LinKS blog

As usual this Forum was an extraordinary experience, businesswise, culturally and by networking opportunities.Steve Forbes and his team was in the usual top shape to set the scene for discussing the business opportunities in the Middle East, the new Silk Road across from Asia and the energy situation as a whole.

The host was the Emir of Qatar and the Foreign Minister bid us welcome in this extraordinary country. Small, like a city-state with about 850t inhabitants, maybe only 200.000 Qataris. Richest in the Middle East and the business life booming as never before. And this s not only about oil. The strategies are diversified and the future Energy City of Qatar hosts science within many energy solutions. On behalf of a questions of mine on the scope of sustainable energy ambitions, the Danish Oil and Natural Gas – DONG - immediately got a special invitation from the Energy City to participate in the development – I will take that home to DONG.

My impression of the Qatari business delegates that I met was top-professional extremely well educated and all perfectly fluent in Engligsh. I decided to do business here and I already started. I will tell you all about that in a special blog edition later.

One of the great moderators and leading editors of Forbes is Bruce Upin who is an expert within Innovation and has followed the energy industry in this perspective. Bruce is always a joy to be with and we had a coffee and a chat on the energy challenges of the world as well as innovation in general. bruce.mp3

Much has been written about Innovation lately - almost everything is about what and why. It seems that attention is on creative processes, fuzzy frontend or even stage gate optimization. Some how very instrumental.

The idea of diversity in group formation, social networks and relation building is in contrast not very offen represented in that discussion. Why is that?

I think some of the answers is to be found in the misunderstood and misinterpreted necessity for costcutting and overall optimization of production. And, what maybe is more important, because Human Resources in many organizations still is “compared” with other production facillities.

In recent years there has been an evolving movement towards explaining the obvious link between the number of and types of relations in personal networks to overall company innovation capabillity - and a new understanding of the importance of technology is definitly part of that picture.

How do your organization cope with “Knowledge Management” and Innovation capabillity? And do you see the same picture?

As management theory has changed direction during time, so has music a long tradition of different approaches. According to the classical music tradition, a scale is a hierarchical stairway which most often consists of seven pure tones in either major or minor, with a keynote as a basic condition. In a classical view a piece of music must express a certain scale and finish at the keynote.

Some musicians are convinced that new pieces of music is to be created in an incremental way, an improvement of existing approaches, based on above conditions. Other believes that new music can only be created in a tense intersection between music traditions and approaches. In the meeting of different approaches it’s often impossible to separate the principles from the different approaches; instead the meeting is an expression of best practice across approaches. In some of these mixed traditions (ex. blues, jazz and African music) the so called ‘blue tones’ appear as an expression of distorted constellations and innovative improvisation with for example no respect to the classical scale of tones and with no specific keynote. In blues the melody can be singed in minor while the accords is played in major, which gives an exiting tension of blue tones in the music, an approach that many modern traditions has adopted. But in spite of this anarchistic approach and artistic degree of freedom, each piece of music is often expressed in a certain dogma way, where the composer follows a more or less conscious plan and common accepted rules and norms in the creation of the musical expression.

Like this mixed music approach LinKS Advice composes new knowledge in a tense intersection between members, and the events and teams are compounded to create the best conditions for innovative improvisation among members and for composition of new knowledge. With the common Wharton principles in mind; the thinking in syntheses, the mental models, the scenarios and personal experience, each member in LinKS Advice contributes with unique and distorted qualities, which in the right constellation creates the blue tones.

Which qualities do you recognize as most important in creating blue tones?

Mads Kjaer, chairman of KjaerGroup, www.kjaergroup.com, has started a revolutionary program, C4-World, designed as a new model of the world economics. Mads Kjaer is member of the LinKS Advisory Board and is one of the best thinkers I ever met. Listen to his key points about about C4 for your self.

It is about solving the problems of Africa to influence tomorrow’s Africa and the goal of creating sustainable development across continents. And guess what, Mads is taking this all the way through the UN, Bono, local African entrepreneurs and the greatest companies of the world. Keep an eye on this project, it will change the way the world goes around.

The Power of Impossible Thinking – Transform the Business of your Life and the Life of Your Business
Authors: Jerry Wind and Colin Crook

It’s nine in the evening and you’re on your way home from work. You go down to the car park and look for your car. You hear footsteps behind you. You don’t want to turn around, but you start walking faster. You remember a story about a robbery a couple of weeks ago. You walk faster, but the footsteps behind you also get faster.

The person behind you is catching up. You get to your car and try to find your keys. You hear the person come right up behind you. You turn around quickly and stare straight at the person. It’s a colleague whose car is parked close to yours. Relieved, you say goodnight and drive home.

The point of the story is that the situation didn’t change, but as soon as you saw your colleague, your perception of the world changed. Only a little part of this drama took place in the cark park; most of it took place in the mental models of your brain.

Research shows that the brain disregards most of the stimuli it receives based on its mental models. The Power of Impossible Thinking deals with how you can become better at understanding the world around you so that you can begin making decisions based on the real world, and not only on the mental models of your brain.

The main point of the book is that in order for you to change your world, you first need to change the way you think, in other words your mental models. If you succeed in doing this, a whole new series of opportunities will open up for you and your company. Or as Albert Einstein wrote, “Without changing our pattern of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought.”

The book recommends a number of methods that individuals, companies and society can use to change their mental models. One such method is to use radical thinkers who in no way fit in with your current life, company or society. Another method is to go out into the world and experience how other people and companies perceive reality.

Even though the book doesn’t solely focus on business, it is relevant nonetheless. Both society and business are focused on innovation, on inventing, developing and selling – activities that our nation will be living off in the future. This requires that we are conscious of – and dare to break away from – our mental models and work with Impossible Thinking.

At CSC, we’ve opened an innovation lab (I lab), where, together with our customers, we develop new solutions to our customers’ challenges. We start changing our mental models by ignoring how things are today, including internal and external limitations, and instead focusing on what we would like in an ideal world. In order to ensure that we don’t resort to the mental models in a traditional customer/supplier relationship, we initially do not enter into a contract for the sale of the solutions that emerge from the sessions in the lab.

The Power of Impossible Thinking is filled with examples of how companies have broken with their mental models and succeeded in changing their worlds. For instance Starbucks is mentioned, which, as we know, transformed a low-priced commodity into an exclusive lifestyle product. An example of an individual is Roger Bannister, the British runner who broke the magic barrier of the four-minute mile in 1954. It was said that it couldn’t be done, but three years after Bannister succeeded, there were 16 other athletes who could run the mile in under four minutes. The mental model was broken.

The book is challenging, and provokes the reader into some very deep thinking. For this reason, it is absolutely recommended reading.

The main points of the book are:

* To change your life, you must change the way you think.
* Constantly question the way you perceive the world.
* If you think the impossible, you can do the impossible.

By Jens Galatius

If you found Jerry Winds discussions on mental models at the lecture a Wharton or in his book “The Power of Impossible Thinhing” interesting, “On intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins is a must read.

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, the Treo smart phone and other handheld devices, has developed a powerful theory of how the human brains works.
The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences on a way that reflects the structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships mad making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness, Jeff Hawkins proposes.
Hawkins theory goes hand in hand with Jerry Winds mental models; in fact Hawkins explains how mental models are created in the brain and how they in practise often replace what we actually are sensing. When reading “On intelligence” you get a better understanding of why the theory of mental models is so strong.
Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence. ISBN 0-8050-7853-3
Read more about the book on: http://www.onintelligence.org/

By Jens Galatius

Talking about innovations it is a natural reaction to focus on the great innovations such as:

• The steam engine
• The water closet,
• Beogram 4000, (the one with the tangential arm)
• The paper clip
• The personal computer,
• Tetrapack,
• The Ipod,
• The mobile phone,
• And many other great innovations..

However, just a few of us actually have the capability, the chance, or the luck - to be around when great innovations happens. Great innovations have great impact – maybe that’s why we recognise them as great innovations?
I will however risk my neck arguing that it is all the small innovations that make the world turn, day after day. It is all the small innovations we do every day such as;

• Sorting the incoming mail in a new way that increases the productivity in the case handling with 30%.
• Changing the oil velocity in a hydraulic arm to make the movement less abrupt.
• Developing a standard operation procedure (SOP) in customer service to ensure a consistent quality, and a baseline for improvement.
• Creating a new strategy that conquers new market segments
• Etc.

That matters to most of us. These types of small innovations that many organisation does every day, improve the lives of the employees, saves valuable resources, creates new markets, protects the environment and boosts the profits have a tendency of going on below the radar screen watching for innovations.

However there seems to be a endless potential for small innovatons, if you nurture them by a stimulating environment, create a structure for recognising and develop the potentials of your employees and celebrating the inventors.

What are you doing in your organisation?

Share your thoughts and practise we us.