Design Legends
The Unfrozenmind Innovation Diagram are based on a set of principles (Logic of Experience) utilized by Mahatma Gandhi to show the vital role observation plays in creating the causes and conditions which determine our future. Understanding this logic of experience means we can transform ourselves and our organizations to design legends.

If we turn this set of governing principles (Thinking, Words, Actions, Habits, Values and Destiny) into model, a logic of innovation, we can show the key factors and relationships between the individual and organizational aspects involved in leadership and collaboration. Thinking, talking and acting and the habits that govern these activities are directly related to strategy, communication, performance and the culture that maintains them. Pre-established patterns provide the highway to your future. The key to change cannot and does not live outside your mode of observation.
Utilising the logic of experience as its base, the unfrozenmind programmes focus on six key areas, perception, emotion, ideas, culture, leadership and future to design legends. We can now use the logic of the Unfrozenmind Master Innovation Model (Blue Model) to flesh out the general principles that either maintain skilled convergence or help develop divergence.

Frozen Logic - Groundhog Day
In the red model we can see the individual governing factors which promote organizational convergence leading to circular futures. Blind Vision stands paramount as the key factor in maintaining the status quo because it is the ignorance of the power of labels in organizing our experience which keeps us heading in the direction of habit. However, the second factor, Skilled Unawareness(1) (or blind emotion), which promotes the organizational disease of groupthink,(2) keeps any avenue closed that may lead to the unraveling of the iron cage of Blind Vision and leads unintentionally to skilled incompetence. Blind Vision culminates in an organizational design (outer green circle) that prizes linear strategies, emotional emasculated modes of broadcasting communication bereft of any risk, and an obsessive focus on measuring performance in incremental steps. With engrained personal and social habits that ensure that you “learn not to learn”, these principles rise up through the organization into a closed cultural set of norms and values which keeps it in a position of “learned incapacity”.

The silent killer of new ideas is good management and good communication, which paradoxically support the reign of the status quo, a terminal disease triggered by fear, uncertainty and doubt, whose symptoms are censure, consensus and compromise.(3) The reification of the principle of “being right” morphs personal and organizational destinies into a commoditized realm of frozen thinking, frozen talking and frozen action, as anything new is avoided and immediately de-risked and made error free. Skilled Convergence is caused by Blind Vision.

The key to ending Skilled Convergence is then to transform the very domain of awareness and thought which causes convergence. Designing Vision is the antidote to Blind Vision and Mastering Divergence is the path to learning how to Design Vision. In the Mastering Innovation diagram we can now see the logical governing principles which organize experience to allow creativity and innovation to flourish. It is important to understand that though there is a logical sequence to transforming the way you think, talk and act, all of the governing principles above are interrelated. A change in one leads to a change in all. However, the habits of individual and organizationally-learned incompetence run deep and thick.

Unfrozen Logic - Purple Model
Simple training programmes and policy cascades will not work. Mastering Innovation is a journey to the centre of the self where you choose to come face to face with your real Self, to the place where your highest future potential and highest future purpose lie.(4) In truth, Mastering Divergence /Innovation is the process of bringing the Self - forced to take cover from the canon fire of skilled convergence - out of hiding. Leadership is about being employed by an idea or a dream, not a job title. How you see, and how you feel are the two most important components which lead to change in your cultural set of habits.

Designing Vision begins with learning to know the logic of your enemy - convergence - intimately. It is intimate because convergence lies in the very infrastructure of thought and awareness and the rules which govern your way of observing. Designing Vision and Designing Emotion are the causes which lead to Organisational Creativity and Expression. Designing Vision begins with the recognition that perception and emotion are inseparable. You cannot experience an object free from emotion. All perception is emotionally based. The Descartesian Dualism of rationality and emotion and an external world separate from the mind are incorrect.(5) If awareness of labels is emotionally based, it is either good, bad, or neutral. Our experience of objects is therefore organised ethically. Learning to see is an exercise in discovering your emotional landscape.(6) Learning to control, manage and transform the process by which labels construct our experience is Designing Vision. Learning to step out of hiding and overturn the fear which maintains the pernicious principles of skilled unawareness means you must learn to see with your heart. Designing Vision is an economic necessity where corporate survival is dependent on releasing organizational imagination. The foundation of the Lotus-Economy is an emotional hierarchy in which organizations will be ranked by the nobility of their dreams, and leaders’ potential by the size of their dream.

If you truly set your life alight with your dream, Mastering Divergence /Innovation is no longer a choice. You cannot go back to sleep. You cannot stuff the dream back in its box and walk away. A new idea will always alter the bandwidth of your mind. Normal service cannot be resumed. You can try, but somewhere, and somehow, it will always find a way to slip by the guardians, creep out from under the blinkers, and disrupt your return to the safety and womb of groundhog-day thinking. You cannot escape taking responsibility for your dream.(7) To do so will make your life immeasurably smaller and result in despair.

Stepping off the beaten highway of thinking, and walking down the space between your thoughts, is fundamentally not a comfortable route. Almost every aspect of the organizational infrastructure which supports the status quo, the comfort zone, will seek to pull you back to the centre of gravity.(8) However, like the Alchemists of old turning lead into gold, the Unfrozenmind leader takes the base elements of convergence and crafts Legends from Blind Vision.
References

(1) Chris Argyris, How Good Communication Blocks Learning, HBS, 2001. Ibid, p.17.
(2) Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organizational Intelligence in Action, Amacom, 2003, p.29.
(3) “Good management was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.” Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, HarperBusiness Essentials, 1997; Chris Argyris, op.cit.
(4) Peter Senge et al, Presence: exploring profound change in people, organizations and society, NB Publishing, 2004.
(5) Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: emotion, reason and the human brain, Penguin, 2005.
(6) Saatchi and Saatchi have created a Blue Ocean strategy called LoveMarks based around this component of human experience.
(7) “If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, I warn you that you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life” (Abraham Maslow).
(8) “A pattern emphasized in the cases in this study [The typewriter, the DC3] IS THE DEGREE to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them, preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard of heights.’ But in most cases is a sign of impending death.” J M. Utterback, op.cit.