Principled Innovation LLC

Imagination is the lifeblood of the revolution

July 6th, 2008

New Zealand blogger Gareth Farry had an excellent post on his Music&Music blog yesterday on the role of creativity and innovation in 21st century society.  Gareth writes:

…The capacity to imagine is being squashed by the hierarchy of risk culture, the doom and gloom corporate system that places an ability to mitigate loss above the blue sky creative capacity. Ideas, knowledge and intercultural imagination are just as valuable as powerful as financial capital.

Prosperity more and more will depend on creative advantage, a flow of ideas and innovation. The top down corporate structure is giving way to the horizontal open source, peer produced network of ideas. The hierarchical model of organization has been the historically dominant model for our Western institutions such as the Government, Church and military-industrial complex. So pervasive and enduring has this model been that we have assumed there are no alternatives.

But today companies that make their boundaries porous, and accept input from the global creative sector are the ones best poised to create enduring value. Traditional forms of intellectual property create a walled compound of content, where resources are hidden and companies compete with each other to gain access to vital innovation pools.  But increasingly companies are finding that the best way to build vital business structures is to harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

Whether or not we’re ready to accept it, there is a revolution unfolding in our world, and in our association community.  No amount of describing what’s happening online as fad changes this current reality, much less the future that is emerging for the next decade and beyond.  Paradigm shift isn’t a theoretical construct, but a real-world, life-changing phenomenon, and not all of it is or will be for the better unless we act to make it better.  Fortunately, thanks to distributed Web-enabled collaboration, it is now possible to fully capitalize on the near-limitless creative potential of people worldwide to imagine what comes next.  Imagination is the lifeblood of this revolution, and it is our imagination that will see us through no matter what challenges we are forced to confront.

It’s too easy to think of incrementalism as a style choice, a matter of personal preference for those who fear change and need to made comfortable by being brought along more slowly.  Sadly, after decades of failing to act because of leadership denial and myopia, organizations have forfeited this “steady as you go” option on behalf of their stakeholders.  Fairly or unfairly, this is where we are, and it is now time to embrace the revolution and imagine the association community of the 21st century!

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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, We Have Always Done It That Way, Garage Memes