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Kickstart Change and Innovate in Uncertain Times

In our last blog, we described why innovation is transformational, and why, at this moment in time, it is more important than ever to innovate, to take advantage of living in a globalised world, interconnected through technologies and values and within an interrelated structure of reality. 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, organisations, 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 focus your attention, kickstart change, and drive and execute your change and innovation initiatives, to survive, thrive, and flourish in uncertain times.

  1. Strategy #1

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

  • Acknowledging the vital need to give people permission and safety that allows them to accept and acknowledge the range of emotional reactions, physical consequences, and work-life imbalances as a result of the imposed WFH environment.
  • Building the capacity to acknowledge 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 people through their personal conflicts.
  1. 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 refocus their attention, self-manage anxiety, and become grounded, mindful, and fully present, with self and with others, to effectively flow with the paradox of both transformation and disruption.
  • 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, build the foundations necessary for connecting, managing, and harnessing them for productive good, 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 behaviours and the reasoning, problem-solving, planning, and execution skills to initiate and sustain business, cultural and digital transformation initiatives to embed the desired changes and to innovate in uncertain times.
  • Developing the fundamental foresight and energising vision to perceive innovation strategically and systemically, adopting an approach that is holistic, human and technology centred, that aligns, enables, and equips people to adapt and grow and to change and innovate in uncertain times.
  1. 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 energising 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, organisational, leadership, or team context and creating an engaging and compelling narrative around it.
  1. Strategy #4

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

  • Improving engagement, energising 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-centred structure for change management to deliver business breakthroughs and digital transformation initiatives.
  • Breaking down silos and supporting people to collaborate; re-connect, re-energise and re-invent themselves in a disrupted world.
  • Maximising 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.
  1. 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 organisational 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.
  1. Strategy #6

Explore opportunities for measuring, benchmarking, and contextualising the impact of innovation on business performance, leadership, executive team, and organisational 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, behaviours, and skills to embody and enact, differently to become future-fit and succeed in the 21st 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, behaviour and systems changes, and radically new sets of artifacts and symbols through communicating new and different messages that unleash people’s potential to kickstart change and innovate in uncertain times.

Taking the first steps to change and innovate in 2023

Embracing a range of new and different strategic and systemic approaches governments, communities, organisations, teams, and leader organisations 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 energising, 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, mobilise 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.

Janet Sernack
Janet Sernackhttps://www.imaginenation.com.au/
Janet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ a global learning and coaching company that unlocks human potential and develops human skills that enable people to adapt, innovate and grow through disruption in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, that are appreciated and cherished by: Empowering people to tolerate uncertainty, and be receptive and ready to make radical changes individually and collectively; Enabling people to make sense of innovation, develop a common understanding and language and apply and align it strategically and systemically in their unique context; Opening people to their innovation potential, igniting their imagination, developing their human skills and harnessing their collective intelligence to design and deliver breakthrough solutions; Empowering people to take smart risks, safely experiment, fail fast to learn quickly and collaborate to cohesively maximize differences and diversity in their unique context. She has 35 years of experience consulting and leading culture development, change management, leadership, innovation education, and coaching interventions to some of Australasia’s, Canada’s, and Israel’s top 100 companies.  Acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation, she is an award-winning blogger, an ICF PCC coach, an EMCC Master Practitioner, and is a Professionally Certified Coach for Innovators, Mbit and NLP coach, mentor, trainer, and facilitator.  

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