Transformative Innovation

Leicester Graham

Description

This book offers a first stand-alone practical guide to how to realise transformative potential at scale.

Sujets

• Service innovation

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781911193814
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

First published: 2016
Second edition: 2020
Published by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, UK
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © International Futures Forum, 2016 and 2020
The right of Graham Leicester to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs
Print: 978-1-911193-80-7
ePub: 978-1-911193-81-4
PDF: 978-1-911193-82-1
Artwork by Jennifer Williams
Jennifer Williams is critically acclaimed at making hand-made books, cut-outs, photographs, illustrations, prints and puppets. She is a trustee and member of International Futures Forum and for 31 years directed the Centre for Creative Communities.

This book could not have been written without the remarkable learning community that is IFF. Each of its members has held their own considerable knowledge lightly in a generous collective pursuit over many years of fresh insight, available only to those willing to wrestle with fundamental themes and challenge the safe bet of conventional wisdom in service of the greater good.
Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Transformative Innovation
The Practice of Transformative Innovation
The Capacity to Innovate
Practice and Theory
Ten Characteristics of Transformative Innovation
Case Study: SHINE ~ Changing the Culture of Care
CHAPTER 2: Knowing
Complexity Is Your Friend
Five Principles
Two Loops
A Variety of Prompts
CHAPTER 3: Imagining
Imagining Social Change
Three Horizons and Social Change
Convening the Future
Dilemmas
Imaginary Islands
CHAPTER 4: Being
The Human System
Organizing for Action
Managing the Process
Sustaining the People
CHAPTER 5: Doing
Frameworks for Action
Social Learning
The Buddhist and the Broker
Taking Action
CHAPTER 6: Enabling
A Compelling Vision of the Third Horizon
Encouragement for Pioneers
A Realistic View of the Policy Landscape
Evaluation Based on Third Horizon Intentions
Financing Transformative Innovation
CHAPTER 7: Supporting
Everything Flows
Patterns of Renewal
Cultural Renewal
Infrastructure for Transformative Innovation
The Permission Slip
APPENDIX: The IFF Clan
ABOUT IFF
I NTRODUCTION
TO THE S ECOND E DITION
This is the second edition of a book originally published in 2016. It contains new substance and insight based on learning from experience and feedback from readers and practitioners. For the most part what distinguishes this edition is framing - a more conscious effort to place the book and the idea of transformative innovation in a wider conceptual and practical context. There are three major shifts.
The first is in the title, which now contains an explicit reference to system transition . It is clearer to me now that the practice of transformative innovation - shifting failing systems towards new patterns of viability fit for the future - only makes sense if understood in this wider systemic context. Innovation and change are neutral terms. Both phenomena are occurring naturally all the time in any system. But transformation implies something more than just change or improvement. It suggests a qualitative shift over time, a re-patterning, a reconfiguration of existing materials into something quite new and distinct. In the practice of transformative innovation this fundamental systemic shift is intentional.
We have used the Three Horizons framework to highlight this distinction, between sustaining innovation that maintains or improves an existing pattern and transformative innovation that helps to create a new pattern.
We have not been explicit enough, I feel, in locating these variants within the language of systems change and, more to the point, system transition. System transition implies a longer-term continuous change process which proceeds through different phases (typically versions of emergence, diffusion and reconfiguration) and which incorporates developments at different levels in the system (e.g. niche, regime and landscape or micro, meso, macro). Transformative innovation finds its place within this context. It is a core practice for transformative system transition.
The second shift is apparent in Chapter 5 on doing. Since the original publication, IFF has trained and coached many individuals and organizations explicitly in the tools, methods, approaches and processes of transformative innovation outlined in this book and in the associated IFF Practice Centre. In the process we have found useful ways to make creative connections between some of the frameworks, notably linking Jim Ewing s Impacto and Implemento frameworks in Chapter 5 more directly with the Three Horizons framework and dilemma resolution in Chapter 3 .
Working with practitioners using Impacto and Implemento has also stimulated a curiosity about Jim Ewing s wider menu of executive arts and a desire to understand the foundations that make his conversational maps so effective. I have therefore included a little more detail in the text on his underlying philosophy and also introduce his Insight Cycle ( p.75 ), the master framework that underpins all his individual maps.
Including the Insight Cycle is also indicative of a third shift, which is a more explicit recognition of the importance of being as a determinant of the effectiveness of our doing . Training people to use the approaches and processes in this book has served to emphasize once again that all tools only come to life in the hands of the user.
To hold, to stand for, to mobilize resources around and ultimately to realize a transformative intent in the messy and complex conditions of the 21 st century will require us to develop and demonstrate the full range of our 21 st -century competencies, the individual and collective capacities of persons of tomorrow .
These are explored in detail in the book I wrote with Maureen O Hara in 2012, also now updated in a second edition - Dancing at the Edge: Competence, culture and organization in the 21 st century . Transformative innovators we have worked with have found this book foundational for the practice. So much so that our full competence in complexity programme now begins by developing the 21 st -century competencies before moving on to explore transformative innovation in action. You will find in what follows more regular references to these human capacities, especially in Chapters 2 and 4 , which previously might have been taken for granted throughout.
Finally, whilst I wrote this book to provide everything needed to get started as a transformative innovator - start where you are - our practical experience is that practitioners seeking a deeper understanding are drawn both to Dancing at the Edge and to Bill Sharpe s Three Horizons: The patterning of hope as companion volumes. This book is now amended in places to make clearer reference to this wider landscape, including in this new introduction.
For the rest, the original intention remains. This is a short, sturdy book - like the repair manual we used to carry in the glove box in case our car broke down. It is designed to be taken into the field, to be consulted in real time as the learning cycle unfolds. It is also a gateway to a much wider set of resources, materials and a community of mutual learning and moral support - the IFF Practice Centre at www.iffpraxis.com . I look forward to seeing you there and hearing your tales of transformative change.
CHAPTER 1:
T RANSFORMATIVE I NNOVATION

The Practice of Transformative Innovation
In December 2000 an invitation was issued to around thirty leading figures from different disciplines and different parts of the world to join International Futures Forum, a two-year project to discover how to take more effective action in a complex world. They were invited:

to explore the nature of the most significant future challenges facing society and the systemic connections between them; to examine ways in which we might successfully adapt and respond to these challenges, including by learning from existing promising practice; and to stimulate actions consonant with that inquiry by individual communities and at a systemic level, in Scotland and elsewhere .
That two-year project has prompted a further decade and more of international inquiry. It has furnished an extensive and still growing body of new theory and critical thinking.
Yet the central mission has always been to support effectiveness in action. IFF has diligently worked in diverse settings, with government, business, social agencies and in communities, to test and elaborate our emerging understandings in practice.
We learned early on that effective action in today s complex world requires three essential orientations:

- take the broadest possible view of the context, always thinking systemically, combining holism with focus.
- think in terms of long-term transitions: what brought today s challenges into being, and how might things develop in the future? The late California Senator John Vasconcellos told us that the task is to be hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new.
- always remember that whatever else is in play we are dealing with a human system. As the great systems theorist Sir Geoffrey Vickers observed: human systems are different.
These orientations only get us so far. There is still the question of what we should actually do . If at some level we feel our current actions are ineffective , then the answer is apparently simple. We must change. We must try something different. We must innovate.
But what kind of innovation? I well recall a conversation with the distillery manager at L