What is Conscious Innovation and How Can it Serve Us?

Conscious Innovation combines emerging, interconnected fields that promote long-term thinking, personal transformation, creative mutual learning and contextual understanding, as well as considerate adaptation and collaboration to approach thorny challenges.

But what makes Conscious Innovation so timely and who benefits from this invitation to think deeply?

First of all, Conscious Innovation is an approach that combines Futures-Thinking and Systems-Thinking with an emphasis on ethical considerations, social responsibility, and, importantly, our capacity to listen to each other generatively and think independently.

This approach seeks to recognise interdependencies that meet various needs. Through our efforts to listen, meet needs and learn, we aim to see benefits and impact fairly distributed among all stakeholders. It ticks many boxes!

On paper, it looks great.

In practice, I believe that, at the core of Conscious Innovation, you will find a combination of practical elements that make it powerful.

Conscious Innovation involves:

  1. A Thinking Environment: Using a philosophy of communication and interactions that ignite people’s independent thinking. Based on the work of Nancy Kline, the Thinking Environment is a series of practical values-based applications steeped in one observation: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first”. And one question: “What does it take for people to help each other to think well for themselves?”

  2. Empathy and Compassion: Discerning, understanding and considering the needs, values, and perspectives of all stakeholders (living beings, nature at large, history, ancestors, contexts, moods, etc…) involved in a problem or a system, not just individuals present in a room.

  3. Responsible, Creative Design: Applying ethical principles to the design and implementation of strategies and ways to meet needs, ensuring that they promote equity, justice, sustainability, care and well-being. In the process of doing so, injecting imagination, creativity and play to go to the edge of our thinking…

  4. Mindful Evaluation: Assessing (as much as it is possible) the impact of insights and practicals steps, intended and unintended, on people, nature, and communities (current and future). Involving diverse and various groups in this evaluation.

To make it short, Conscious Innovation is an “artistic” approach, in the sense that it helps us “prepare for and anticipate” our future, a future where we all “fit together”. (See the linguisitic root of “Art” !)

So who benefits from Conscious Innovation and how?

Forward-Thinking Business Leaders & Investors

Many business leaders are realizing the importance of adopting long-term, sustainable strategies for their organisation’s growth and the impact they seek to have on their clients or customers and wider communities.

Conscious Innovation allows them to develop approaches that address social and environmental issues while remaining profitable (if that’s important to them), efficient and mindful of changes and ripple effects. It reminds them there is much more that products and big plans at the heart of what they do.

They are able to make better-informed decisions, considering potential scenarios, developing scenarios, and adapting to unforeseen risks. They identify interdependencies and make decisions that meet needs, considering the bigger picture.

For instance: Accepting that scenarios that might look absurd on paper could very well happen, and force businesses to change, is essential to plan for a strategic pivot. Businesses that had anticipated a possible global pandemic (as widely announced by The Institute for the Future for instance and other thought leaders) were prepared to adapt and navigate a lockdown and the change of their customer’s purchasing priorities. But through conscious innovation, they can also be more attentive to the needs of their teams, and wider ecosystem.

Academics and Researchers

Academics and researchers across various disciplines are increasingly interested in this combination of concepts because they offer new perspectives on what we consider traditional problem-solving.

Conscious Innovation is of particular interest to social scientists, as it promotes equality, sustainability, and responsible use of a wide range of technologies. The approach enables people to suspend judgment, listen deeply and explore alternative societal trajectories and their possible impact on ecosystems.

This can have an impact on funding partnerships, innovation lab focuses, and interdisciplinary creations.

Government Agencies and Policymakers

As they are creating laws and regulations that can affect society’s future, government agencies and policymakers make use of Conscious Innovation to create policies and initiatives that foster sustainable development, leveraging technology responsibly, and involving citizens in the decision-making process.

They explore multiple scenarios, examining the interdependencies between different policies, sectors, and stakeholders, and cretae policies based on the needs that need to be met.

Eg: The UK GOV encourages civil servants to make use of Futures-Thinking to think through scenarios. Fostering a culture of  indepenent thinking and deeper listening contributes to making public services more relevant (and work at the office more enjoyable!)

Government Agencies or ministers that don’t promote a generative listening culture run the risk of being out of scope and wasting taxpayers’ money.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Activists

When addressing complex social, environmental, cultural and/or technological issues, NGOs and activists need to envision the future and its complexity. Conscious Innovation helps them devise mindful strategies and advocate for preferred futures based on their core values.

Because Conscious Innovation is an approach based on the components of equality and appreciation of differences, NGOs and Activists discover new ways of partnering with governments, businesses, and local communities, to foster scalability (this deserves a page on its own…) and a positive impact. The process of listening generatively to all assumptions also enables them to decide if a partnership is definitely NOT the way forward…)

Importantly, it is an approach that we use to diffuse internal conflicts and miscommunications, especially with dispersed and diverse teams, in a context of underfunding, societal risks and threats to democracies.

Individuals Seeking Personal Growth and Change

Conscious Innovation fosters independent thinking and deep personal reflection. It is a valuable approach to improving rich decision-making skills in individuals and it encourages meaningful changes to one’s way of being in the world.

We exist for ourselves, as ourselves and in a collective context. The inherent focus on self-awareness and the interconnection of society – in its current and possible future states – enables individuals to develop a stronger sense of social responsibility and ethical action.

I hope you can see how Conscious Innovation is attractive to a wide range of individuals, teams and groups, reshaping how problems are approached and needs can be met.

By embracing it, we can grow respectful collaborations and activate meaningful efforts for a more sustainable, equitable, and kinder future.

I look forward to meeting you and your group and listening to you!

Contact Us

We're not around right now. But you can send us an email and we'll get back to you, asap.

Not readable? Change text. captcha txt