An invitation to a new Innovation Dynamic

Why do creative Mindsets and Skillsets matter more than ever?

Because Creative Thinking is the powerful source of Innovation.

Let’s face a simple truth: to design innovative ways forward and shape our Future for the best, it is vital to move away from just recognizing standard situations and providing standard answers.

Especially in a disruptive period like the one we live, where no standard remedy will ever be a solution.

Think about it for a moment.
If you have a liver crisis, standard and short-term treatments – such as drinking water – will allow you to get back to the status quo.
But if you have a liver condition, no known standard remedy will allow you to get back to normal.
You need to change your life.
There is a before and an after.

That’s what futurist, leaders and sane people say about the state of the world right now: we are going through a rupture and after will never be like before.
We are living a profound and irreversible Sharp Transformation at all levels.

A crucial consequence is that NO known remedy will ever bring back the status quo.
As Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved by using the same Thinking that created it”. It is obvious that we cannot solve 21st century issues with 19th and 20th centuries ways of thinking and acting.
We, as human species, need to invent new approaches. Instead of merely “correcting” things, we must think about “reinventing” them.

We even need to reinvent Innovation.

Because if we want to create a successful and meaningful Future, Imagination and Creativity are needed not only to discover new possibilities and create new products and services in the current paradigm, but to rethink the paradigm within which we want to innovate and create value.

Are we ready to rethink and reinvent its meaning and to recognize that Innovation today is more than just being “different”, something else than the old notion of “creating needs” or sticking to the notion of being “new”?
Are we ready to accept that innovation is about creating an abundance of life-sustaining solutions to human needs? That it is about meaningful Value creation – not “Things”.
For sure, accepting this will lead us to reinvent our Strategies, our Business Models, our Processes, our Products, our Services, our Organizational Models, our Management and of course, our lives. It might lead us to disrupt our Businesses, to stop selling things people don’t need to start inventing things that are really making a meaningful difference in people’s lives

It might require disrupting Innovation itself.
And that cannot be done by just using the “magic” word.

You can see for yourself: the word Innovation is used all over, thousands of CEO”s, Innovation Directors, R&D manager, consultants, endlessly talk about improving their Innovation funnels and methods, investing in R&D teams and processes, huge amounts of money are invested to “innovate”…but most of the time, too little Innovation is taking place. Only “Renovation”.

How can Leaders and Managers adapt?

It is not about processes and methods.
It is not about a new Innovation recipe or another Creativity “tool box”. 
It is not about Platitude, it is about Attitude.

It is about developing the mindsets and skillsets that empower profound innovation.

It is about humbly recognizing the absolute need to move beyond the traditional linear, analytical, rational, critical and repetitive Thinking our Occidental Culture still emphasizes and which is useful only to solve “Linear Problems”. The enormous amount of change in the “Macrocosm” calls for enormous change in the “Microcosm” between our ears.
We need a shift in perspectives, a true Revolution in Mind.

Instead of people mainly busy “rearranging” the furniture in the same room, Leaders and managers need to become thoughtful and mindful “Business Designers”, “Shapers of Context” with the Courage, Flexibility and Imagination needed:

• to challenge and escape conventional Wisdom, regenerate “mental maps”, see things differently
• to explore this ambiguous and disruptive world with fresh eyes and good questions versus recognizing what they know and giving good answers to the wrong questions
• to generate new and visionary concepts and ideas and creatively reinvent their approaches  .
• to escape the prison of “facts” and concrete realism” to master conceptual Thinking which is in fact the essence of Creativity and allows to connect Vision and Action
• to escape the prison of “incremental Thinking”, put their Imagination at work on key issues with Audacity to open up fresh and radically new ways forward and “make the impossible possible”
• to escape rigidity and the illusion of control to understand how to navigate this fuzzy and ambiguous world with pleasure

That’s what we call the Art of Reperception. It is what Leaders and Managers can develop to imagine and lead the next generation of Wealth-creating strategies and solutions. That is the type of thinking needed to navigate between Vision and action and enjoy the fuzziness of our VUCA world. 

Stay tuned, in our next post, we will be exploring what makes it difficult to build that innovation dynamic and how to build it
See more about creative Thinking on our website
Learn more about in our blog about How can you focus and motivate your teams to put their creativity at work on your main issues?