Smart Leaders: Thinking and Innovation Skills for the 21st Century

We live and work in an era like none before, an age that requires smart leaders – people with the thinking skills and tools to deal with uncertainty, complexity and discontinuity and the know-how to capitalize on emergent trends, leverage intellectual capital and  prepare their organizations for a future of opportunities rushing at us faster than ever.

Smart leaders are mindfully “plugged in” to the idea spaces of the future. They see the bold contrast that awaits – between the success that comes from innovation and change and the failure that comes from risk aversion and an unwillingness to “let go” of unproductive habits. Smart leaders actually “think up” new ideas; they don’t wait for them to fortuitously arrive. They make things happen; they don’t just let them happen. Largely because they have replaced the power of habit with mindfulness and the power of focus.

The question every executive today must ask is this: Is our current business model and management approach up to the challenges of an era of complexity and discontinuity where knowledge and ideas are the raw materials of growth and prosperity? Whether you seek to run your business better, grow it through revenue-focused invention or transform it entirely, innovation is about everything you do – and how you strategically choose to do it. “Companies fail to create the future not because they fail to predict it but because they fail to imagine it.” Even if you decide not to change, the world around you most certainly is and will continue doing so at an ever more breathtaking pace.

Leaders of the past relied heavily on the lens of rational analysis to peer into the future only to discover, too late, that the urgent and vital task of understanding how their world will unfold requires a different kind of thinking discipline. Imagination, the ability to free oneself from the grip of present reality, is the mind’s faculty for grasping emergent challenges before they come into being, recognizing patterns that are neither spatially contiguous nor logically related, and looking around corners to anticipate high-risk, high-impact events. The critical question is whether your current thinking “box” is a prison or a platform for greater accomplishments.

Only one thing is certain: any degree of comfort you might have with respect to your current job, career, industry or marketplace is misplaced. What you will be responsible for tomorrow will be very different from what you do today. The skill sets you will need going forward will require some fundamental changes. And chief among them is the ability to think and solve problems. Rational analysis is simply not up to the task.

Most brilliant business decisions come from the gut. The conscious mind processes information at 2,000 bits per second; the unconscious mind can handle four billion bits/second. A growing body of research from neurology and cognitive psychology suggests that intuitive insight is a real form of knowledge and power. It isn’t a gift but rather a skill that can be learned. Creative problem solving is not about serendipity; it’s about “making things happen” when needed. To do so, you must discover that it contradicts everything you’ve likely ever been taught about how to solve problems and make the right decisions.

Leaders who make tough decisions for a living are discovering that in complex or even chaotic situations, such as today’s brutally competitive business environment, analogue thinking usually beats analytical thinking. Simply stated, too much is unknowable. Complex systems, like markets, ecosystems and corporate cultures, are impervious to the logical, deductive, take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works approach.

Situations in which rules supply all the answers are an endangered species. In part, this is because your very actions (and those of your colleagues) change the situation in unpredictable ways. And rarely do you have the time to consult the experts, do the necessary research and incessantly look for perfect information. In today’s world, that is time utterly wasted. Smart leaders are practical, decisive and focused on what really counts.

Each of us has the potential to think more effectively. The first step is to rid ourselves of the unproductive thinking patterns and mental traps that constrain us from achieving our full potential and destiny. The ability to think better is the most significant competitive advantage you will ever possess. Your ultimate success lies not in what you know but rather in what you do with what you know. Because how you think will determine who you are and what you will become in the time you have remaining.

The benefits of attending

This program was purposefully designed to help you:

  • Evaluate how you presently think and approach your most vexing challenges
  • Discover more productive ways to achieve greater focus and find better answers
  • Upgrade your current thinking skills and problem-solving methods and tools
  • Think about yourself differently and see complexity and the future as opportunity
  • Acquire the knowledge and insights to lead people to daring new heights 
  • Challenge the conventional wisdom about creativity and innovation
  • Examine the latest research on brain physiology and neurology
  • Develop new approaches to dealing with today’s key business challenges
  • Broaden your perspective through robust dialogue/sharing with colleagues 
  • Build a new network of reliable, mindful, creative professional contacts 
  • Discuss and find solutions to your most difficult problems in complete confidence

Sessions include

  • What the future portends: Laws, forces and trends you can’t ignore
  • Minds of the future: Disciplined, synthesizing and creating
  • Analytical thinking: The good, the bad and the ugly
  • Understanding “The Box”: Social and organizational conditioning
  • Analysis, creativity, imagination, intelligence and intuition
  • Understanding the hardware: Brain neurology and physiology
  • Innovation at work: Practical realities and critical necessities
  • Barriers and constraints to creativity and innovation
  • Mind traps: The value of information, research, intelligence, etc.
  • Problem solving: Learning a better (and simpler) way
  • A practical framework for innovation
  • Optimizing the creative potential of groups: Consensus decision-making
  • New thinking windows: Tools, techniques and methods
  • Unleashing genius: Personal liberation and transformation.