“Discovering who we are, our vision, and living our dream will become the new role of corporations and organisations of the future.”
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“An old story tells of a young man who keeps hearing about a wonderful tailor, Zumbach, whose suits can make anyone look handsome and stylish. One day the man goes to Zumbach and asks him to make a suit. So Zumbach takes his measurements and tells him to come back in a week.

A week later the young customer eagerly goes back for his suit and has the man try it on. It looks wonderful – except that one sleeve is longer than the other, the buttons do not match up and the trousers are too short. So the customer complains. Zumbach, deeply affronted, says with great indignation, it’s not the suit. The trouble is the way you are wearing it. If you crook your left elbow just a bit, the sleeves will be perfect. And if you hunch forward and raise your right shoulder, the buttons, match up splendidly. Then if you’ll just bend your knees a bit, you’ll see the trousers are just right.” The customer tries it and, lo and behold, the suit fits like a glove – and it’s gorgeous.”

The tailor is the set of internal principles which shape and cut your experience. The tailor and the suit exist within our mind. Unless you realise that experience is organised into pre-established emotional patterns, then habit, conditioned by language, social conventions and shared concepts, will custom-tailor your experience. Patterns of thinking, talking and acting drive strategy, communication and performance. Personal transformation, creativity and innovation are about understanding and mastering the nature of this principle experientially. Understanding the logic of how lived experience is conditioned is a strategic imperative for those leaders and organisations who wish to break out of the pernicious nature of habitual thinking and compete in an idea driven economy. (Tailor Zumbach Story from Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennet-Goleman)

Francisco Varela in conversation with the Dalai Lama at a Mind Life Conference said “This idea – that people vary in their abilities as observers of their own experience – may seem completely obvious to you, Your Holiness, but you will be surprised how nonevident, almost revolutionary it is among researchers in the West. Everybody knows that you have to train to be a sportsman, or a musician, or a mathematician. But when it comes to observing one’s experience, it as if there is nothing to learn – it’s just there. You cannot underestimate the degree to which there is a culture of blindness about this”.

Unless we understand “the way we think” then it is the very process of this way of “thinking” which remains the obstacle to achieving our goals. The issue is that our attention is trapped by content (Blind Thinking), and we have no awareness of the processes that shape and structure the content. In other words, the blind spot in business is not the “What” or the “How” but the Who? (Peter Senge et al, Presence)

To create change, business leaders need to come face to face with the question of WHO they are. This is the cultivation and development of Howard Gardner’s 9th intelligence, existential intelligence: “Existential thinking… entails the human capacity to pose and ponder the biggest questions: who are we? Why are we here? What is going to happen to us? Why do we die? What is it all about, in the end?” The root cause of the blind spot, not exploring this WHO, is that our cultural model of scientific objectivity outlaws personal exploration and transformation.

Organisations need to escape the cultural prohibitions of a learning method that traps individuals from investigating their own experience. We need to concentrate on developing skilled observation (Designing Thinking) of the labels and objects within experience. Discovering who we are, our vision, and living our dream will become the new role of corporations and organisations of the future.

“No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.”
Jesse Jackson

NOTE: the following presentation uses technical terms, like SKILLED CONVERGENCE and BLIND VISION etc. to specifically identify the positive and negative factors within our experience which inhibit or cultivate creativity and innovation. Please be patient with these terms and don’t let their unfamiliarity put you off. At first they may seem cumbersome and difficult to understand but experience has shown that rather than dumbing down, or underplaying this message, really working with this mental map can result in a good understanding of strategic innovation and a logic of experience.

The Logic of Innovation and Personal Transformation

Unfrozenmind is about the end of skilled convergence. There are four logical principles of personal transformation which bring to an end skilled convergence and open the door to creative leadership and organisational divergence/innovation.

1. Skilled Convergence (Effect)
2. Blind Vision and Blind Emotion (Cause)
3. Designing Vision and Designing Emotion (Effect)
4. Mastering Divergence/Innovation (Cause)
Unfrozenmind Innovation Education Roadmap
Share, Explore, Engage, Build and Design

Skilled convergence is the commoditisation of ideas and thinking that morphs into a macabre groundhog day, an unintentional circularity of perception and emotion that maintains you in a fixed orbit around the status quo. The cause of convergence is the “unawareness” that experience is organised into pre-established emotional patterns. When appearances and experiences are fixed by labels, a Blind Vision and a Blind Emotion directs the way we think, talk and act. Not knowing this is like being a physicist who thinks the world is flat. The cessation of skilled convergence is brought about through Designing Vision and Designing Emotion.

Mastering Divergence/Innovation is a journey to the centre of the self where you choose to come face to face with your real Self, to the place where your highest future potential and highest future purpose lie. In truth, Mastering Divergence is the process of bringing the Self – forced to take cover from the canon-fire of skilled convergence – out of hiding. Mastering Divergence is broken down into the five models of the Innovation Education Roadmap.

The Unfrozenmind Innovation Wheel
The Unfrozenmind Innovation Wheel is based on a set of governing principles utilised by Mahatma Gandhi as a pragmatic framework with which to understand the role of observation and labels or pre-established emotional patterns in creating the causes and conditions which determine your future. It shows that it is our ability at observing our experiences which determine the quality of our experience. Moreover it shows that by skillfully observing we can change our lives and our futures

Carefully watch your Thoughts
for they will become your Words.
Manage and watch your Words
for they will become your Actions.
Consider and judge your Actions
for the will become your Habits.

Acknowledge and watch your Habits
for they will become your Values.
Understand and embrace your Values
for they will become your Destiny.

If we turn this set of governing principles, from thoughts…. to destiny, into a circle then we can create a model that shows the relationship between the individual and organisational factors involved in leadership, creativity and innovation.

Thinking, talking and acting and the habits that govern these activities are directly related to strategy, communication, performance and the culture that maintains them. Pre-established patterns provide the highway to your future. The key to change does not live outside your mode of observation. We can now use the logic of the Unfrozenmind Innovation Wheel to flesh out a model which shows the factors at work when skilful un-observation is paramount…

…and conversely the factors at work when skilful observation is at work… in other words we can identify the key causes of skilled convergence… (staying the same whilst thinking thing and doing the opposite) and skilled divergence which is creating and innovating.

In the green circle we can see the individual governing factors which promote convergence leading to circular futures. Blind Vision stands paramount as the key factor in maintaining the status quo because it is the ignorance of the power of labels in organising our experience which keeps us heading in the direction of habit. However, the second factor, Skilled Unawareness (Chris Argyris, How Good Communication Blocks Learning, HBS, 2001.)… (or blind emotion), which promotes the organisational disease of groupthink, (Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organizational Intelligence in Action, Amacom, 2003, p.29. ) keeps any avenue closed that may lead to the unravelling of the iron cage of Blind Vision and leads unintentionally to skilled incompetence.

Blind Vision culminates in an organisational design (outer green circle) that prizes linear strategies, emotional emasculated modes of broadcasting communication bereft of any risk, and an obsessive focus on measuring performance in incremental steps. With engrained personal and social habits that ensure that you “learn not to learn”, these principles rise up through the organisation into a closed cultural set of norms and values which keeps it in a position of “learned incapacity”. (Ibid, p.17.)

The silent killer of new ideas is good management and good communication, which paradoxically support the reign of the status quo, a terminal disease triggered by fear, uncertainty and doubt, whose symptoms are censure, consensus and compromise. (“Good management was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.” Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, HarperBusiness Essentials, 1997; Chris Argyris, op.cit.) The reification of the principle of “being right” morphs personal and organisational destinies into a commoditised realm of frozen thinking, frozen talking and frozen action, as anything new is avoided and immediately de-risked and made error free. Skilled Convergence is caused by Blind Vision.

The key to ending Skilled Convergence is then to transform the very domain of awareness and thought which causes convergence. Designing Vision is the antidote to Blind Vision and Mastering Divergence is the path to learning how to Design Vision. In the Mastering Innovation diagram we can now see the logical governing principles which organise experience to allow creativity and innovation to flourish. It is important to understand that though there is a logical sequence to transforming the way you think, talk and act, all of the governing principles above are interrelated. A change in one leads to a change in all. However, the habits of individual and organisationally-learned incompetence run deep and thick.

Simple training programmes and policy cascades will not work. Mastering Innovation is a journey to the centre of the self where you choose to come face to face with your real Self, to the place where your highest future potential and highest future purpose lie. (Peter Senge et al, Presence: exploring profound change in people, organizations and society, NB Publishing, 2004.) In truth, Mastering Divergence /Innovation is the process of bringing the Self – forced to take cover from the canon fire of skilled convergence – out of hiding. Leadership is about being employed by an idea or a dream, not a job title. How you see, and how you feel are the two most important components which lead to change in your cultural set of habits.

Designing Vision begins with learning to know the logic of your enemy – convergence – intimately. It is intimate because convergence lies in the very infrastructure of thought and awareness processes and the rules which govern your way of observing. Designing Vision and Designing Emotion are the causes which lead to Organisational Creativity and Expression. Designing Vision begins with the recognition that perception and emotion are inseparable. You cannot experience an object free from emotion. All perception is emotionally based. The Descartesian Dualism of rationality and emotion and an external world separate from the mind are incorrect. (Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: emotion, reason and the human brain, Penguin, 2005.)

If awareness of labels is emotionally based, it is either good, bad, or neutral. Our experience of objects is therefore organised ethically. Learning to see is an exercise in discovering your emotional landscape. (Saatchi and Saatchi have created a Blue Ocean strategy called LoveMarks based around this component of human experience.) Learning to control, manage and transform the process by which labels construct our experience is Designing Vision. Learning to step out of hiding and overturn the fear which maintains the pernicious principles of skilled unawareness means you must learn to see with your heart. Designing Vision is an economic necessity where corporate survival is dependant on releasing organisational imagination. The foundation of the Lotus-Economy is an emotional hierarchy in which organisations will be ranked by the nobility of their dreams, and leaders’ potential by the size of their dream.

If you truly set your life alight with your dream, Mastering Divergence /Innovation is no longer a choice. You cannot go back to sleep. You cannot stuff the dream back in its box and walk away. A new idea will always alter the bandwidth of your mind. Normal service cannot be resumed. You can try, but somewhere, and somehow, it will always find a way to slip by the guardians, creep out from under the blinkers, and disrupt your return to the safety and womb of groundhog-day thinking. You cannot escape taking responsibility for your dream. “If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, I warn you that you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life” (Abraham Maslow). To do so will make your life immeasurably smaller and result in despair.

Stepping off the beaten highway of thinking, and walking down the space between your thoughts, is fundamentally not a comfortable route. Almost every aspect of the organisational infrastructure which supports the status quo, the comfort zone, will seek to pull you back to the centre of gravity. (A pattern emphasized in the cases in this study [The typewriter, the DC3] IS THE DEGREE to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard of heights.’ But in most cases is a sign of impending death.” J M. Utterback, op.cit.) However, like the Alchemists of old turning lead into gold, the Unfrozenmind leader takes the base elements of convergence and crafts Legends from Blind Vision.

The unfrozenmind Innovation Educational Roadmap
The unfrozenmind Educational Roadmap is built around the logical principles of personal transformation and economic creativity. Unfrozenmind challenges the normal rules of engagement in which the relationship is based on the partner providing answers. Traditional organisations focus on the past through solving problems and devising answers. Unfrozenmind focuses on the future through creating questions and designing dreams. Unfrozenmind’s job is to help its clients find questions; questions, which lead to uncovering the organisational dream. It is this fundamental principle of focusing on the WHY, rather than the WHAT and the HOW which distinguishes the Unfrozenmind approach. Transforming your organisational DNA begins by putting the mind back into business. Putting the mind back into business means that YOU have to do it. The Unfrozenmind modules BrandNewMind, BrandNewGame and BrandNewFutures are normally week long workshops with built in pre and post workshop support. The Innovation Opportunity Documentary is a way of bringing into relief the logical principles of organisational story-telling. BrandNewPlanet is about digital story-telling and driving the dream through web 2.0 collaboration. Unfrozenmind recruits, builds and custom-tailors the programmes and project teams uniquely for each client. Depending on your organisational or personal strategy the Unfrozenmind roadmap can be taken as whole or broken down into individual modules