Looking for innovators? Look to Millennials.

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?

Can Innovation Drive Transformation? Our Intention for Wisdom 2.0

This week, Causeit's team (and our friends Jeffrey Van Dyk, Monique Svazlian and Mariposa Leadership) will be attending Wisdom 2.0. The conference's site speaks for itself, but we thought we'd share a bit about our own intention for wisdom, mindfulness and innovation in a 60-second video. 

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Intellectual Property, DNA and Innovation Viruses: Julie Sammons

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Intellectual Property, DNA and Innovation Viruses: Julie Sammons

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.  

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Teams of Lone Wolves

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Teams of Lone Wolves

I first started conceiving of misfits and misfit teams when I began to reflect on my own employment process. As an unusual, "over"-sensitive and intelligent kid with no siblings, I often balked at oversimplified directions, experienced a bruised ego when receiving criticism, and struggled with how to participate in team or group environments. By the time I entered the workforce, I had developed a complex web of insecurities and related defenses designed to protect against the embarrassment of making public mistakes, compensating with my intelligence. It was in my first management position, which happened at about the same time I was engaging in lot of personal development work, that I really saw the impact. 

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Healing the Wounds of the Assembly Line with Feedback Loops and Doctrine

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Healing the Wounds of the Assembly Line with Feedback Loops and Doctrine

Often, the focus on the ideal of the cross-functional, interdisciplinary, extroverted worker results in questions being asked which the average employee is insufficiently skilled to answer. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain cites the example of one of her research technical interviewees' recollection of a 'murder board,' a panel of decision-makers whom engineers had to face in order to get their new ideas considered for funding and other resources. One can imagine a hard-faced panel of besuited men tearing down the brilliant if meek engineer with the smug expressions of a young MBA grad: "What's your marketing plan!," they might shout, "

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Kits as an Innovation Enabler (and an Indicator Species)

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Kits as an Innovation Enabler (and an Indicator Species)

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: 

The Introversion-Extroversion Spectrum

The Introversion-Extroversion Spectrum

Introvert seems to be a nasty word these days. It's worth unpacking why, though, according to Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In the book, she point to an overemphasis on the extrovert rooted in the shift from a 'culture of character' to a 'cult of personality,' stemming from the need to find new ways to quickly and repeatedly introduce one's self—to sell  one's self—in the newly-urbanized United States in the early part of the 20th century. 

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Autonomy and Acceptable Failures: The Need for Doctrine

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Autonomy and Acceptable Failures: The Need for Doctrine

Autonomy, especially in and around U.S. businesses, is a tricky concept. Autonomy is valued very highly in our culture, but the challenge of finding a way to hand off acceptable amounts of control takes a lot more work than most leaders or employees realize. Few companies have the patience or budget for mistakes which occur when a more-autonomous goes wrong, so they choose not to grant autonomy in the first place, or revoke it at the first sign of trouble. Understandably, the constant conflict of employees who need autonomy and leaders who need accountability plagues most organizations. 

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First Steps to Doctrine: the Example of Moore's Cloud Business Principles

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First Steps to Doctrine: the Example of Moore's Cloud Business Principles

For an example of a fluid progression from values to high-level beginnings of doctrine, consider this published set of business principles from Moore's Cloud, a "smart light" startup based in Australia. Their founder, Mark Pesce, explained that the intent of these principles was both internal and external, being used both to inform internal daily decision-making and to filter (attract or repel) investors by explicitly stating the company's commitment to open ecosystems and transparent business practice. By 'downloading' individuals decision-making guides from key leaders in the organization and then 'uploading' them to the business's guiding source code, Moore's Cloud has reduced huge amounts of unnecessary

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Doctrine: Downloading Wisdom for Agility and Effective Improvisation

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Doctrine sits in between strategy and plans. It is more specific than the strategy, but also more versatile than plans, or rules. Think of it as heuristics, or guidelines: the purpose of doctrine is to enable an individual to know what to do in a situation that's consistent with the strategy and achieves the objectives of a plan, but with flexibility, with autonomy, for the individual, in the circumstance. And the creation of effective business doctrine, I believe is going to be critical for the transition of business in the next century.

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The Shift from Push to Pull: Creating an Orbit

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The Shift from Push to Pull: Creating an Orbit

One of the greatest shifts we're seeing today is a shift from push to pull. We're in a world now where our customers and our employees don't need us the way that they used to. It used to be that we needed to advertise, we needed to promote, we needed to push information out to people, so that they knew who we are, what we sell, why they should buy from us

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Caring: The Missing Ingredient

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I think the biggest missing ingredient for leaders is caring. At some point along the line, they stop caring—about their teams, about the company, about their customers, and it becomes a matter of just executing actions. I think when leaders reconnect with why they're doing what they're doing, the difference that it makes in the world and allow themselves to open their mind and their heart and take action based on those, that's when things really start to happen. Because it becomes inviting to people. That's what becomes open and transparent.

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Creatives, Non-Linear Thinkers and So-Called Misfits

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I was recently asked to weigh in on how to support the creative worker. It's a broad, almost-impossible question: how does one even begin to categorize such a person? So I chose to respond by focusing on the elements of the workplace which enable creativity, both culturally and structurally, to support the rise of good ideas and ease for those bringing good ideas to light. 

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The Spectrum of Introversion to Extroversion

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The Spectrum of Introversion to Extroversion

Most leadership guides, hiring manuals and educational practices are grounded in the idea of supporting collaboration and motivating employees by having extroverts lead. The history of how this came to be is detailed in the revealing title by Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. 

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Social Enterprise as a Listening Tool

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Social Enterprise as a Listening Tool

And what I would say is that there is a unique opportunity right now for companies to, as a first step, to start to embrace the social enterprise—because what that does is that gets the value of the human component quantified, and from there we start to make decisions, we start to put in structures that are not 100% based on just what the profit and revenue growth are. Those things become an end, an outcome.

Causetalk: Future of Organisations Teaser from Osaka, Japan

Curious about the shift from hierarchies to networks? Have big ideas about what leadership will look like a new economy? We are too. We were honored to be invited by @innotribe of the @swiftcommunity to speak @sibos, the annual international banking conference, on just what leadership might look like. Here's a preview of the session while the full film is being produced:  

How Good Ideas Become Real Innovations

How Good Ideas Become Real Innovations
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?”