Innovators.

Where are your talking heads?

Are you an innovator or design lead creating new value props or solving wicked problems? Do you find yourself drowning in post-it note parties filled with crazy 8 ideas that always seem to gravitate to iterations of “faster, better, cheaper”? Do you find your human-centered design more consumer-centered? Are you tired of tech tropes being touted as “best practice”? Or just tired.

We get it. We’ve been there too.

Many of the talking heads who swirl around innovation hubs suffer from binary byte blinded-ness, and don’t speak a language that can see how living systems work. Their approach to value is deeply disconnected from the real world. Which conditions you to play a short, shitty game, chasing your tail, locked into agile and aimless sprints. It’s not just tiring, it stops you unlocking your real value potential.

If you want to ride the real disruption curve, you need to change the playbook.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Most talking heads preach from an old school innovation playbook that enforces low value, high risk patterns. Unpack this, and their approach to sensing and seizing opportunities is often way off kilter.

If any of the following sounds familiar, you’re probably exposed….

Their approach to sensing opportunities looks something like this….

Their approach to seizing opportunities looks something like this….

Which, in practice, focuses your innovation something like this….

And feels a little like this….

If this resonates, odds are, this is the game you’re playing….

Don’t play this game.

This puts you on the wrong side of the real disruption curve.

instead ask yourself about the hardcoding…

What is the lens they’re using?

What are the assumptions underpinning their thinking?

To summarise

* There is an overlap of problems felt by Change Agents and Start Ups too.

You can play a bigger game

Getting on the right side of the real disruption curve means doing a 180° flip (the bird) on the broken methods, models and false constructs hardcoded as “best-practice” in the current innovation playbook. If we want to seize all the blue ocean opportunities around us, we first need to change how we sense and sense-make.

Different lens. Different language. Different questions.

We go around the bright and shiny moving things, to where it’s quiet and still. We go behind linear markets, to living systems. We don’t look for the patterns so much as how the pattern book has been imprinted. And the language of currency? It’s not binary bits, but biological atoms.

#hidden in plain sight

Where are you now?

Take a moment to think about where your time, energy and focus is going. What are the questions you’re asking? The assumptions you’re making? If you want your innovation to disrupt your world, you need to build up a compass of consciousness that’s contextually connected to the real world.

#this is the bigger game

Tell me about the t.METHOD. Tell me about my learning options.

“Melissa's design thinking skills have been instrumental in helping us unlock our innovation potential. She has an uncanny ability to cut through big problems to identify what’s broken, what works and what can fly. She can see value potential and knows how to unlock it – both in the business and in people. I’d highly recommend her to any business leader wanting to reset and scale up their business."

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Sheri Thomas, Miraka innovation champion