Emotional intelligence is a real, and really important, factor at play in any business which employs and serves human beings. Leaders are learning how to leverage the impact that emotional intelligence—sometimes called “soft skills”—has in business, from individual careers to organizational culture. Articles on the subject are no longer relegated to fringe publications or social sciences, in fact mainstream business journals like Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and FastCompany have been talking about it for several years. The thriving conscious capitalism movement, the emergence of B Corps , and sold-out conferences like Wisdom 2.0 are all further evidence that more and more professionals and companies are taking the human element of business very seriously. This means that not only is the industrial age model of treating people like machines an outdated one, but companies who aren’t engaged with their employees and customers on a human level are at a competitive disadvantage in an increasingly networked world.
Full-Spectrum Innovation is the idea of creating value in every possible place—from culture & society down to end users of a product, service or platform.
I'm at the Purple Beach Conference in London for the next few days—talking and listening and dancing and getting fired up about People Innovation. I've already captured some great content and inspiration for our Field Guide on Cultures of Innovation. Check out this video sampler of today's adventure:
Smart innovation relies upon information and collaboration to steer it in the right direction, and innovative organizations need to be great at exchanging ideas and opinions among their own departments as well as with their customers and strategic partners. Feedback loops are a straightforward way to invite, collect, and broadcast collective wisdom and put it to good use making better stuff in smarter ways.
Causeit is proud to participate in @petervan's Corporate Rebels United. We first met Peter Vander Auwera in his work with @innotribe (a Causeit client), and are glad to support his work of helping the corporate rebels and misfits of the world find the best way to apply their brilliance to pressing global issues.
Causeit will be speaking as part of Corporate Rebels United's 24-hour Global Rebel Jam, on the topic of how to prepare organizations for the transition from hierarchies to networks, build feedback loops and cultivate the business case for empathy. Causeit's Principal, MJ Petroni, will be speaking from 2:30-3:00 PT; login and registration details are below, along with some context from Corporate Rebels United.
As the world shifts towards more-networked organizations, the creation of feedback loops is more important than ever. An organization's capacity for empathy determines whether or not its products and services will actually serve the people it is trying to earn money from, and its awareness of what motivates its competitors, regulators and even its own staff will determine its ability to form important strategic alliances, form public-private partnerships and retain its workforce.
Running a company can be incredibly challenging. I started Causeit in 2006, without a clear vision for the business, but with a remarkably big, broad vision for my work in the world. Having done several years of personal, transformative work alongside academic study in my field of Cyborg Anthropology, I was really clear that I was committed to creating love, joy and community in the world.
everal years later (seven, to be precise), I'm still constantly attending to the intersection of my personal and business visions, how they play out in the world, and what it means for my team.
I recently attended a “Generational Leadership” seminar to learn how the interaction of different generations of workers affects organizations’ ability to innovate and respond to a rapidly-changing business environment.
The organizations showing up to this conversation have caught on by now: the world is changing… fast. Every day you wake up in a slightly different place. While you were sleeping last night, more information was created in the world than you can process in a lifetime, and somewhere within all that data is a new business model waiting to be discovered. Are the people in your organization prepared to innovate at a rapid pace in order to keep up?
I keep coming back to the question of "how does nature handle IP?" The closest I can think of is our creation of APIs. Organisms don't walk around with their genetic code sort of displayed for everyone to see, what makes them unique. But there is massive and constant interaction between organisms and their environment, and exchange of information. I think APIs, in a way, are sort of an interesting way of thinking about that. You display enough information about your internal code that others can really interact [with it], and build upon it effectively, without giving away the whole farm—which probably wouldn't even be useful. The other organisms don't even need to know your entire code. That piece is interesting to me.
The creation of a kit—literally, as in the Maker world, or figuratively, as in the software world’s APIs and application frameworks—serves as a magnet to whatever industry offers it. Make: magazine’s Project Editor, Keith Sammons, offers why:
An introduction to Causeit's research pilot Opening the Door for Innovation
Steven Johnson's deep dive into the patterns of innovators, Where Good Ideas Come From, explores the environmental factors supportive of innovation and how good ideas come to be. Johnson’s work centers on where innovations are conceived, but spends less time on the factors affecting their birth. While reading the book, it occurred to me to ask, “If so many brilliant ideas are emerging, why aren’t more being put into action?”
![Event: Corporate Rebels & Moving From Hierarchy to Network [30 May]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/500a17fce4b016a023c03626/1369110681231-H4O41ZL9JW3MTOG33SIJ/CRU+logo.png)
