Swiss cheese Model for Ideas Aidan McCullen. Have you noticed a colleague who was once full of ideas, who has gone unusually quiet? Perhaps you may assume they are just disinterested? You may think they are having a bad day? Perhaps instead, they have fallen prey to a corporate lobotomy? Perhaps they are worn down? Perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered any more.
What does Tree Dieback have to do with leadership? Nature instinctively knows what to do to ensure the survival of a species, but we homo sapiens can make things much more complicated than they might otherwise be. Biases, blind spots and clinging to the status quo block our progress. Being aware of this is the first step.
Curiosity is essential, but… Preschool children ask an average of 100 questions per day, but shamefully, by middle school, they all but stop asking questions. In a world of abundant data and information, asking the right question is an invaluable skill. The answer can be found easily, coming up with the right question is much more difficult.
Prometheus risked everything to give us a spark, a fire within. Therefore, it is our responsibility to kindle that spark, to keep it alive and to nurture it on to future generations. We are all born with a spark, however small and however clouded by circumstance. Many of us all our spark to fizzle as we grown older or allow others to extinguish or douse our inner flames. While we will not suffer torture like Prometheus did, not embracing our spark can result in mental torture throughout our existence.
We were all impacted in various ways in 2020, but just as bruises result in scar tissue, which is thicker than normal tissue, setbacks can result in resilience if we change how we perceive them. C.S. Lewis puts it beautifully, “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
When we are experiencing chaos, it can be all encompassing, we can forget that there is order ahead. Our guest on Innovation Show 253 is John Rogers, John reminds us that the devastation of the “Black Death” was the chaos that preceded the Renaissance.
If we learned anything in 2020, perhaps it is that we are stronger together. Collaboration can bring us vaccines in record time. This mindset cannot be just a flash in the pan, if that is the case the pan will not be around for much longer. In a world of complex challenges, we need to venture beyond our swim lanes and explore the entire pool.
“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until […]
When others discourage us, we need to see past their words. What do they really mean? Often friends and family do not want us to get hurt, they see a career change/entrepreneurial adventure/new study as a risk. Others may feel if we change they may lose us, we may no longer show interest in them. In some cases, if you change and progress in life, they see it as a reflection of their lack of change. If you change and they don’t where does it leave them?
When we imagine the future, we use memories, dreams, movies we have seen. These data points act like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that we construct. If this is the case, then we can manipulate the information we consume to create novel versions of the future. We can use new information to create new visions of our organisations for a rapidly-evolving world.