Were we all upside down in 2022?

Image adapted from Imaginary Forces for this post

What an utterly strange year, 2022 has been. We have been confronted, reflective and seemingly having to “kick start” our lives again after the challenges of living through the impacts of a global pandemic.

We go into 2023 far more in personal and business conflict. We do need to find a new way of working. It is not throwing away the technology, tools or established processes, it is transforming these in new and different ways. We have not found the “real-time” to stop, explore and approach concepts and innovative ideas in different ways. Our mindset or conditioning was fairly hard-wired from our past ways of working, we felt unable to justify “permission” to change how we undertook work and have found it challenging with the impact of being remote. Many have simply walked away from their past established ways of working. We are confronting unsettling times for many reasons.

In many ways, it felt all we knew or needed was suddenly not good enough. We have lost our understanding of many things we became used to, and suddenly it all seemed challenged in far bigger ways. War, flooding, famine, shortages, and illness challenges began impacting our lives. We were indeed been confronted with a series of crises and the need for a fast, thoughtful set of responses which we were unprepared or incapable to give as each challenge has been highly complex.

We were beginning to be more open to being more reflective but we have been constantly pushed to take us back to “business as usual”. In many ways, we are struggling with a need for a “reset” but it is far more complex than that as we are in the middle of multiple crises.

This return to the old normal is a non-starter for me, we are in a rapidly changing world

We are in need of recognizing and discerning how much our world is upside down, so we can begin to understand how we need to re-equip ourselves to a new way of working, thinking and responding. We need to “righten” what is wrong with this feeling of much of what we are doing being out of balance.

We are all struggling to transform ourselves. Our businesses are grappling with the current economic difficulties we all presently facing including shortages, disruptions, and dealing with inflation and economic downturns and massive climate change challenges. We are not only confronted with the potential of the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it. 2022 was unsettling for me.

The ability to rethink global competitiveness and if it was really needed for our business.

That constant pressure always telling you to never stand still because others aren’t; the merging, acquiring, rethinking that is going on constantly around us, the changes in processes, new alliances and the sudden emergence of a ‘new kid on the block’ who sees a weakness and rapidly fills that gap overnight. Is it the right “mindset” or are we expending resources, precious ones because we are chasing the wrong metrics?

These not only need the necessary reactions of quick fixes but recognizing where they fit within your long-term plans and these need to take more of your precious ‘thinking’ time.

We need to not only re-imagine but need breakthroughs in thinking, bunker busting, and a ‘concentrated’ focus on what is important to our business and our own personal values and contributions.

Will the year of 2023 begin the “great” reset I feel we need? What will help us make that happen?

Where do we grow, where do we go and how do we do this to offer new value, worth and impact?

I turn to innovation as my catalyst for change. Inventing, challenging, spotting opportunity, creating something different, being more radical and seeking out solutions that shift us into something better and valuable.

We start by recognizing that Innovation grows your business, grows your personal worth. It grows your equity, it provides you greater returns but it needs a far greater recognition of its ‘multiple’ parts that must fit together to make it provide a real return.

Innovation has to be central to our future, it needs a more systematic and integrated approach that has a ‘heart’ that beats on a continuous repeating basis that scales accordingly to the challenges you are facing. It needs a ‘fitness’ that knows where it has to focus and why so you can meet these constant challenges in a flexible, coordinated, well-balanced way with speed and combined strength…..the art of building Agility into your innovative thinking and approaches.

Why did I call my advisory service Agility Innovation, it conveys the need to be agile, to be responsive, to be different and seek new ways of undertaking something. It is the ability to change your position……through building new innovation capabilities that combine balance, build out in ways that adapt to the world around us, being fluid and curious to seek out the opportunities to add greater value in the change offered in better innovative solutions. To build more on collaboration, seek greater coordination, understand where speed and scale work, and finally build the reflexes & strength for releasing new creative energy

My tagline for Agilityinnovation.com is: “Innovation: through Agility to move from the existing to the preferred”

 This is not a time to turn away from innovation or (re) invention, it is the very opposite need, a time to embrace it even more. Not in a haphazard way but in a systematic approach with expert advice to help guide you through, often what is called the ‘maze’ of innovation. This focused help should provide you with that vital innovation energy and a deeper set of resources so as to enable you to focus your innovation spending in more targeted ways.

There are clearly many new threats with our changing economic conditions. Have you had the time to make a detailed, thorough assessment of your capabilities and capacities to innovate in different ways to deal with this upside-down world?

I want to offer a structured framework as a method to work through challenging the existing from a business perspective

In a world spinning in different, unpredictable ways, that does seem to be upside down on what, where and how we thought and acted it is this moving to the preferred that needs to be our increasing focal point in 2023.

I have put together a dedicated website for advocating and guiding.

This provides thoughts and advice for individuals and within a team or a business at www.guiding4innovating.wordpress.com. As we look at where we are, I felt this series of thoughts, suggestions or guides were helpful in being reflective, and in plotting out a new innovative pathway. These have been written from my coaching, mentoring, and advisory perspectives.

For example in one post, the value in personal innovation learning journeys I suggest four points of value, perhaps my value proposition to help, if you like, for you to achieve personal innovation growth:

  1. Gaining knowledge gives you growth, impact and return. Others seek you out to understand
  2. Translating knowledge into value deepens your value, increases your worth and gains respect
  3. If you are able to put the co-ordinates into your innovation world you have a clear compass to proceed
  4. The External Innovation Catalyst prompts your thinking, accelerates your understanding and guides you on this personal learning journey of innovation understanding.

The aim is to put the (new) innovation coordinates into our thinking, to establish the directions we wish to travel.

Do we attempt to return to “old” ways or make the break and really push to seek new ways of working, designing and building our innovation? Technology that connects and combines people and intelligence offer a real path to manage with speed, scale and agility. We need to think about ourselves and what needs adjusting and changing but also what and who we want to share this with, within an organization or a wider community where we gain a new sense and direction.

I see Innovation Ecosystem in design and thinking leading the new way of working in 2023 as it enables a higher level of collaborative environments, where we gain from the diversity we need to have in our thinking and appreciation.

It will begin to make contributions, possibly to right what may seem upside down at present, helping us on where we would prefer to be, but also enable us to take what we have and find the ways and means to offer different answers that solve our multiple challenges and crisis to give them this new value, identification and worth.

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