Author: Howard Lieberman

Innovators attempting to innovate generally experience resistance and this is not a bad thing. Change, unavoidable for progress is dangerous, and as such, requires risk prudence to insure it will be useful and valuable enough to justify. Innovators must repeatedly alter and justify their actions to iterate toward workable solutions. Although initial forays do not always succeed, they serve as foundations supporting subsequent efforts to achieve the critical mass required for change to occur. In other words, innovators are necessarily agents of change and as such need to rapidly determine boundaries they need to operate within in order to contribute value in any given situation.

Boundaries always exist, at times between departments, divisions, enterprises, markets and nations, but most often in terms of mental models, which usually arise to cope with political and fiscal realities. Everyone has to prioritize and categorize, sometimes rigidly and other times permitting degrees of freedom to exist. We all adhere to the constraints of the mental models we adopt, even if we are the creators of those models. These models exist to help us predict the future by limiting the unknown or unknowable. Models are not reality, and can change either more quickly or more slowly than reality does. Herein lies one inherent divide between decision makers and innovators – adherence to prior models. This chasm is regularly crossed by the two parties negotiating boundaries. This is not to say that decision makers are not innovators. Successful decision makers innovate to remain decision makers, but as change agents they have the responsibility to preserve and preside over smooth operations by prudently defending against less calibrated innovators. These two roles are relativistic because they are situation dependent.

Which side of the divide one finds themselves has to do with resource allocation. If the innovator is in charge of allocating larger organizational resources then they are also the decision maker but it is likely they will need to justify their actions to another decision maker above them. Presidents still report to boards or congress or someone. We all have to justify our actions not just to ourself but to others. And we all lead some of the time even if it is just ourselves.

As leaders, innovators and change agents, it is always useful to attempt to put yourself in the places of those above and below you in order to better understand  perceived and real needs, and perceived and real boundaries.  All of us are constantly adapting to both changing circumstances and the way in which others adapt to their changing circumstances. We do this to survive and each of us play all of the roles beginning at early ages. When a six year old is left to watch the family dog for even five minutes they begin to be faced by these issues. All people adapt – that is their job to adapt, grow and mange change. We are all in charge of some innovation some of the time. And we are all subject to others needs at the same time. Try to look all around you and above and below too whether you are adapting, changing, innovating, following or leading.

Most innovators desire impact — to make a lasting difference . There are ways to leverage our ability to be change agents. A most obvious one, is having enough money to hire a lot of people to work on your projects programs, companies and inventions. Another one, is having enough influence and charm to convince other stakeholders to participate in various ways. In all cases we are assuming the innovation initiative to be designed around valid and valuable insights which will be beneficial. Of course wealth and influence are not always applied in such a noble manner, but for our purposes SVII is presuming positive outcomes for the greater good.

What if there was a way to have 10 to 100 times the impact? For you to be 10 or100 times more effective than you currently are? Would you be interested? It has been often stated that we each have more potential than we exercise, that almost everyone is an underachiever in terms of potential. This brings up the issue of human potential which to my mind is the greatest existing resource. We have a very large number of other resource issues that consume our attention including but not limited to energy, air, water, money, overpopulation, food, species extinction but the single dominant resource that impacts all of them is the human resource. This is why much of the SVII community is focused upon human potential as a most impactful resource.

A long time member, friend of SVII, and Thought Leader – Bill Veltrop, has been a proponent of a concept he calls “Infinite Games” which are in turn played by “Infinite Players”. More information here: TheInfiniteGames | What Are Infinite Games. Bill has been busy developing and articulating systems and approaches that permit individuals and organizations to explore working toward being10 to 100 times more effective. GlobalGEA Manifesto – GlobalGEA.

I am not going to try to paraphrase Bill, as his words are available in other places (linked to above) but do feel the need to point out to individuals possessed of significant degrees of personal freedom including resources and flexibility, the possibility of radically amplifying their impact in part through first shifting their internal models to open to this possibility. Life is not linear. Our nervous systems which include our sensory apparatus and brains, are generally characterized in exponential terms. When our thoughts appear to progress linearly they are simply straight line approximations to the curved, nonlinear dimensionally vast universe we occupy. We sometimes express powerful innovations as being disruptive, but they are only disruptive to our linear models, not to reality. Breakthroughs often act as delimiters as they occur at the edges of linear hierarchical and categorical thinking. The act of attempting to reconcile what “we know” with “what we experience” frequently requires adapting or improvisation — also sometime called innovation.

In order to experience infinite multipliers where we change by a factor of 10 or 100, we have to first consider the possibility that we are in some way transcendent. This does not require a suspension of logic and adherence to mystical belief systems. Innovators are always transcending circumstances to achieve  breakthroughs. This is perfectly natural, normal and reasonable when we remember that we are nonlinear and exponential, and let go of some of our constraining mental models about who we are and what we are capable of. If you have any doubt -just watch small children for an hour and see just how “linear” they are. If they can go 100X so can adults – it is inherent in being human. We are all natural innovators with infinite degrees of freedom until we start thinking that we are not.