Unfrozenmind launches the Noble Business network (http://unfrozenmind.ning.com) an electronic Agora designed to help people collaborate, engage and create a new agenda for organisations, businesses and society to change the business of world.

Unfrozenmind Marketing Director Alexei Levene said that “now more than ever we need a global conversation about  Corporations, innovation, creativity and our responsibilty for who we are within this context. We can no longer be passengers, avoiding eye contact with the rest of the world and our major issues about water, education, famine, human rights, greed, war and catrastophes… if you really follow Ghandi’s maxim that “you must be the change you wish to see in the world”… then the Noble Business Network is about where the “rubber meets the road”… it’s a call to action to change. The Noble Business network is about business as a force for good… so tune in, connect and change the business of the world.”

Stories are the key tools to liberate dreams and free the human spirit to live divergently. These stories are not the new instrumental trend of painting-stories-by-numbers, Hollywood style, to increase branding and effective communication.

No, these stories are far more dangerous. These stories are heretical and revolutionary by nature. They have been proscribed by the logical policemen of Skilled Convergence (organisational group think). Using these stories is likely to get you ejected by an organisational auto-immune system which ensures new ideas are tried by consensus, tortured by censure and sentenced to death by compromise.

These stories provide us with the mental cartography to place emotional dynamite under the very foundations of linear thought. They blow apart the fortifications built by convergence and release the mind’s dormant nuclear energy of creativity and innovation. These stories are about unlocking your dreams. (See Organisational Stories Quadrant) They are about crossing, storming, jumping, burning, dodging and evading the emotional and perceptual land mines, prohibitions, barricades, defence lines of convention. To ride out on a horse of naked awareness to a new Wild West, a land of spirit, adventure, risk, fun, play, romance, laughter, joy, happiness, and fulfilment. This is a land where self-concept, self-inquiry and self-investigation are ruled by the imagination and not by the natural predators of the status quo: fear, uncertainty, doubt, guilt and obligation.

When you continuously point your dream at the space between your thoughts, at the space between your habits, at the space between your breaths, at the space between your actions, then the culturally created labels of your emotional infrastructure literally go into meltdown in the face of the divergent logic. It is important to understand that the logic of personal and organisational divergence is not based on the either/or categorisation process of western Greek logic. Designing Experience is not about putting things in boxes, it is about seeing the nature of constructing boxes and taking the blindfold off your mind’s eye.

It is about training your awareness to step out of the circular logic which keeps you imprisoned in the status quo.

It is about escaping the frozen thinking which has exiled emotion and prohibited self-investigation.

It is about finding the left-hand side of a thought, and sailing your awareness right by its cliff edge, out into brand new oceans of ideas and possibilities. Unfrozenmind is about creating a logic which transforms habit into an emotional differentiation, it is about transforming work into adventure, it is about using emotion and perception to drive creativity and innovation.

In the Lotus-Economy, organisations will need to create models of personal transformation that skilfully help leaders break the rules of Group-Thinking that end convergence and grow creativity and innovation.

The golden thread running through the landmark theories of leadership, strategy, performance, innovation and organisational design for the last 20 to 30 years is the relationship between change and the mind.

The success of radical innovation depends on “the constraints of established patterns of thought and action.” And this is where the problem lies. Our common sense view of how the mind works, especially in relation to disciplines like innovation, strategy, creativity and the like is at odds with the way experience is actually constructed.

The missing link in current models of personal and organisational development is the relationship between theory and practice. It can be argued that most of these frameworks are based on principles which implicitly operate from a taboo of subjectivity, and therefore do not adequately take into account the role of perception and emotion in designing experience. Moreover, we can draw the conclusion that unless business academics and corporate executives take into account the processes of Blind Vision and Blind Emotion they in fact collude in skilfully maintaining convergence.

The Traditional model of business leadership needs to turns its microscope round the other way and look at how organisations design their own experience. Real competitive advantage exists in transforming thought and creating new ideas

Until this is realised, in effect all external restructuring is really the equivalent of reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. We need a new model of business strategy which breaks the taboo of subjectivity and sets out an organisational framework to enable new modes of thinking, talking and acting.

In an economy based on ideas and meaning, imagination is your competitive edge. If you seriously want to pursue groundbreaking advances in Innovation and Leadership then establishing a breakthrough scenario to take the conceptual and emotional high ground is not a nice to have, but a must.

“To its credit, the Catholic Church did formally acknowledge that it had badly mistreated Galileo Galilei, and that it had made a grave mistake when it forced him to recant, under threat of death, his belief that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. And it said so in a formal proclamation – in 1983.” (1)

An idea is by definition dangerous. It is dangerous because if it is worthy of its name it threatens the status quo. When new ideas are introduced into the board room or in fact any part of the organisation they are tried by the three principles of skilled unawareness: consensus, self-censure and compromise these are in turn held in place through fear, uncertainty and doubt, an emotional mechanism which hamstrings an organisation’s ability to function.

Skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion is the emotional matrix of afflictive emotions which holds Blind Vision in place. What we discover is that any information, conversation or action which threatens the status quo is ejected both privately in our own mental decision-making processes and socially in group/team processes. This is what Aries de Guess calls the organisation’s auto immune system.

The organisation rejects new information and skilfully seals it-self back up in its protective cocoon of convergence. It is also very important to understand that skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion runs across an organisation’s network of clients, advisors, and key stakeholders. This means that the generally accepted rules that define successful outcomes across Strategy, Communication and Performance are channelled into a set of internal tramlines that lead to commoditisation. The organisation’s collective awareness operates on blind, skilfully maintaining convergent thinking and emotions, whilst convinced that their strategic intention is otherwise.

Good management and good communication are bad for business. Designing Emotion, that is transforming this learned incapacity, the emotional and cognitive pre-established patterns that keep organisations and individuals in orbit around the status quo, is a pre requisite for creating great ideas.

1) Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organisations Intelligence in action, Amacom, 2003 p125.