The business playing field has changed and will keep on changing, in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Uncertainty and instability are the key drivers of the business game, and many of our coaching clients are challenged by a diverse range of wicked, societal, business and people problems, none of which are going away. This means that the future will be very different from what it is today. We can support and enable leaders in organizations to master and flourish in the playing fields of the future through innovation coaching and mentoring. By becoming a coach for innovators, we can help our clients accelerate their innovation process, support them to implement their digital transformation initiatives. As coaches for innovators we can help them reduce their own and their people’s resistance factors and risk adversity, and support them to build long term business value, growth, and sustainability. As mentors for innovators, we can help them improve and apply their knowledge, skills, and experience to effect transformational change.

What are innovation coaching and mentoring opportunities?

As executive and business coaches, we have a unique opportunity to empower them to maximize these trends and problems as creative opportunities for innovation today. We can achieve this by enabling them to develop a strategic and systemic way of embracing business, learning and innovation agility.  As coaches for innovators, we can help facilitate the shift their often conventional and traditional ways of leading, managing and doing things.  As coaches for innovators. we can collaborate with them to co-create new ways of leading that result in the profound changes that create the REAL results that people want, whilst affecting business growth in the process.

“We collectively create results that nobody wants because decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the people affected by their decisions. As a consequence, we are hitting the limits to leadership- that is, the limits to traditional top-down leadership that works through the mechanisms of institutional silos.” 

What is business enterprise agility?

Business enterprise agility is the “ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”. Business agility can be maintained by maintaining and adapting goods and services to meet customer demands, adjusting to the changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of human resources.

It is the ability of an organisation to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An agile enterprise uses the key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success.

Some of our clients are keenly aware of the need for Speed and Simplicity, and Low Cost, High-ValueLen and Agile Solutions to their key challenges and problems. As business and executive coaches, we just don’t always have the time to go deeply into the theory behind complex adaptive systems, complexity science, and enter the multiple intelligence debates.

However, many of us are already powerful, knowledgeable in our various modalities, and effective in knowing how to contextualize these notions for our clients and enhance their ability to apply them. As coaches for innovators, we can improve and extend our capacity, confidence, and capability through innovation coaching.

What is innovation?

At ImagineNation™ we acknowledge that innovation is about creating “changes that add value” and involves knowing how to see, respond to opportunities and solve problems in creative ways that people value & cherish!

What is business enterprise innovation?

Business enterprise innovation involves making changes that add value in terms of either revenue growth or increased operational efficiency. It may involve the creation of new products and services or technologies that deliver value to customers, in a manner that is supported by a sustainable and profitable business model. 

How does business enterprise innovation merge with agility?

“Isn’t there a way to break the patterns of the past and tune into our highest future possibility—and to begin to operate from that place?” 

Creating collisions through coaching and mentoring innovation

Innovation results as a COLLISION between different perspectives, to disrupt, interrupt and break habitual thought patterns. This creates the space for something new to emerge, as an explosion of creativity, which leads to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions!

As coaches for innovators, we artfully facilitate the key collision between our client’s “necessity” programming because necessity is the ‘mother of all inventions’ with our client’s highest “possibility” thought patterns.

This collision helps us to co-create their “why” for being innovative. It unleashes the power of intrinsic motivation, which can then be evolved as their passionate purpose for innovation.  Without a sense of urgency, coupled with a clear, compelling, and courageous “why” and passionate purpose for innovation, people stay inside their comfort zones. Making their chance to learn how to be, think, talk, and do things differently, virtually impossible. As coaches and mentors for innovators, we enable them to develop their sense of urgency, intrinsic motivation, and passionate purpose to step outside of their comfort zones, courageously, compassionately and creatively into the playing fields of the future.

  • Cultivating agility 

“Agility as the ability to make an intentional shift in order to be effective in changing contexts” and that“every person in every organization will experience the need to respond to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways, and will have a choice whether or not to make their own agility shift

Agility merges with innovation when we apply the collision as:

  • Both a way of intentionally shifting our way of being thinking and doing.
  • And taking a strategic, systemic, and end to end approach to discovering, designing and delivering the change or innovation strategy.

As coaches and mentors for innovators, we help people;

  • Quickly embrace, respond, adapt to, and safely deal effectively with change.
  • Self-regulate their complacency and unconscious resistances to change.
  • Feel confident and empowered to take smart and courageous risks.
  • Permit, encourage and enable people to rock the ‘business as usual’ boat and safely disrupt their comfort zones.
  • Collaborate and connect, are curious and inquisitive and generatively see, respond to and solve problems.
  • Create an energetic environment that cultivates their purposefulness, creativity, and wellness.

This is encapsulated by what Bart Schlatmann, former COO, of ING Netherlands said to Mc Kinsey:  “Being agile is not just about changing the IT department or any other function on its own. The key has been adhering to the “end-to-end principle” and working in multidisciplinary teams, or squads, that comprise a mix of marketing specialists, product and commercial specialists, user-experience designers, data analysts, and IT engineers—all focused on solving the client’s needs and united by a common definition of success. This model was inspired by what we saw at various technology companies, which we then adapted to our own business”.

How does this benefit organisations?

  • Accelerates the innovation process.
  • Reduces the resistance factors and risks inherent in change and innovation.
  • Engages, empowers and enables the entire organization & broader ecosystem in the innovation effort.
  • Build long term business value, growth, and sustainability.

Who are coaches and mentors for innovators?

A coach for innovation is someone who knows how to be present to, see, and respond to (complex adaptive systems), the unexpected and the unplanned (complexity). Who is able to shift their way of being, thinking, talking and doing (applying multiple intelligences) to emerge possibilities, opportunities and solve problems generatively by demonstrating;

  1. Agility competence involves cultivating the mindsets, behaviours, and generative skills necessary to respond to the unexpected and unplanned. As well as being safely disruptive in the discovery and design phases of innovation to generate new developments and innovative breakthroughs from emerging trends.
  2. Agility capacity is about cultivating the emotional, visceral & cognitive abilities to flow and flourish with uncertainty and volatility.
  3. Agility confidence is about cultivating the determination, resilience, and self-efficacy to trust their own, and others’ judgments, competence and capacity to be effective in changing contexts and stay in the business game.

A coach for innovators is someone who contributes the best of oneself, and generates the best from others, by being able to connect, explore, and discover from the whole system. Who then co-creates, designs, and delivers commercial solutions for the good of the whole – in the context of innovation and entrepreneurship

What is the highest possibility for you through innovation coaching and mentoring?

At the heart of every successful coaching or mentoring intervention is the willingness of the coach to creatively, courageously and compassionately step outside of our comfort zones and hit the issue in safe powerful authentically powerful ways.

When we are able to connect with the other person, and create a collective holding space, in deep and meaningful ways, often to effect profound change and transformation.

Coaching and mentoring innovation are key levers for effecting this, because, as Otto Scharmer says: This is the moment when what we need most is enough people with the skill, heart, and wisdom to help us pull ourselves back from the edge of breakdown and onto a different path.” 

At ImagineNation™ we provide innovation coaching, education and culture consulting to help businesses achieve their innovation goals. Because we have done most of the learning and actioning of new hybrid mindsets, behaviours, and skill-sets already, we can help your businesses also do this by opening people up to their innovation potential.

Contact us now at janet@imaginenation.com.au to find out how we can partner with you to learn, adapt and grow your business in the digital age.