What Is The Access To Innovation Including CX Innovation?

Some time ago I found myself in a workshop listening to and observing that which was occurring. As time flowed onwards and my existence kept ebbing away, i found myself sad, deflated. Here were a group of intelligent people who were charged with charting the future of their organisation. And that future included the label of ‘a customer-centric organisation’. There was much talk about customer obsession, trust, customer experience innovation etc.

So how is that I found myself sad and deflated?  I found myself present to that which did not appear to show up for the rest of the team. What was I present to? The following says it as well as it can be said:

We construct realities and then forget we were the ones that constructed them. When our relationship with reality has a kind of “is-ness”or “fixed-ness” to it, – it limits what’s possible and allows only for options like explaining, trying to fix, resisting or accepting. The answer to the question, what does it mean to be human, gets looked at only through that lens. The movie The Matrix says it well: “Welcome to the desert of the real.”

– Gale LeGassick, Landmark Education

Time and again, I find myself in meetings and workshops where the talk is lofty yet where the course of action is merely reasonable.  What magnitude of possibility lies in a reasonable course of action? Reasonable possibility. What kind of possibility is that?  More of the same and results which are merely reasonable. What is another word for reasonable? Average.

The access to new realms of possibility and the generating of extraordinary results lies in the unreasonable.  Unreasonable given the taken for granted “is-ness” yet not at all unreasonable when one lets go of the cage of “is-ness”. It occurs to me that if there was a master of ‘reality distortion’ it was Steve Jobs. Which may explain why it was that he was the source of new worlds of possibility and extraordinary accomplishment.

It occurs to me that the deeper reason that so few organisations innovate – in any dimension – is that the folks who are doing the innovating are reasonable folks taking reasonable courses of action.  What is more reasonable than going for the ‘low hanging fruit’? Or sticking to the proven methods?  Or involving only the people that have proven themselves to be good team players and safe pair of hands?

Innovation is not simply a matter of process / methodology. Nor is it a matter of tools and techniques. At its heart innovation, and that is just another word for transformation, is a matter of being: the being of the folks in the organisation, and the being of the organisation as a whole.  Only those whose being is ‘unreasonable’ have access to generating innovation and transforming business.

Put simply: plodders do not cause innovation or transformation, they simply plod along no matter what tools and techniques you put in their hands.

The accessing to innovation / transformation? Leaders: those who are ‘unreasonable’ enough in their being to put their very being at stake to bring forth, into the world, the ‘unreasonable’: new worlds of possibility.

Author: Maz Iqbal

Experienced management consultant living/working in Switzerland. View all posts by Maz Iqbal