Innovator’s Mindset
One-day Seminar on Creating an Innovative Culture

Much progress has been made in improving innovation over the last 30 years. New techniques for developing skills and capabilities have been developed. Improved processes, structures, and systems have been discovered and implemented. However, one core area has received little attention — The Innovator’s Mindset — the thinking and spirit that is the source of innovation. Mindset addresses questions such as How did that person get the breakthrough idea in the first place? What enabled them to see, formulate and desire the end state and then develop and execute a plan to achieve it? And, why, despite all the obstacles did they stay resolved and succeed? This is the subject matter for this seminar.

If the mindset of innovation were similar to others areas mentioned above, by now it would have been distilled into a series of steps and widely taught. But it is not similar since it resides in the understanding of the realm of thought, — how we think and why — innate and omnipresent but arguably impossible to reduce to a set of programmatic steps and techniques. The aim of the seminar is to expose the participants to a set of fundamental principles and ideas in a way that has them have insights — their own understanding — into how they can easily and naturally be innovative and how this can become a “new normal” state. From this state and understanding, innovative actions naturally arise with no real attention required on the part of the individual. The key to this is the realization that it is through thought that we perceive and understand. Thus, as we improve thought, we touch everything in our lives — our decisions, our actions and ultimately our performance. Understanding the nature of thought allows people to access fresh thinking and aspirations. Innovative ideas are unleashed that can be used in the workplace and everywhere else in life.

Seminar Focus - Three Key Areas

The innovative individual is curious about what is going on and whether it can be improved; they are accustomed to thinking freshly about problems. When a new idea or solution dawns, they take the first sensible steps to test it. Instantly, or over time, it crystallizes into a goal or vision that they care deeply about and which they pursue with resolve and commitment. The seminar will explore principles and distinctions in these three areas:

1. Insight Thinking — a mode of thinking that brings a continual flow of fresh, creative ideas — insights perfectly tailored to the needs of the moment. In this mode of thought you can know freshly in every moment what’s most important to do right now and how to accomplish it with ease and grace. We will explore and understand how habitual thinking processes “drown out” Insight Thinking and how to recognize the kinds of mental habits that block the flow of reflective thought and thus block you from the fresh, creative ideas that are always available to you. You will learn how to increasingly recognize and trust your own source of creative inspiration and to recognize when the quality of your own and others’ thinking is low, so that you will know when not to act on your thinking, and when engaging with others is likely to be unproductive.
   
   
2. Creative Orientation — the mental posture of “bringing things into being” as contrasted with Problem Solving which often carries the mental posture of “driving the unwanted out of existence.” We will explore the power of being clear about which results you most deeply want, why aspiration is the most powerful state of motivation, and how to tap your own deepest aspirations. You will see how Creative Tension is naturally formed and how to open your receptive awareness to information from reality that will strengthen your ability to create what you want.
   
   
3. Persistence, Commitment and Resolve It has been said that commitment to a goal is evidenced by intelligently ignoring anything that distracts you from focusing you attention on what you want to create. Mostly, persistence is thought to be a matter of willpower, but this is not true. It is a matter of mindset and thinking habits. As you come to understand how thought works, you will find it natural to be “undistractable” and easy-going-yet-unyielding in the pursuit of your goals and visions. You will develop the natural capacity to enroll others and to help them surmount emotions that may make it difficult for them to adopt and implement a new idea.

These three areas are not necessarily a complete set of all that makes up The Innovator’s Mindset. It is, however, a very good set, and with understanding in these areas, anything that is missing will be quickly discovered and addressed. And it will be the most natural thing to do just that.

The seminar works because you already have the innate capability to innovate; you do it in many areas of your life. We will be re-awakening what you already know as much as learning something new, which is why so much progress can be made in one day. The inherent capacity to innovate simply needs to be reclaimed and made more habitual in the business setting.

After this seminar, you, like others in the past, will see results and new habits in these areas:

• You will naturally be focusing your energy on things that truly matter to you; you will be undeterred by distractions and obstacles.
• Your personal inventiveness will increase dramatically. As you access creative thinking on a regular basis, putting up with less effective ways of getting things done will no longer seem either necessary or desirable. “Business as usual” will be replaced by fresh approaches in all areas, from individual job activities to strategic corporate initiatives.
• The quality of your conversations will increase. You will begin to look forward to so lving problems and creating results together with other people, even if they have been “difficult” in the past. You will notice an increasingly pervasive spirit of good will. You will view other people less and less as obstacles and more and more as highly valued colleagues in the ongoing process of innovation.
• Optimism, confidence and a high mood will naturally become the norm. You will see great opportunities in situations that would previously have seemed difficult or even hopeless. A state of calm will prevail and it might even seem easy.

 Although the seminar is aimed primarily at individuals, when groups of people understand and apply the principles they discover in The Innovator’s Mindset,

• They are on the lookout for ways of improving, and when discovered, the ideas are somehow taken to the next level for testing. If they hold up, mechanisms are put in place to carry them further.
• Whatever stands in the way of the desired results becomes obvious to everyone and people begin to spontaneously take collective steps to make changes in systems, structures, and other tangible aspects of their workplace to foster innovation.
• They spur each other on to new creative thought and they coach each other, and even their managers, whenever they find the quality of thinking or conversation slipping.
• Decisions and overall business practices and results improve. “Second-guessing” drops dramatically, fewer decisions need to be revisited, and implementation goes far more smoothly. The organization becomes more successful.
• The organization as a whole comes to be characterized by inventiveness, resolve and a state of mind in which people are buoyant and light-hearted because they have the well-founded confidence that they can accomplish together whatever they set out to do. No matter how difficult the circumstances in which they find themselves may appear, their combined innovative capacity will be equal to the challenge.

This group application is the logical next step for participants of this one day seminar.

If you have an existing innovation initiative and want to accelerate its impact or need to start changing the way your organization thinks about challenges, give us a call and in a short conversation we can help you move your thinking forwards and decide whether The Innovator’s Mindset makes sense for you.

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