Tag Archives: Thought Leadership

A Tipping Point for Organizational Culture

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like millions of others globally, I watched with fascination, the sensational and striking spectacle of the ceremony, significant symbolism, spectacular artifacts, and rituals at the recent King of England’s majestic coronation. At the same time, I allowed my mind to wander and wondered how this visually stunning and unrivaled British ceremony would impact the nations and realms’ culture and leadership, today and in the future, wondering if, indeed, it is at a cultural tipping point.

Where it is believed, by some, that the coronation made “two statements of great importance for today’s world about the place of religion in public life and the importance and meaning of the nation”. Acknowledging that such a monumental and marvelous event is indicative of a cultural tipping point, not only for the people it embraces but also for organizations, nations, and realms as a whole, to search for what is meaningful and valued by its people.

Making the connection

My mind wandered and made some obvious connections between the core and common elements that embody both organizational, and national cultural realms – the values, beliefs, assumptions, and mindsets that drive key behaviors and deliver the common implicit messages. As well as the disciplined systems and processes that deliver the results, the rituals that are enacted, and finally, the artifacts whose symbols represent what the culture values.

Maintaining relevance and engagement

Like the monarchy, what do organizations need to do to maintain relevance and engagement to thrive in unstable and uncertain times, especially when their existence and legacies are being questioned and evaluated by the people they serve?

At a pivotal time when new sets of global, societal, and organizational demands are being made, largely as a result of the fourth industrial revolution, encompassing the convergence of exponential technologies impacting all of us globally.

At the same time, we are all still affected by the consequences of the global pandemic-induced lockdowns, impacting every fabric of our social and civic structures in our world today.

A case study for leveraging cultural tipping points differently

The coronation of King Charles III provides us with a great case study of an outstanding and remarkable display of English cultural attributes.

This enables us to ask some serious questions about how national and organizational cultures and leadership in times of exponential change, like today, might thrive with uncertainty and co-create solutions to some of the most complex global challenges, by leveraging the range of cultural tipping points differently.

A range of organizational cultural tipping points

We are in effect, experiencing globally a range of cultural tipping points:

At the macro level, according to a recent article here in Australia, where King Charles still resides as our head of state, the local SMH states that this realm is in a state of flux:

“The King is head of state in 15 countries. More than half of the so-called “realm states” are in the Caribbean and most of them are bailing out. Barbados two years ago, Jamaica probably next year. Belize, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are planning their exit as well”.

At the micro level, according to Mc Kinsey & Co, in a recent article “New Leadership for a new era of thriving organizations” stated that organizations and leadership are also in a state of flux:

“Organizations such as Allianz, Haier, Microsoft, and Nucor are transforming their industries with a new organizational approach that seeks to be open, fluid, and adaptable; unleashes the collective energy, passion, and capabilities of its people; reimagines strategy; and focuses on delivering greater value to all stakeholders”.

“Their cultures support a more open, collaborative, and emergent way of working. And the shift to this new kind of model changes the way businesspeople must lead”.

Going back to culture and leadership fundamentals

Because culture and leadership are, according to Edgar H. Schein “two sides of the same coin and cannot understand one without the other” we have to be in charge and focused to intentionally, constructively, and creatively manage their interdependence.

He also states that culture matters because it is a “powerful, tacit, and often unconscious set of forces that determine both our individual and collective behaviors, ways of perceiving, thought patterns, and values”.

If we do not intentionally and strategically take charge, focus, and leverage these forces, we will simply always be at the effect of them, as they take us down the path of least resistance, remain implicit, and will not deliver the results we want and need in a disruptive world.

Going back to culture and leadership fundamentals

Sharing the key messages

My mind then wandered and considered what might be the key messages being communicated by this incredible series of marvelous events, and wondered how relevant and engaging they might be to people today:

A coronation signals the conferment of God’s grace upon a ruler,
A coronation appoints the king as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
A coronation is a joyous and celebratory event.

Back to the SMH “The people got what they wanted. The cheers in the Mall, the boulevard built for the adoration of royalty, were real, even if the masses were down on those for the Queen’s Jubilee.”

Impacting the future

It remains to be seen if this powerful, majestic, memorable, and significant once-in-a-lifetime ceremonial event will ultimately help unify or divide the English realm. Which it seems, is facing its own range of unique challenges and a controversial cultural tipping point, ultimately and seriously impacting its future viability.

Back to the SMH “But Charles’s big show might be his last great day. The last dance of a wheeling, brilliant circus that has entertained and beguiled but which soon enough, in its distant realms, will stutter and shrink and reel no more.”

Why does this matter?

This matters today because we are individually, and collectively at a range of social, civic, and organizational cultural tipping points.

Where our organization and leaders are also dancing many of our “last dances”, and “stutter and shrink and reel nor more” because, according to some, we are not strategically focussed on leveraging the culture and leadership basics:

Implicitly clarifying values that focus on delivering value that improves the quality of people’s lives that they appreciate and cherish and explicitly making them an active part of corporate life.
Ensuring that leaders role model and enact behaviors that demonstrate the values in action, where people are accountable and rewarded by rigorous systems and supportive disciplined, and agile processes.
Co-creating powerful sets of rituals, symbols, and artifacts, aligned to the values, that deliver the “new architectures” to create permission, safety, and trust that drive collaboration, experimentation, innovation, inclusion, and sustainability.
Communicating engaging and inclusive messages that resonate creativity, respect, and appreciation for people, profit, and the planet.

Shifting the organizational cultural tipping points

It’s time to transform leadership to transform organizations, in ways that are self-aware and inspiring, meaningful and purposeful, equitable and sustainable, with increasing speed, resilience, and efficiency to guide organizational cultures and leadership that:

Helps people navigate and balance in-person and remote work, be mentally healthy and well, and make the way for both applied AI and human skills development.
Develops new rules for attracting and retaining people, close the capability chasm and walk the talent tightropes to better equip, empower and harness people’s harness collective intelligence to make both the organization and the world better places.
Creates, invents, and innovates new ways of thinking, and acting that ultimately shift the range of cultural tipping points to meet new sets of global, societal, and organizational demands and challenges emerging in the 21^st century, and lets go of what is no longer relevant to better serve humanity as a whole.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

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

Image Credit: Pixabay

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3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

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But They Do Determine Your Success

3 Innovation Types Not What You Think They Are

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The Official Story

When discussing innovation, you must be specific so people know what you expect. This is why so many thought leaders, consultants, and practitioners preach the importance of defining different types of innovation.

Clayton Christensen encourages focusing on WHY innovation is happening – improve performance, improve efficiency, or create markets – in his 2014 HBR article.
The classic Core/Adjacent/Transformational model focuses on WHAT is changing – target customer, offering, financial model, and resources and processes.
McKinsey’s 3 Horizons focus on WHEN the results are achieved – this year, 2-3 years, 3-6 years.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options and worry about which approach is “best.” But, like all frameworks, they’re all a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and the best one is the one that will be used and get results in your organization.

The REAL story

Everything in the official story is true, but not the whole truth.

“Innovation” is not peanut butter.

You can’t smear it all over everything and expect deliciousness.

When doing innovation, you must remember your customer – the executives who make decisions, allocate resources, and can accelerate or decimate your efforts.

More importantly, you need to remember their Jobs to be Done (JTBD) – keep my job, feel safe and respected, and be perceived as competent/a rising star – because these jobs define the innovations that will get to market.

Three (3) REAL types of innovation

SAFE – The delightful solution to decision-makers’ JTBD

Most closely aligned with Core innovation, improving performance or efficiency, and Horizon 1 because the focus is on improving what exists in a way that will generate revenue this year or next. Decision-makers feel confident because they’ve “been there and done that” (heck, doing “that” is probably what got them promoted in the first place). In fact, they’re more likely to get in trouble for NOT investing in these types of innovations than they are for investing in them.

STRETCH – The Good Enough solution

Most like Adjacent innovation because they allow decision-makers to keep one foot in the known while “stretching” their other foot into a new (to them) area. This type of innovation makes decision-makers nervous because they don’t have all the answers, but they feel like they at least know what questions to ask. Progress will require more data, and decisions will take longer than most intrapreneurs want. But eventually, enough time and resources (and ego/reputation) will be invested that, unless the team recommends killing it, the project will launch.

SPLATTER – The Terrible solution

No matter what you call them – transformational, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or moonshots – these innovations make everyone’s eyes light up before reality kicks in and crushes our dreams. These innovations “define the next chapter of our business” and “disrupt ourselves before we’re disrupted.” These innovations also require decision-makers to let go of everything they know and wander entirely into the unknown. To invest resources in the hope of seeing the return (and reward) come back to their successor (or successor’s successor). To defend their decisions, their team, and themselves when things don’t go exactly as planned.

How to find the REAL type that will get real results.

“You said you want X. Would you describe that for me?” (you may need to give examples). When I worked at Clayton Christensen’s firm, executives would always call and ask for our help to create a disruptive innovation. When I would explain what they were actually asking for (something with “good enough” performance and a low selling price that appeals to non-consumers), they would back away from the table, wave their hands, and say, “Oh, not that. We don’t want that.”
“How much are you willing to risk?” If they’re willing to go to their boss to ask for resources, they’re willing to Stretch. If they’re willing to get fired, they’re willing to Splatter. If everything needs to stay within their signing authority, it’s all about staying Safe.
“What would you need to see to risk more?” As an innovator, you’ll always want more freedom to push boundaries and feel confident that you can convince others to see things your way. But before you pitch Stretch to a boss that wants Safe, or Splatter to a boss barely willing to Stretch, learn what they need to change their minds. Maybe it will be worth your effort, maybe it won’t. Better to know sooner rather than later.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation

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Moneyball and the Beginning, Middle, and End of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Recently, pitchers and catchers reported to MLB Spring Training facilities in Florida and Arizona. For baseball fans, this is the first sign of Spring, an occasion that heralds months of warmth and sunshine, ballparks filled (hopefully) with cheering fans, dinners of beers and brats, and the undying belief that this year will be the year.

Of course, there was still a lot of dark, dreary cold between then and Opening Day. Perfect weather for watching baseball movies – Bull Durham, Major League, The Natural, Field of Dreams, and, of course, Moneyball.

Moneyball is based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis and chronicles the 2002 Oakland Athletics season. The ’02 Oakland A’s, led by General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), forever changed baseball by adopting an approach that valued rigorous statistical analysis over the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (coaches, scouts, front office personnel) when building a team. This approach, termed “Moneyball,” enabled the A’s to reach the postseason with a team that cost only $44M in salary, compared to the NY Yankees that spent $125M to achieve the same outcome.

While the whole movie (and book) is a testament to the courage and perseverance required to challenge and change the status quo, time and again I come back to three lines that perfectly sum up the journey of every successful intrapreneur I’ve ever met.

The Beginning

“I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall…he always gets bloody…always always gets bloody. This is threatening not just a way of doing business… but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”

John Henry, Owner of the Boston Red Sox

Context

The 2002 season is over, and the A’s were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. John Henry, an owner of the Boston Red Sox, has invited Bill Beane to Boston to offer him the Red Sox GM job.

Lesson

This is what you sign up for when you decide to be an Intrapreneur. The more you challenge the status quo, the more you question how business is done, the more you ask Why and demand an answer, the closer you get to “tak(ing) it in the teeth.”

This is why courage, perseverance, and an unshakeable belief that things can and should be better are absolutely essential for intrapreneurs. Your job is to run at the wall over and over until you get through it.

People will follow. The Red Sox did. They won the World Series in 2004, breaking an 84-year-old curse.

The Middle

“It’s a process, it’s a process, it’s a process”

Bill Beane

Context

Billy has to convince the ballplayers to forget all the habits that made them great and embrace the philosophy of Moneyball. To stop stealing bases, turning double plays on bunts, and swinging for the fences and to start taking walks, throwing to first for the easy out, and prioritize getting on base over hitting a home run.

The players are confused and frustrated. Suddenly, everything that they once did right is wrong and what was not valued is deeply prized.

Lesson

Innovation is something new that creates value. Something new doesn’t just require change, it requires people to stop doing things that work and start doing things that seem strange or even wrong.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a switch to be flipped. It’s a process to be learned. It takes time, practice, reminders, and patience.

The End

“When you get an answer you’re looking for, hang up.”

Billy Beane

Context

In this scene, Billy has offered one of his players to multiple teams, searching for the best deal. When the phone rings with a deal he likes, he and the other General Manager (GM) agree to it, Billy hangs up. Even though the other GM was in the middle of a sentence. When Peter Brand, the Assistant GM played by Jonah Hill, points out that Billy had just hung up on the other GM, Billy responds with this nugget of wisdom.

Lesson

It’s advice intrapreneurs should take very much to heart. I often see Innovation teams walk into management presentations with long presentations, full of data and projections, anxious to share their progress, and hoping for continued funding and support. When the meeting starts, a senior exec will say something like, “We’re excited by the progress we’re hearing about and what it will take to continue.”

That’s the cue to “hang up.”

Instead of starting the presentation from the beginning, start with “what it will take to continue.” You got the answer you’re looking for – they’re excited about the progress you’ve made – don’t spend time giving them the info they already have or, worse, could raise questions and dim their enthusiasm. Hang up on the conversation you want to have and have the conversation they want to have.

In closing

Moneyball was an innovation that fundamentally changed one of the most tradition-bound businesses in sports. To be successful, it required someone willing to take it in the teeth, to coach people through a process, and to hang up when they got the answer they wanted. It wasn’t easy but real change rarely is.

The same is true in corporations. They need their own Bill Beanes.

Are you willing to step up to the plate?

Image credits: Pixabay

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Innovation and the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

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Why It’s Bad News and Good News for Corporate Innovation

Innovation and the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last week, as news of Silicon Valley Bank’s losses and eventual collapse, took over the news cycle, attention understandably turned to the devastating impact on the startup ecosystem.

Prospects brightened a bit on Monday with news that the federal government would make all depositors whole. Startups, VCs, and others in the ecosystem would be able to continue operations and make payroll, and SVB’s collapse would be just another cautionary tale.

But the impact of SVB’s collapse isn’t confined to the startup ecosystem or the banking industry.

Its impact (should have) struck fear and excitement into the hearts of every executive tasked with growing their business.

Your Portfolio’s Risk Profile Just Changed

The early 2000s were the heyday of innovation teams and skunkworks, but as these internal efforts struggled to produce significant results, companies started looking beyond their walls for innovation. Thus began the era of Corporate Venture Capital (CVC).

Innovation, companies realized, didn’t need to be incubated. It could be purchased.

Often at a lower price than the cost of an in-house team.

And it felt less risky. After all, other companies were doing it and it was a hot topic in the business press. Plus, making investments felt much more familiar and comfortable than running small-scale experiments and questioning the status quo.

Between 2010 and 2020, the number of corporate investors increased more than 6x to over 4,000, investment ballooned to nearly $170B in 2021 (up 142% from 2020), and 1,317 CVC-backed deals were closed in Q1 of 2020.

But, with SVB’s collapse, the perceived risk of startup investing suddenly changed.

Now startups feel riskier. Venture Capital firms are pulling back, and traditional banks are prohibited from stepping forward to provide the venture debt many startups rely on. While some see this as an opportunity for CVC to step up, that optimism ignores the fact that companies are, by nature and necessity, risk averse and more likely to follow the herd than lead it.

Why This is Bad News

As CVC, Open Innovation, and joint ventures became the preferred path to innovation and growth, internal innovation shifted to events – hackathons, shark tanks, and Silicon Valley field trips.

Employees were given the “freedom” to innovate within a set time and maybe even some training on tools like Design Thinking and Lean Startup. But behind closed doors, executives spoke of these events as employee retention efforts, not serious efforts to grow the business or advance critical strategies.

Employees eventually saw these events for what they were – innovation theater, activities designed to appease them and create feel-good stories for investors. In response, employees either left for places where innovation (or at least the curiosity and questions required) was welcomed, or they stayed, wiser and more cynical about management’s true intentions.

Then came the pandemic and a recession. Companies retreated further into themselves, focused more on core operations, and cut anything that wouldn’t generate financial results in 12 months or less.

Innovation muscles atrophied.

Just at the moment they need to be flexed most.

Why This is Good News

As the risk of investment in external innovation increases, companies will start looking for other ways to innovate and grow. Ways that feel less risky and give them more control.

They’ll rediscover Internal Innovation.

This is the silver lining of the dark SVB cloud – renewed investment in innovation, not as an event or activity to appease employees, but as a strategic tool critical to delivering strategic priorities and accelerating growth.

And, because this is our 2^nd time around, we know it’s not about internal innovation teams OR external partners/investments. It’s about internal innovation teams AND external partners/investments.

Both are needed, and both can be successful if they:

Are critical enablers of strategic priorities
Pursue realistic goals (stretch, don’t splatter!)
Receive the people and resources required to deliver against those goals
Are empowered to choose progress over process
Are supported by senior leaders with words AND actions

What To Do Now

When it comes to corporate innovation teams, many companies are starting from nothing. Some companies have files and playbooks they can dust off. A few have 1 or 2 people already working.

Whatever your starting point is, start now.

Just do me one favor. When you start pulling the team together, remember LL Cool J, “Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years.”

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Take Charge of Your Mind to Reclaim Your Potential

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Take Charge of Your Mind to Reclaim Your Potential

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our recent blog, we explored how our focus and attention have been stolen, and how our ability to pay attention is collapsing and described why we need to be intentional in reclaiming it. Yet, many of us are constantly challenged by very short attention spans, where we can often be found sitting at our desks, dealing with a range of very urgent deadlines with a distracted, and unfocussed mind. Despite being intrinsically motivated to meet our deadlines, and being self-aware of needing to focus on completing the tasks in front of us, many of us often still struggle to disrupt and stop our thoughts from wandering randomly and haphazardly. Because, we are no longer being in charge of our minds, our time, or of our cognitive capacities and abilities that help us self-regulate, concentrate and focus our attention, kickstart change, innovate and become resilient.

A recent article in Psychology Today “The War For Your Attention” reinforces this problem by stating:

“We live in a time when attention has become our most valuable asset, one for which multiple stakeholders are competing. Political parties, media outlets, companies, and individuals want a share of it, and if they can have it, they want it all. As a result, remaining in charge of our minds has become a daily challenge. Our attention defines our experience, which sets the mindset of our minds”.

Become Resilient

Because we don’t know if companies will ever return to their pre-pandemic-like worlds, and what new technologies will emerge, we need to become resilient to be future-fit, in this new world of unknowns.

This requires people to unlearn some of their less resourceful “bad pre and post-pandemic habits” and be:

Open towards relearning and reskilling in how to focus, concentrate and observe, and how to manage, direct and expand our attention spans.
Intentional, outcome-focused, and therefore, effective, agile, adaptive, and resilient in an uncertain world full of disruption and crises.

This is reinforced by a recent article “Seizing the momentum to build resilience for a future of sustainable inclusive growth” by McKinsey & Co:

“In the past year, leaders have been confronted with a lifetime’s worth of disruption and crises: global conflict, energy uncertainty, food shortages, accelerating inflation, and severe climate events. Natural and human-made disruptions will only persist. To enable long-term, sustainable, and inclusive growth, today’s business leaders and policymakers must strengthen resilience beyond a survival capacity.”

From surviving to thriving

The nature and speed of change are not going to slow down, at the same time, our uncertain world full of disruption and crises is having a harsh psychological toll on everyone, impacting negatively on people’s states of emotional and physical health.

If we want people to thrive, we have to start helping people to live better than we ever have.

Taking the first baby steps requires people to confidently and courageously be, think and act differently.

Starting with empowering and enabling people to take charge of their hearts and minds, and commit to focusing their attention on building their resilience.

The Switch-Cost Effect

In his best-selling book Johann Hari – Stolen Focus, describes how Professor Earl Miller, a specialist in neuroscience, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, states that “our brains can only produce one or two thoughts” in our conscious minds at once.

Because “we are very, very single-minded” and have “very limited cognitive capacity.”

Multi-tasking is an illusion

The delusion that we can multitask, or juggle a number of thoughts and activities at the same time, is revealed, through robust research, as actually “switching, back and forth.”

He states that we don’t notice the switching because:

“Our brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – which comes with a cost.”

Losing time to refocus

This is described as the “switch-cost effect” and means that every time we switch tasks while trying to work, we are actually losing a huge amount of time required to concentrate and manage our attention spans to refocus afterward.

“For example, one study at Carnegie Mellon University’s human-computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”.

Reducing Cognitive Degradation

There are a number of simple and obvious ways to reduce our cognitive degradation and heal our unconscious “attention deficit syndromes”, and cognitively reappraise to be in charge of our minds, concentrate and effectively manage our attention spans.

It is also the first step we need to take to empower and enable ourselves and others, in taking charge of our hearts and minds and demonstrating our commitment to focusing our attention and becoming initially resilient.

These simple actions require us to be self-disciplined, methodical, and rigorous and open to re-learning how to concentrate and self-regulated our attention spans by habitually:

Stripping out distractions,
Ceasing to multi-task,
Getting more quality sleep,
Taking regular short breaks,
Doing brain exercises,
Doing physical exercises,
Listening to music,
Setting priorities,
Using a timer.

How to be in charge of our own minds

Intention transforms

If we want to cultivate a calmer, coherent, and resourceful psychological state, to achieve the outcomes we want to have in our lives, then focus and place our attention on both what we want to manifest (our intention), and on what we want your attention to move away from, to cease.

Attention activates

When choosing to consciously slow down, hit our pause buttons, and retreat into stillness and silence, opens the sacred space, that allows us to reflect, focus and pay deeper attention to the impact of our emotions and beliefs on our thoughts.

We can then also attend to, and break down any unresourceful beliefs, emotions, and cognitive distortions about what we can really and truly influence and control to:

Create a more normalised state of equilibrium and calm, get grounded and fully present and manage our attention spans to concentrate on what really matters to us, in ways that are self-compassionate and optimistic about the future.
Support ourselves by believing that we can succeed in handling our situations, responsibly, creatively, and effectively.
Become resilient by knowing how to respond to events in real-time, anticipate events and problems that may occur in the future, and bounce from adversity whilst processing the insights and learnings gained by conquering key challenges.

Developing Resilience

We can then be in charge of our minds, become resilient, and create a safe space and generosity for others to fully show up and connect with us. We can open our eyes, minds, and hearts to all options, unleash possibilities and opportunities, make smart change choices, and innovate, rather than panicking and retreating from the risks emerging in an uncertain world full of disruption and crises.

Image Credit: Pixabay, Pexels

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The Impact of AI on Human Civilization

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A New Era of Possibility

The Impact of AI on Human Civilization: A New Era of Possibility

GUEST POST from Douglas Ferguson

OpenAI released ChatGPT on Nov 30th, 2022, which has captivated the public due to its applicability to various needs and asks and near-human accuracy at astounding efficiency. AI has traditionally elicited mixed reactions, ranging from excitement and anticipation to fear and hesitation. With the introduction of this revolutionary technology, questions about its implications are beginning to arise. How will this affect knowledge workers? Which career paths are likely to become obsolete? What new knowledge do marketers, creators, programmers, etc. need to acquire to make the most of this changing landscape?

These are valid and important questions to consider, and it is essential that we have open and honest conversations about the potential impacts of AI on the workforce and how its emergence is making us and our co-workers feel. As the workplace continues to evolve and adopt more of these tools, It is critical to explore some common fears people have about AI and discuss ways that individuals and organizations can adapt, maintain the best parts of our humanity, and thrive alongside these technological advancements.

The tools now available to the public are incredibly powerful and are ushering in a momentous time of discovery. The availability of such powerful AI tools has opened up new avenues for discovery and innovation in various fields. GPT-3, Claude, Sparrow, and the technology they will inspire all have the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate, learn, and interact with information. If we approach this game-changing tech with humanity, curiosity, and excitement, we can easily step into a world where AI is not only a tool but also a collaborator.

A common reaction to experiencing the power of AI is a feeling of cheating or that we are replaceable, this leads to discussion and debate about whether people will lose their jobs. It’s important to remind ourselves that this feeling is not new or unique to AI. Consider innovations like the printing press or the internet. While initially seen as disruptive, more opportunity has always been generated than lost. New roles and markets emerge in times of massive change.

One unique thing about AI technologies, in particular, is that there are advancing and improving at an astonishing rate. This means that it’s an exciting time to play and watch and learn what can be done with these tool and how they might shape our work in the future. As we learn more and gain clarity and confidence, we are better suited to experiment with new approaches to our work. From there, we can consider how our jobs might shift and take on new requirements and meanings. If the AI can now automate 80% of your work, what can you do with that 80% that is now gifted back to you? Are you able to spend focus on the 20% that really provided the most value? The part that speak to your humanness?

While many people will shift habits and behaviors, some will shift into complete new roles with new titles that never existed before. We’ve already seen this happen in the AI ecosystem. A role that has specifically caught my attention is the “Prompt Engineer” I fondly like to refer to them as AI Facilitators. If you’ve spent any time with ChatGPT, you’ve learned that getting great results from Chat GPT is similar to getting great results from a room of people you are facilitating. You have to ask GREAT QUESTIONS.

Software companies seeking to add GPT capabilities into their products are hiring Prompt Engineers to create the best prompts for GTP to tailor the responses for their product use cases. Think of it like constructing the perfect MadLib. Consumers of a product will interact with the product and maybe fill in some data or make some requests in the app. The app will then submit that request and data to GTP by inserting the pieces into this perfectly crafted MadLib that will generate the ideal result for the end user. Prompt Engineers design these prompts and Madlib-like structures to get desired outcomes from the AI model.

It’s fun to watch the job boards and careers pages for AI consultancies and AI-forward tech companies to see what trends are emerging around new job titles. Reflecting on these observations and considering what that means for overall trends and how those might emerge in your work can lead to valuable insights. Take a look. What ideas surface for you when you consider potential new roles in this emerging landscape?

If nothing else, remember to be curious! It’s totally normal to feel overwhelmed, confused, scared, frustrated, dubious, and generally concerned. Take time to move past those reactions and cultivate the generative curiosity needed to learn and understand the technology. When we are curious, we see connections that are non-obvious, and when these pathways are illuminated are able to design our future more effortlessly.

Putting It Into Action

As I mentioned previously, questions have always been paramount in facilitation, which is still true for ChatGTP and other language modules. While these tools are amazing, you won’t get far if you don’t know how to ask good questions or know what questions you should be asking. Questions are uniquely human. No other being discovered has this ability. And, when we engage in self-reflection, introspection, and empathy towards others, we connect more deeply with our humanity—leading to a better understanding of our thoughts, emotions, and values as well as how we are connected to those around us. Thoughtful inquiry cultivates a greater sense of awareness, compassion, and connection within our teams, organizations, and, eventually the AIs alongside us.

Master facilitators have spent years honing their skills and developing their ability to attune to and guide the flow of energy, attention, and conflict in a room. Successful facilitation in the future will also require mastering the art of collaborating with machines. Adapting and extending existing practices to maximize new potential with AI will be the norm. In preparation for this new age of collaboration, we’ve started experimenting by employing proven facilitation techniques while interacting with ChatGPT and other tools. The familiarity of the tools provides some comfort and confidence as we experiment with the unknown.

Start with classic facilitative questions to help guide ChatGPT toward your outcomes:

How might we clarify and align the goals and objectives?
How might we identify the tone and perspective?
How might we recognize empathetic requirements that are considerate to our audience?
How might we brainstorm and generate ideas for prompts and test them?
How might we evaluate and prioritize prompts with core values in mind?

If you are a leader, facilitation is key to your work, or you are curious to grow into these areas, start by familiarizing yourself with the capabilities and nuances of the tools. You’ll want to start with any tool-specific tutorials to familiarize yourself with the UI and functions of the tool. Once you are on the tool and ready to start experimenting, take a moment to explore and learn how to craft questions that yield the best outcomes. As with any good question, think about the context of your audience, what do they know, the purpose of your question, what’s the format of a really good response, and even the types of answers you’d like to avoid. Remember that we have spent our entire lives asking, communicating, and presenting questions to other humans, and it will take some time and experimentation to master questions for machines.

I have been experimenting with ChatGPT and have made some progress on how to get the most interesting results.

Always make sure to start with your purpose, and think clearly about why this is important. Find ways to incorporate your why into the questions and prompts you construct for ChatGPT.

Consider the personality of, or style of, the response that might be most valuable to you. Would you like to have your meeting summarized from the perspective of an investigative journalist, Charles Dickens, or Gandhi Think about the tone, attitude, and mindsets you seek to convey.

Remember that ChatGPT is there to perform tasks for you. What is the thing you want it to generate? An essay, a poem, a love letter, a summary, a report, or computer code.

One noteworthy feature of ChatGPT is that it can reference up to approximately 3000 previous words from the conversation. Take advantage of this is beneficial for requesting revisions and getting the tool to generate variations and adaptations until you get results you are happy with. Give it specific instructions on how to improve.

Include specific qualities or requirements you have for defining a good response. This may not be immediately apparent when you first start, and you’ll need to rely on iterating and refining to get the answer you want. Over time you’ll get a handle on the criteria and instructions that are important to you. Save these for the next time you use ChatGPT.

We have created a template laying out these steps in further detail so you can play with ideas and help streamline this process.

ChatGPT has lots of potential but how do we get the most out of it? It’s all about the prompt. Writing and tweaking prompts specific to your needs is key to unlocking the best results. Use this tool template to think through what you’d like to achieve and how to construct the ideal prompt for ChatGPT to get you there.

Collaborating With AI

Practice, practice, practice! Learn to ask the right questions and become more comfortable collaborating with AI. This is key because, eventually, AI will work with us on our teams. We need to become accustomed to how they operate and how they “think”, as it will be different than collaborating with humans. We have generations of experience collaborating with humans, and now is the time to start building that same experience with machines.

Imagine you are on a team of five, four humans and one AI.

What does collaboration with AI look like, and how does it feel?
What questions will the team ask the AI?
How will we learn to work and collaborate in new ways?
What does it mean to invite AI in as a team member?
How might we notice and encourage it to have more ethical and inclusive answers?

Inviting the AI in as a team member means giving it context and teaching it how to work best with us. We can help it learn our culture and values to better align with our mission, vision, and purpose. Building a strategy to incorporate AI as a team member is not unlike working with people in an organization. When a company’s strategy is aligned with its values and purpose, it can create a more meaningful and fulfilling work experience for employees. AI can be an extension of this, reinforcing desired norms and behaviors. Creating a safe environment allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and tap into their innate sense of purpose and connection with others. This can, in turn, help employees lean deeper into their humanity and contribute to a more positive, ethical, and sustainable organizational culture.

Transcending The AI

There are many examples of how technology has allowed us to put aside trivial matters and elevate as humans. AI is currently simplifying tasks of all kinds by efficiently performing mundane tasks on demand. For example, AI design tools are able to nearly eliminate the creation of UI design, allowing designers to spend their time considering the strategy, conceptual design, how to elevate user experience, and how to address accessibility or other concerns. While the simple example is handy for examples sakes, the potential is much greater than just moving from tactical work to strategic work. As these tools advance and provide deeper functionality for us, we will shift into a higher state of work, finding deeper connections and relating at levels never before experienced in the workplace.

Humans are exceptionally adaptable organisms, and the AI revolution is a time that calls for us to lean into that ability. As with any change, we must also be considerate of long-term systemic implications and sustainability of our actions and work. As you embark on your journey, consider the ethics of what you or your organization are asking of the AI. Think about the second and third-order effects of what you are asking. If the AI excels at doing this task, what might result from that and so on and so forth? What are the long-term consequences of that? Finally, consider if we might want to pick a different starting point or provide more conditions to properly guide or constrain the AI.

I’m excited about what the future holds for us. As we explore these times together, join me as I focus on appreciating and respecting the diversity of experiences and perspectives that make us all unique. As we begin to create our first relationships with AI, remember to reach firmly into the deepest depths of our humanity.

Article first published at VoltageControl.com

Image credit: Pixabay

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

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Kickstart Change with Reclaimed Focus and Attention

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

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

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

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

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

Power of focus and attention

Energy flows where attention goes

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

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

Being intentional

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

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

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

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

Parasympathetic fight or flight system

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

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

Reduced capacity

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

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

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

Initiate reclaiming focus and attention

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

Developing daily habits to be focused and productive

Being intentional about breathing

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

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

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

Being intentional in stepping away from your screens

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

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

Working in focused intervals

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

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

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

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

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Kickstarting Change and Innovation in Uncertain Times

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Kickstarting Change and Innovation in Uncertain Times

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last article, we described why innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to innovate. We stated that innovation-led growth is absolutely critical and that people need to be enabled and equipped to adapt, connect and collaborate in new ways to kickstart change in agile, constructive, equitable, and sustainable ways to innovate in uncertain times. Yet, our research and experience at ImagineNation™ over the past 10 years has revealed that many governments, communities, organizations, teams, and leaders, feel somewhat – but not very – confident in their readiness, competence, and capacity to change and innovate in a world of unknowns.

Six Strategies to Kickstart Change and Innovate in Uncertain Times

To help build this confidence we have identified six key strategies and the key first steps to help you focus your attention, kickstart change, and drive and execute your change and innovation initiatives, to survive, thrive, and flourish in uncertain times.

Strategy #1

Build change readiness and receptivity to survive and thrive in an uncertain world by:

Giving people permission and safety that allows them to accept and acknowledge the range of emotional reactions (fears), physical consequences (exhaustion), and work-life imbalances as a result of the imposed WFH environment.
Acknowledging how people are feeling helps them better re-balance, adapt, and become resilient by supporting them to develop a work-life balance to better connect with others, tolerate uncertainty to change, and innovate in uncertain times.
Challenging people’s habitual default patterns of remaining in the safety of their comfort zones, breaking habitual “business as usual” habits, inertia, and complacency.
Being empathic and compassionate with people’s anxieties, confusion, insecurity, and uncertainties about their futures at work, and supporting them through their personal conflicts.

Strategy #2

Allow, accept and ack knowledge people’s fears and struggles about change, help manage their anxiety, improve their productivity and attune them to the possibilities and potential opportunities in the current business environment by:

Providing individual and collective support to enable people to take back and refocus their attention, self-manage anxiety, and become grounded, mindful, and fully present, with self and with others.
Investing in time and money to enable people to unlearn, learn and relearn how to be change ready and change-receptive, and become adaptive to effectively facilitate successful business and digital transformation initiatives.
Helping people get familiar with the brain’s basic cognitive functions, and build the foundations to help get work done by regulating emotions, suppressing biases, switching tasks, solving complex problems, and thinking creatively.
Developing 21st-century skills to shift old mindsets, develop new behaviors and the reasoning, problem-solving, planning, and execution skills to initiate and sustain business, cultural and digital transformation initiatives to embed the changes and to innovate in uncertain times.
Developing the fundamental foresight and energizing vision to perceive innovation strategically and systemically, adopting an approach that is holistic, human, and technology-centered, to align, enable, and equip people to adapt and grow and to change and innovate in uncertain times.

Strategy #3

Make sense of innovation, and develop a common understanding and language as to what innovation means in a unique context by:

Developing an awareness that innovation is, in itself, a change process, and paradoxically requires rigorous and disciplined change management processes and a chaotic creative and collaborative interchange of ideas.
Clarifying an energizing and compelling “why” innovation is important to an overall “cause” developing a passionate purpose and a sense of urgency towards leveraging innovation to achieve long-term success, competitiveness, and growth.
Knowing how to both make connections and distinguish and leverage the differences between creativity, invention, and innovation.
Building the safety, permission, and trust that helps facilitate, educate and coach people to deal with the emotional consequences of failure, to reframe it as opportunities to encourage a culture of taking small bets to learn quickly.
Taking a disciplined and methodical approach to risk planning and management, that allows and encourages a culture of smart risk-taking to reduce risk adversity.
Creating a consistent and common understanding as to what innovation means in their unique government, community, social, organizational, leadership, or team context and creating an engaging and compelling narrative around it.

Strategy #4

Optimize the notion that innovation is transformational and leverage it as an overall energizing strategic and systemic alignment mechanism and set of processes to kickstart change by:

Improving engagement, energizing and maximizing people’s potential and intentionally cultivating their collective genius to learn how to execute and deliver deep change and innovate in uncertain times.
Aligning technological, processes and adopting a human-centered structure for change management to deliver business breakthroughs and digital transformation initiatives.
Breaking down silos and supporting people to collaborate; re-connect, re-energize and re-invent themselves in a disrupted world.
Maximizing differences and diversity that exist between people’s demographics, cultures, values, perspectives, knowledge, experiences, and skillsets to deliver their desired outcomes.
Learning and coaching people to adapt to survive and thrive by solving complex problems, uncertainty, instability, and trends that are constantly emerging.
Improving both customer centricity and the customers’ experience.
Building accountable, equitable, and sustainable business enterprises that people value, appreciate, and cherish.

Strategy #5

Challenge the status quo and conventional ways of perceiving innovation to unleash the possibilities and the opportunities and kickstart change that true innovation offers by:

Taking a strategic perspective in the longer term and the need for investment in innovation, rather than being reactive, and short-term profit-focused.
Developing an understanding of the different types of innovation and how they can be applied, including incremental, breakthrough, sustaining, and disruptive, depending on their strategic imperative and motivation for change, and not just focussing on making continuous and process improvements.
Improving trust in organizational boards and leadership decisions, reducing self-interest and eliminating corruption, and focussing on being in integrity to successfully empower people in change and innovate in uncertain times.

Strategy #6

Explore opportunities for measuring, benchmarking, and contextualizing the impact of innovation on business performance, leadership, executive team, and organizational ability to adapt, innovate and grow by:

Embracing new business models, developing leadership capabilities and collaborative competencies, capacities, and building people’s confidence to perceive their worlds differently, and with fresh eyes.
Letting go of “old” 20th century methods of diagnosing and assessing culture, based solely on the “nice to haves” rather than exploring the emerging “must haves” to enable people to survive and thrive by experimenting with new assessment tools like the OGI® and the GLI® to quantify and qualify current and potential strengths and weaknesses.
Using data to know what new mindsets, behaviors, and skills to embody and enact, differently to become future-fit and succeed in the 21^st century, and accepting that some of these are “not nice”.
Cultivating an innovation culture to embed deep change, provide learning and coaching to evoke, provoke and create mindset shifts, behavior and systems changes, and radically new sets of artifacts and symbols.

Taking the first steps to change and innovate in 2023

Embracing a range of new and different strategic and systemic approaches governments, communities, organizations, teams, and leader organizations can successfully kickstart change and innovate in uncertain times.

By using this moment in time to choose to refuse to walk backward and sleepwalk through life, by simply committing to take the first baby steps in allowing and enabling people to pause, retreat, reflect and:

Recover from the effects of working mostly alone, from home, and online.
Re-balance work and home lives through reconnection and resolving loneliness and rebuilding a sense of belonging.
Know how to tolerate uncertainty and become resilient and adaptive.
Reimagine and refocus a more energizing, compelling, and sustainable future.
Reinvent themselves, their professions, business practices, and teams in meaningful and purposeful ways.

We can then confidently, meaningfully, and purposefully energetically engage and enroll people, mobilize and harness their collective genius, to innovate in uncertain times in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

To kickstart changes that contribute effectively to global stability, security, connectedness, and sustainability in the current decade of transformation and disruption.

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

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3 Steps to a Truly Terrific Innovation Team

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What had a bigger impact on the project? The process you introduced or the people on the team?”

As much as I wanted to give all the credit to my brilliant process, I had to tell the truth.

“People. It’s always people.”

The right people doing the right work in the right way at the right time can do incredible, even impossible, things. But replace any “right” in the previous sentence, and even the smallest things can feel impossible. A process can increase the odds of doing the right work in the right way, but it’s no guarantee. It’s powerless in the hands of the wrong people.

But how do you assemble the right group of people? Start with the 3 Ts.

Type of Innovation

We’re all guilty of using ‘innovation’ to describe anything that is even a little bit new and different. And we’ve probably all been punished for it.

Finding the right people for innovation start with defining what type of innovation they will work on:

Incremental: updating/modifying existing offerings that serve existing customers

Adjacent: creating new offerings for existing customers OR re-positioning existing offerings to serve new customers

Radical: new offerings or business models for new customers

Different innovation types require teams to grapple with different levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. Teams working on incremental innovations face low levels of ambiguity because they are modifying something that already exists, and they have relative certainty around cause and effect. However, teams working on radical innovations spend months grappling with ambiguity, certain only that they don’t know what they don’t know.

Time to launch

Regardless of the type of innovation, each innovation goes through roughly the same four steps:

Discover a problem to be solved
Design solutions
Develop and test prototypes
Launch and measure

The time allotted to work through all four steps determines the pace of the team’s work and, more importantly, how stakeholders make decisions. For example, the more time you have between the project start and the expected launch, the more time you have to explore, play, create, experiment, and gather robust data to inform decisions. But if you’re expected to go from project start to project launch in a year or less, you need to work quickly and make decisions based on available (rather than ideal) data.

Tasks to accomplish

Within each step of the innovation process are different tasks, and different people have different abilities and comfort levels with each. This is why there is growing evidence that experience in the phase of work is more important than industry or functional expertise for startups.

There are similar data for corporate innovators. In a study of over 100,000 people, researchers identified the type and prevalence of four types of innovators every organization needs:

Generators (17% of the sample): Find new problems and ideate based on their own experience.

Conceptualizers (19%): Define the problem and understand it through abstract analysis, most comfortable in early phases of innovation (e.g., Discover and Design)

Implementers (41%): Put solutions to work through experiments and adjustments, most comfortable in later stages of innovation (Develop and Launch)

Optimizers (23%): Systematically examine all alternatives to implement the best possible solution

Generators and Conceptualizers are most comfortable in the early stages of innovation (i.e., Discover and Design). Implementers and Optimizers are most comfortable in the later stages (e.g., Develop and Launch). The challenge for companies is that only 36% of employees fall into one of those two categories, and most tend to be senior managers and executives.

Taking Action

Putting high performers on innovation teams is tempting, and top talent often perceives such assignments as essential to promotion. But no one enjoys or benefits when the work they’re doing isn’t the work they’re good at. Instead, take time to work through the 3Ts, and you’ll assemble a truly terrific innovation team.

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

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Why is it important to innovate in 2023?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

At ImagineNation™ we have just celebrated 10 years as a global innovation consultancy, learning, and coaching company. During this time, we’ve identified some of the common patterns that people demonstrate as a result of feeling uncomfortable, frozen, inert, stubborn, and confused and as a result, are resistant to innovation. Where many organizations, teams, and leaders appear to walk backward as if they are sleepwalking through this time in their lives.

At the same time, we know that innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to create, invent and innovate. We also know that is crucial to be better balanced, resilient, and adaptive to grow and flow, survive and thrive, in today’s chaotic BANI environment. We also know exactly what transformative innovation involves, and how to enable and equip people to connect and collaborate in new ways to effect constructive and sustainable change in a world of unknowns.

Innovation is, in fact, the water of life!

Shaping the next normal

According to a recent article by McKinsey and Co “The future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal” the coronavirus crisis is a “world-changing event” which is forcing both the pace and scale of workplace innovation.

Stating that businesses are forced to do more with less and that many are finding better, simpler, less expensive, and faster ways to operate. Describing how innovative health systems, through necessity, constraints, and adversity have exploited this moment in time, to innovate:

“The urgency of addressing COVID-19 has also led to innovations in biotech, vaccine development, and the regulatory regimes that govern drug development so that treatments can be approved and tried faster. In many countries, health systems have been hard to reform; this crisis has made the difficulty much easier to achieve. The result should be a more resilient, responsive, and effective health system”.

We all know that it is impossible to know what will happen in the future and yet, that it is possible to consider and learn from the lessons of the past, both distant and recent. On that basis, it’s crucial to take time out, be hopeful, and positive, and think optimistically about the future. To be proactive and innovate to shape the kind of future we all wish to have, through making constructive and sustainable changes, that ultimately contribute to the common good.

Strategically deciding to innovate

Strategically deciding to innovate, is the first, mandatory, powerful, and impactful lever organizations, teams, leaders, and individuals can pull to effect constructive and sustainable change that enables people to execute and deliver real benefits:

Deal with, and find solutions to a world full of complex and competing social, civic, and political problems that are hard to solve and aren’t going away.
Better adapt, respond to, and be agile in fast-changing circumstances, uncertainty, instability, and to random and unexpected Black Swan events, like the global Covid-19 Pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Become human-centric to help people recover and manage their transition through the challenges of the global pandemic and enable them to exploit the range of accelerating technological advances in the digital age.
Develop corporate responsibility, sustainability, diversity, and inclusion strategies that are practical and can work and really deliver on their promises.
Compete by applying and experimenting with lean and agile start-up methodologies and take advantage of the opportunities and possibilities of the global entrepreneurship movement’s new models for leadership, collaboration, and experimentation.
Align to the range of changing workplace dynamics and trends, resulting from the pandemic, including WFH, the “soft resignation” and the demands of a hybrid workplace.
Shift individual, group, and collective consciousness towards collaboration and experimentation in ways that rebuild the trust that has been lost through incompetence, corruption, greed, and dishonesty.
Respond creatively to meet the increasingly diverse range of customer expectations and choices being made around value.

Important to innovate – three elements

To take advantage of living in a globalized world, where we are interconnected through technologies and values and where we have an interrelated structure of reality, we can:

Accept that innovation-led adaptation and growth are absolutely critical and develop targets and a willingness to invest in new scalable business models, achieve fast and effective developments, and launch processes to reflect these.
Invest in a coherent, time-risk balanced portfolio of initiatives and provide the resources to deliver them, at scale, strategically, to innovate to the right market, at the right price, at the right time, and through the most effective channels.
Adopt an ecosystem approach to adapt and grow by creating and capitalizing on both internal and external networks, and stakeholder management through developing workforce ecosystems – a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

Problem-solving, cultural change, and improving people’s lives

It is more important than ever to make innovation transformational, so that it delivers constructive, ethical, and sustainable change, by building on three critical successful abilities:

Seeing and sensing the real systemic problem or breakthrough opportunity:

What problem are we solving? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have that problem solved?
What problem are we solving for the customer? Who needs this?
What are the possibilities and opportunities available to us? And is there a customer who wants to pay to have this opportunity realized?
What are some of our strengths? What are some of the things we are doing well that we can build upon or exploit?

Shifting the culture:

Where are we today? Where do we want to be in the future?
What are our prevailing mindsets? How can we measure and contextualize their impact? What mindsets might we embrace to adapt and grow in an uncertain world?
How ready and receptive are we to really embrace change?
What do we need to unlearn and relearn to ensure our people are open-minded, hearted, and willed to embody and enact the desired change?
How engaged and passionate are our people in problem-solving?
How might we harness our people’s collective intelligence to solve problems and realize opportunities?

Aligning technologies, processes, artifacts, and behaviors as a holistic system:

What is our appetite for risk? How do we define risk in our context?
What type of innovation do we strategically want to plan for and engage in?
What old legacy technologies no longer serve your needs? What new technologies might you be willing to invest in for the future?
What disciplines are in place to ensure that people have a common understanding of the key processes and comply with managing them?
How are we ensuring that everyone is motivated and skilled to innovate?
How are we ensuring that people are acknowledged, rewarded, and organized to repeatedly innovate?
What are the key mindsets and behaviours that enable and equip people to embody and embrace repeatedly innovate and design solutions with the end customer in mind?

Become an adaptive and resilient difference maker

As many of us are aware, Toys R Us and Blockbuster were huge companies, that enjoyed massive success; however, this was all brought to an end due to their failure to innovate.

We can all avoid this fate by choosing to innovate and create constructive and sustainable change through:

Accepting and acknowledging that to survive and thrive in a BANI world, where necessity is still the mother of all invention, and the urgency to do this is more important than ever.
Identifying, understanding, and dealing with our own resistance to innovation, safely and proactively, and transforming resistance into resilience, to be adaptive and safely innovate.
Understanding where we are today and then assessing the gap to what we want to be in the future, and mitigating the risks of both closing the gap and leaving the gap wide open.
Enabling leaders, teams, and individuals to connect, explore, discover and navigate new ways of approaching and delivering commercially viable, value-adding, constructive and sustainable change, and outcomes.
Leveraging innovation to transform an organization, a business, the way people lead and team, to improve the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish.

“In order to transcend mere adequacy and make a mark of creative transcendence on the world, organizations need to stop walking backward, following a trail that has already been blazed. The motto of the British Special Air Service is, “Who dares, wins.” It is time for businesses to be bold, inspired, and look to the horizon. The next great innovation is out there. Will you have the guts to create it?”

Will you make a fundamental choice to innovate?

According to McKinsey and Co “The point is that where the world lands is a matter of choice – of countless decisions to be made by individuals, companies, governments, and institutions”.

Will you make a fundamental choice to use the current crisis to lead to a burst of innovation, productivity, resilience, and exploration in 2023, to take advantage of our connected world to create the constructive and sustainable changes we all want to have?

Or will you continue walking backward and sleepwalking through life, and fail to take advantage of this moment in time, to innovate, and continue life with the same thinking that is causing the current range of results, that many of us don’t want to have?

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Image Credit: Unsplash

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