I am in my second year of studying for a masters in innovation, creativity and leadership. I started the course to refresh my consultancy skills, to make sure that I remained relevant, useful (and worth paying for) and to give myself a structured opportunity to learn. It has been a much richer experience than I had ever imagined – accountants can, it turns out, be creative too – but it has also been a much stranger experience than any of us had envisaged in Term One: online classes, virtual libraries and studying how organisations change whilst the UK is going through its biggest upheaval of my lifetime. It has all felt incredibly relevant (be careful what you wish for) and rather overwhelming. I will be working through what I have learnt for years but I have a few takeaways already and here’s one:
We are all innovators now
‘Necessity’ the proverb asserts ‘is the mother of invention’. Before the current crisis innovation was presented as a choice, albeit one that organisations should say yes to. Not any longer. In some ways it’s pretty depressing. People generally liked the way that they were working before, otherwise why continue? Innovation requires change and that means the loss of some familiar habits and well understood practices. Innovation is risky – it is unpredictable and unreliable so why not stay with what works? No wonder many organisations fail to innovate successfully.
Whilst the bad news is that many of us will have to innovate to survive, the good news is that many of the obstacles to innovation: the all-consuming pressure of delivering today’s work well, risk-aversion and the sense that it can be put off to next year are no longer relevant. We feel the push of being in ‘change or die’ territory and the pull of opportunities in a changed landscape.
There are lots of books that tell you how to innovate (I have read quite a few) but one that sticks in my mind is the Three Box Solution developed by Vijay Govindarajan. He argues that big business decisions fall into three boxes.
Box One: manage the present – make your current business operate as best you can
Box Two: selectively forget the past – escape the traps of the past by abandoning practices, ideas and attitudes that have lost relevance in a changed environment
Box Three: Create the future – generate breakthrough ideas and convert them into new offers and activities
Right now we are in a liminal zone between what was and what will be. We will need to forget some of what we were to make space for what we might be.
What if we can choose to experience this liminal space and time, this uncomfortable now, as a place and state of creativity, of construction and deconstruction, choice and transformation[?] (Fullerton, 2020)
Business school language doesn’t really cut it, as Dawn wrote yesterday, we need new stories to imagine new realities into being.
Susan
References
GOVINDARAJAN, V., 2016. The Three Box Solution. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 3–4.
Fullerton, S. “What Else Is There?,” “Liminal Space,” Oneing, vol. 8, no. 1 (CAC Publishing: 2020), 77–78, 79–80.
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