were. Cornell’s Steve Strogatz even sent her a thoughtful answer to her question.

We often overlook the value of simple questions, because we think intelligence has something to do with ability to recite rote facts. Yet intellect is not about knowing all the answers, but in asking better questions. That’s how we expand knowledge and gain deeper understanding. In fact, the most profound answers often come from seemingly silly questions.

What Would It Be Like to Ride on a Bolt of Lightning?

Over a century ago, a teenage boy not unlike Gracie Cunningham asked a question that was seemingly just as silly as hers. He wanted to know what it would be like to ride on a bolt of lightning shining a lantern forward. Yet much like Gracie’s, his question belied a deceptive profundity. You see, a generation earlier, the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his famous equations which established that the speed of light was constant.

To understand why the question was so important, think about riding on a train that’s traveling at 40 miles an hour and tossing a ball forward at 40 miles an hour. To you, the ball appears to be traveling at 40 miles an hour, but to someone standing still outside the train the ball would appear to be going 80 miles an hour (40+40).

So now you can see the problem with riding on a bolt of lightning with a lantern. According to the principle by which the ball on the train appears to be traveling at 80 miles an hour, the light from the lantern should be traveling at twice the speed of light. But according to Maxwell’s equations, the speed of light is fixed.

It took Albert Einstein 10 years to work it all out, but in 1905, he published his theory of special relativity, which stated that, while the speed of light is indeed constant, time and space are relative. As crazy as that sounds, you only need to take a drive in your car to prove it’s true. GPS satellites are calibrated according to Einstein’s equations, so if you get to where you want to go you have, in a certain sense, proved the special theory of relativity.

A bit later Einstein asked another seemingly silly question about what it would be like to travel in an elevator in space, which led him to his general theory of relativity.

Who Shaves the Barber’s Beard?

Around the time young Albert Einstein was thinking about riding on a bolt of lightning, others were pondering an obscure paradox about a barber, which went something like this:

If the barber shaves every man who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber?

If he shaves himself, he violates the statement and if he doesn’t shave himself, he also violates the statement.

Again, like Gracie’s question, the barber’s paradox seems a bit silly and childish. In reality it is a more colloquial version of Russell’s paradox about sets that are members of themselves, which shook the foundations of mathematics a century ago. Statements, such as 2+2=4, are supposed to be either true or false. If contradictions could exist, it would represent a massive hole at the center of logic.

Eventually, the crisis came to a head and David Hilbert, the greatest mathematician of the age, created a program of questions that, if answered in the affirmative, would resolve the dilemma. To everyone’s surprise, in short order, a young scholar named Kurt Gödel would publish his incompleteness theorems, which showed that a logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both.

Put more simply, Gödel proved that every logical system would always crash. It was only a matter of time. Logic would remain broken forever. However, there was a silver lining to it all. A few years later, Alan Turing would build on Gödel’s work in his paper on computability, which itself would usher in the new era of modern computing.

Why Can’t Our Immune System Kill Cancer Cells?

The idea that our immune system could attack cancer cells doesn’t seem that silly on the surface. After all, it not only regularly kills other pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses and, in some cases, such as with autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, even attacks our own cells. Why would it ignore tumors?

Yet as Charles Graeber explains in his recent book, The Breakthrough, for decades most of the medical world dismissed the notion. Yes, there had been a few scattered cases in which cancer patients who had a severe infection had seen their tumors disappear, but every time they tried to design an actual cancer therapy based on immune response it failed miserably.

The mystery was eventually solved by a scientist named Jim Allison who, in 1995, had an epiphany. Maybe, he thought, that the problem wasn’t that our immune system can’t identify and attack cancer cells, but rather that the immune response is impeded somehow. He figured if he could block that process, it would revolutionize cancer care.

Today, cancer immunotherapy is considered to be the 4th pillar of cancer treatment and nobody questions whether our immune system can be deployed to fight cancer. Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize for his work in 2018.

The Power of a Question

Answers are easy. They resolve matters. Questions are harder. They point out gaps in our knowledge and inadequacies in our understanding. They make us uncomfortable. That’s why we are so apt to dismiss them altogether. So we can go about our business unhindered.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that young Gracie Cunningham’s TikTok garnered such strong reactions. It’s much easier to dismiss questions as silly than to take them on. That’s why Einstein was reduced to working in a patent office rather than at a university, why so many dismissed Russell’s paradox as meaningless and why Jim Allison had doors shut in his face for three years before he found a company willing to invest in his idea.

Yet what should also be obvious by now is that there is enormous value in raising questions that challenge things that we think we already know. Before questions were raised, it seemed obvious that time and space are absolute, that logical statements are either true or false and that our immune system can’t fight cancer.

The truth is that great innovators are not necessarily smarter, harder working or more ambitious than anyone else, but rather those who are constantly looking for new questions to ask and new problems to solve.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Taking Personal Responsibility – Seeing Self as Cause

Taking Personal Responsibility – Seeing Self as Cause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last two blogs on Taking Personal Responsibility, we stated that when people aren’t taking personal responsibility, they cannot be accountable, they will fail in their jobs, and their teams, and fail to grow as individuals and as leaders. Taking personal responsibility is an especially crucial capability to develop self-awareness and self-regulation skills in the decade of both disruption and transformation. It all starts with seeing self as the cause of what happens to us, rather than baling it on the effects events and problems have on us! Where people can learn to recognize the structures at play in their lives and change them so that they can create what they really want to create in their lives, teams, or organizations.

In the last two blogs, we shared a range of tips for shifting people’s location, by creating a line of choice, to help them shift from being below the line and blaming others for their reactive response, to getting above the line quickly.  Through shifting their language from “you, they and them” to “I, we and us” and bravely disrupting and calling out people when they do slip below the line. How doing this allows people to also systemically shift across the maturity continuum, from dependence to independence and ultimately towards interdependence.

In a recent newsletter Otto Scharmer, from the Presencing Institute states “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”.

Creating the place – the sacred pause

When I made a significant career change from a design and marketing management consultant to becoming a corporate trainer, one of the core principles I was expected to teach to senior corporate managers and leaders was taking personal responsibility.

Little knowing, that at the end of the workshop, going back to my hotel room and beating myself up, for all of the “wrongs” in the delivery of the learning program, was totally out of integrity with this core principle.

Realising that when people say – those that teach need to learn, I had mistakenly thought that I had to take responsibility for enacting the small imperfections I had delivered during the day, by berating myself, making myself “wrong” and through below the line self-depreciation!

Where I perfectly acted out the harmful process of self-blame, rather than rationally assessing the impact of each small imperfection, shifting to being above the line where I could intentionally apply the sacred pause:

  • Hit my pause button to get present, accept my emotional state,
  • Connect with what really happened to unpack the reality of the situation and eliminate my distortions around it,
  • Check-in and acknowledge how I was truly feeling about what happened,
  • Acknowledge some of the many things that I had done really well,
  • Ask myself what is the outcome/result I want for participants next program?
  • Ask myself what can I really learn from this situation?
  • Consciously choose what to do differently the next time I ran the program.

I still often find myself struggling with creating the Sacred Space between Stimulus and Response and have noticed in my global coaching practice, that many of my well-intentioned clients struggle with this too.

The impact of the last two and a half years of working at home, alone, online, with minimal social interactions and contact, has caused many of them to languish in their reactivity, and for some of them, into drowning in a very full emotional boat, rather than riding the wave of disruptive change.

Being the creative cause

In our work at ImagineNation, whether we help people, leaders and teams adapt, innovate and grow through disruption, their ability to develop true self-awareness and be above the line is often the most valuable and fundamental skill set they develop.

It then enables us to make the distinction that creating is completely different from reacting or responding to the circumstances people find themselves in by applying the sacred pause.

When people shift towards seeing self as the cause they are able to create and co-create what they want in their lives, teams or organization by learning to create by creating, starting with asking the question:

  • What result do you want to create in your life?
  • What is the reality of your current situation?

This creates a state of tension, it is this tension that seeks resolution.

In his ground-breaking book The Path of Least Resistance Robert Fritz, goes on to describe and rank these desired results as “Fundamental Choices, Primary Choices, and Secondary Choices.”

Because there is one thing that we can all do right and is totally in our control – is to shift towards seeing self as the cause and make a set of conscious choices, with open hearts, minds, and wills, as to how we think, feel and choose to act.

“We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.”

We all have the options and choices in taking responsibility, empowering ourselves and others to be imaginative and creative, and using the range of rapid changes, ongoing disruption, uncertainty, and the adverse pandemic consequences, as levers for shifting and controlling, the way we think, feel.

Benefits of seeing self as the cause and being above the line

Applying the sacred pause to make change choices in how we act – and being brave and bold in shifting across the maturity continuum, will help us to cultivate the creativity, interdependence, and systemic thinking we all need right now because it:

  • Helps people self-regulate their reactive emotional responses, be more open-hearted and emotionally agile, and helps develop psychologically safe work environments where people can collaborate and experiment, and fail without the fear of retribution or punishment.
  • Enables people to be more open-minded, imaginative, and curious and creates a safe space for continuous learning, maximizing diversity and inclusion, and proactive intentional change and transformation.
  • Promotes ownership of a problem or challenging situation and helps develop constructive and creative responses to problems and an ability to take intelligent actions.
  • Gives people an opportunity to impact positively on others and build empowered trusted and collaborative relationships.
  • Enables entrepreneurs and innovators to invent creative solutions and drive successful innovative outcomes.
  • Building the foundations for accountability, where people focus their locus of control on what they promise to deliver, enables them to be intrinsically motivated, and take smart risks on negotiating outcomes that they can be counted on for delivering.

Tips for seeing self as the cause and operating above the line

Taking personal responsibility and seeing self as the cause involves:

  • Acknowledging that “I/we had a role or contributed in some way, to the fact that this has not worked out the way “I/we wanted.”
  • Clarifying the outcome or result in you want from a specific situation or a problem.
  • Seeking alternatives and options for making intelligent choices and actions, and using the language of “I/we can” and “I/we will” to achieve the outcome.
  • Replacing avoiding, being cynical and argumentative, blaming, shaming, controlling, and complaining with courageous, compassionate, and creative language and acts of intention.
  • People become victors who operate from “self as cause” where they are empowered to be the creative forces in their own lives by making fundamental, primary, and secondary change choices.
  • Trust your inner knowing and deep wisdom that everything has a specific and definable cause and that each and every one of us has the freedom to choose how to respond to it.

Back to leadership basics

As Stephen Covey says, people need to deeply and honestly say “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday” because it’s not what happens to us, it’s our reactive response to what happens that hurts us.

Being willing to step back, retreat, and reflect on the gap between the results you want, and the results you are getting all starts with stepping inward, backward, and forwards, using the sacred pause, to ask:

  • What happened? What were the key driving forces behind it?
  • How am I/we truly feeling about it?
  • What was my/our role in causing this situation, or result?
  • What can I/we learn from it?
  • What is the result/outcome I want to create in the future?
  • What can I/we then do to create it?

As a corporate trainer, consultant and coach, I found out the hard way that developing the self-awareness and self-regulation skills in taking personal responsibility and seeing self as the cause is the basis of the personal power and freedom that is so important to me, and almost everyone else I am currently interacting with.

It’s the foundation for transcending paralysis, overwhelm, and stuck-ness and activating our sense of agency to transform society and ourselves.

This is the third and final blog in a series of blogs on the theme of taking responsibility – going back to leadership basics. Read the previous two here:

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, October 18, 2022. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus,  human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique context.

Image credit: Pixabay

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What is design thinking? – EPISODE FIVE – Ask the Consultant

Live from the Innovation Studio comes EPISODE FIVE of a new ‘Ask the Consultant’ series of short form videos. EPISODE FIVE aims to answer a question that many people struggle to answer or accurately discuss:

“What is design thinking?”

Design Thinking is often misunderstood and sometimes even maligned because too many people think it is a process. It doesn’t help when visuals like this one from the Stanford d.School label it as such:

Stanford d.School Design Thinking Process

Instead design thinking should be thought of as a mindset, or a collection of mindsets, including the novice mindset.

There is a big difference between knowing the design thinking components and being a design thinker. Design Thinking is not a technical skill, it is a collection of soft skills, so buyer beware.

One of the key things to remember about design thinking (or human-centered design) is that it is a highly iterative process intended to leverage extensive prototyping and testing.

Another important thing to remember is that unlike other problem solving methods, good design thinking professionals will spend as much, if not more, time and energy on the problems(s) than on the solution(s).

Preparing to Solve the Right Problem

To help with this I’ve created a Problem Finding Canvas to help you identify all of the potential problems in a particular search area.

It’s available for only $9.99 here in the shop.

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Help Shape the Next ‘Ask the Consultant’ Episode

  1. Grab a great deal on Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon while they last!
  2. Get a copy of my latest book Charting Change on Amazon
  3. Contact me with your question for the next video episode of “Ask the Consultant” live from my innovation studio

Below are the previous episodes of ‘Ask the Consultant’:

  1. EPISODE ONE – What is innovation?
  2. EPISODE TWO – How do I create continuous innovation in my organization?
  3. EPISODE THREE – What is digital transformation?
  4. EPISODE FOUR – What is the best way to create successful change?
  5. All other episodes of Ask the Consultant


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Change Planning Toolkit™ Ask Me Anything Transcript

Change Planning Toolkit™ Ask Me Anything Transcript

On Thursday, June 8th I took all questions about the Change Planning Toolkit™ on TWITTER via hashtag #cptoolkit and my contact form. Here were the questions and the answers:

1. I bought your insightful book Charting Change – How can I get the supplementary materials (26 of 50 Change Planning Toolkit™ tools) that go with the book?

Charting Change book buyers can contact me using my contact form here and get me their proof of purchase. Then I will send out the Change Planning Toolkit™ Basic License to them as an 11″x17″ scalable pdf download.

Book buyers can upgrade from the Basic License to the Bronze License or get their organization on the path to success with a site license at any time.

2. Who is the Change Planning Toolkit™ designed for?

The Change Planning Toolkit™ was designed for change leaders, project managers, and program managers to make it easier to successfully plan and execute projects, programs, change initiatives, business transformations, and digital transformations.

Change Planning Canvas

3. I’ve heard amazing things about the Change Planning Canvas™ – How can I get a copy of it? Is there a poster size?

Buy a copy of my latest book Charting Change, contact me with proof of purchase and I’ll send out the 11″x17″ of the Change Planning Canvas™ along with 25 other great tools!

Or, purchase a basic individual educational license and you’ll get instant access to these same 26 of 50+ tools along with a digital copy of the book (hardcover option in certain geographies).

Or, purchase a bronze individual educational license for the Change Planning Toolkit™ and you’ll get all 50+ tools, including the Change Planning Canvas™ in a scalable 11″x17″ pdf PLUS a Quickstart Guide PLUS several discounts.

There is a 35″x56″ poster size version of the Change Planning Canvas™ available for commercial site licensees. Consulting and training companies looking to grow their business, or organizations looking to increase their organizational agility and beat the 70% change failure rate should contact me about site licenses starting at $2/yr per employee.

4. What exactly is the Change Planning Toolkit™?

The Change Planning Toolkit is collection of 50+ tools to make change planning more visual, collaborative, and fun!

It is designed to be used by PMP’s in project management as well, and dovetails nicely with the ACMP Change Standard for change management professionals. In fact you can get a nice ACMP Standard Visualization in the ten free downloads.

5. What do people get when they purchase the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License?

People who purchase the individual educational license of the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License $1,200 worth of items for the extremely low price of $99.99/year (or $999.99 for a lifetime license) that will fundamentally transform how you plan and execute ALL of your projects and change initiatives, from this point forward, greatly increasing:

  • Project success rates
  • Organizational agility
  • Ability to beat the competition
  • Collaboration levels inside the organization
  • The innovation capacity of the organization
  • Employee retention
  • And more!

I answered most of the specifics in question three, but just to recap in a simpler way, if you purchase the bronze license, you get access to:

  • 11″x17″ scalable pdf version of all 50+ tools (including the Change Planning Canvas™)
  • QuickStart Guide
  • Use of the tools for individual educational use unless a commercial site license is purchased (starting at $2/yr per employee + small setup fee)
  • 35″x56″ poster size scalable downloads for key tools (COMMERCIAL SITE LICENSES ONLY)

6. What differentiates the Change Planning Toolkit™ from the competition?

First of all, I created the Change Planning Toolkit™ because so much of what project managers and change practitioners need to be successful didn’t exist!

So, it has been designed to play well with the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), the Change Standard from the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP), and ADKAR from ProSci. But, the Change Planning Toolkit™ delivers value for project managers and change practitioners that those can’t.

In fact, I created a Visual Project Charter™ and a visualization of the ACMP Change Standard as free downloads to help ACMP and PMP practitioners be more successful within their existing frameworks.

So, no matter what project management or change management methodology you like to use, the Change Planning Toolkit™ will feel familiar, and will increase your ability to achieve success with the kinds of projects and change initiatives you’re already running!

7. What’s your view on change management versus project management?

Most people talk about change management as if it is a subset of project management, but that’s so not true!

People need to change this thinking because it’s a big reason why so many projects fail.

Instead what we need to do is to flip this thinking on its head and start seeing project management as a subset of change management. One of the 50+ tools in the toolkit (and in the book) visualizes what such a world can and SHOULD look like. It’s called Architecting the Organization for Change:

Architecting the Organization for Change

You’ll notice that all five of the Five Keys to Change Success are all represented here. 🙂

What’s next?

Look for more AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions on the Change Planning Toolkit™ and The Experiment Canvas™ in future weeks!

FYI – On Twitter I am @innovate if you aren’t already following me.


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