Many of today’s market leaders are relative newcomers to many industries. They achieved their success by breaking the patterns of existing thinking. Google, Tesla, Amazon and more recently Alibaba, have overtaken their markets by shifting their emphasis to consider ‘WHAT IS POSSIBLE’ rather than continuing their focus on ‘WHAT IS’. They are co-creating a new way forward based on what they learn, as they learn, it rather than current understandings and knowledge. Figure 1 shows an adaptation of Blooms Hierarchy of Learning that will enable us to act in cycles of higher order learning in rapid cycles. If we are able to quickly make sense of shifts in expectations though evaluation and then act on these new insights to co-create new options, we can generate a faster path to market dominance.
Traditional teaching practices are focused on remembering ‘WHAT IS’ and this creates a closed mindset. A mindset that believes success comes from convergent thinking leading to ‘discovering the right answer’.
This mindset draws confidence from certainty and comfort from knowing, reflecting less mature actions from the bottom of the Learning Hierarchy. Convergent thinking is good for management problem solving, but is exactly the opposite of what will make us successful leaders.
Future leaders need to be comfortable in uncertainty and prepared to act with limited knowledge, to explore the unknown and co-create new knowledge. That is, we benefit from acting from an open, divergent mindset to stimulate inclusive connections between people and emerging insights to co-create new ideas. Co-creation drives sustained success through conversations and active interactions between people bouncing ideas in an environment of Creative Friction (Shelley, 2017).
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"Co-creation drives sustained success through conversations and active interactions between people bouncing ideas in an environment of Creative Friction". - Shelley, 2017