DESIGNING LEGENDS
What position of responsibility would you take to successfully direct an ocean-going ship? Most people would answer ‘the Captain.’ Yet the Captain is primarily responsible for navigation and management of the ship. When you think about it, the real position of influence is the designer; it is the designer who creates and constructs the ocean-going craft.

The analogy of the ship helps executives understand how the leadership paradigm has changed from one of optimisation to one of creativity. Economic creativity is now the governing principle in an economy driven by ideas. Moving from a model of optimisation to one of innovation is now a strategic imperative. When businesses create ideas-cultures then they take the emotional and conceptual high ground by stepping out of the rules that confine them to a silo-based competitive landscape.

Training, Coaching and Consulting are about optimising the ship’s routes and maximising efficiencies. If we imagine that the ship’s routes are tracks in our mind, then we can see that these three models -Training, Coaching and Consulting - operate from a narrow bandwidth of commonly agreed standards of performance. They are about maintaining the status quo and keeping the ship on track. They follow a set of general principles which encourages people to think and feel in straight lines but which unknowingly keep them going round in circles. Bill Gates, the architect of Microsoft, states that “the only factory asset we have is human imagination.”

If imagination is the business of the future, then creating a business strategy of the mind is an imperative. Moving to an open culture leverages the potential of a workforce no longer constrained by skilled convergence. As people grow their dreams in an emotional climate which authentically supports divergence/innovation, a new motivation, a noble spirit drives a projection of the future. Organisational metamorphosis rests on personal transformation and noble ideas, great ideas, big bang ideas. World-changing ideas become the new corporate measure of success.
Unfrozenmind is about helping leaders and organisations design legends.