“The time has come to do for innovation what we first did for management in general… develop the principles, the practice, and the discipline.”
Peter F. Drucker

Mastering Strategic Innovation

Strategic Innovation is the top priority of CEOs worldwide who are looking to drive organic growth and brand value. But it is little understood that it is the way you think which will underpin your success in creating and implementing new ideas. From the typewriter to the Xerox to the computer, the history of innovation is littered with examples of how convergent thinking guarantees you skilfully avoid success.

Ideas are by definition dangerous. They threaten the status quo. Your organisational immune system operating under the principles of good management and good communication will always reject or smother new ideas. Thinking is a skill! The cost of not learning executive thinking skills will lead you in ever decreasing circles to commodity hell. As the corporate playing field moves from growing numbers to growing human potential, then organisations must overcome the Cartesian principles inherent in our Western model of thinking. Operating from a business model of innovation which has locked out the mind is crazy.

The patterns which drive how you think, how you talk and how you act are the patterns which drive strategy, communication and performance. Personal transformation and Innovation are fundamentally linked as you learn the logic of negating the patterns which organise experience. Learning to think is about training the imagination. Transforming your thinking deeply transforms your organisation’s cultural principles and opens the door to innovative strategies.

Unfrozenmind’s Centre of Innovation Education provides organisations with a new DNA, a logic of experience, which helps executives and organisations enable dreams, create idea cultures and design legends. Unfrozenmind has developed a unique roadmap to help organisations step out of their comfort zone and create world changing ideas.

When you consider that it is the power of creativity, the power of ideas which now drives the global economy then putting the mind back in business should be the number one priority on a CEO’s check list. Discover how the Unfrozenmind Innovation Roadmap, following the key stages of Share, Explore, Engage, Build and Design could generate organic growth, new revenues and wider profit margins.

Learning to deploy organisational imagination is a strategic imperative in an economy based on ideas. Learning to think is about learning to design futures. Unfrozenmind helps you make magic.

The Unfrozenmind Quadrant: beyond consultancy

The Unfrozenmind Quadrant is based on a psychological principle that governs innovation: that experience is organised into pre-established emotional patterns. And because experience is conditioned, it can be trained.

It follows that an executive’s potential is determined by the level of training and mastery of the pre-established patterns that organise their experience. Unfrozenmind puts the mind and the skilful use of imagination front and centre in the boardroom. In fact it is the boardroom’s lack of understanding of how the mind works that is, and will be, in all likelihood, the major obstacle to personal and corporate success. Because we operate in a way that fails to recognise how the mind edits and shapes our experience (frozen logic), we actually fail to learn. This mode of “learning not to learn” is skilled under performance. It means that you adhere to a governing set of ideas, a logic, which holds your individual potential in a state of perpetual deep freeze. Mastering the theory and practice of how the mind organises experience into pre-established patterns creates an opportunity for the radical transformation of individuals and business organisations.

The basic principles which govern your mode of learning manage your experience of life and pre-determine your performance. Perception, emotion, language, culture, ideas, and stories are all edited by the governing principles which manage your experience.By understanding the governing ideas which manage your pre-established patterns of thinking, talking and acting you can radically transform your organisation’s strategy, communication and performance. Organisational metamorphosis originates in personal transformation. It originates in understanding deeply how experience is organised and then using this knowledge practically to generate change. In fact learning is about understanding the rules of change.

(The Strategy Canvass: the vertical axis captures the offering level that buyers receive across competing factors. High score means a company offers buyers more, in that factor. Horizontal axis captures the range of factors the industry competes on and invests in. For more information on this tool please read Blue Ocean Strategy).

The Unfrozenmind Quadrant is based on the marriage of two concepts: one of economic creativity and the other of personal transformation. Personal transformation relates to a particular discipline/model of learning. Economic creativity is not a measurement of productivity but is an indicator of the shift in the marketplace towards an ideas-based economy. It marks the relationship between the model of learning and the likelihood of creating organic growth/new revenues/new marketplaces.

The Unfrozenmind Quadrant used in conjunction with the Lotus-Economy Quadrant outlines the choices available on the market to individuals, business leaders and organisations who want to improve their performance. It allows you to make sense of the multiplicity of offerings in the world of business education and their relationship to business performance.

It can be seen that Coaching, Training and Consulting are commoditized products. Furthermore it allows you to bracket executive education schools within these three categories. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, has reported that MBA’s are becoming commoditized; no longer are top consultancies using MBA’s as the base line for recruitment. They recognise the need for something different in a marketplace whose dynamics resonate around innovation, emotion, ideas, stories and divergence.

The Unfrozenmind Strategy Canvass reveals the organisational battle between a learning model which seeks to optimise and control human behaviour in relation to business performance, and the Unfrozenmind model, which seeks to transform human potential.