Cookies on this website

We would like to put some small files called cookies on your device to make our website work properly.

We would also like to use analytics cookies to help us improve our site. Please let us know if this is OK. We'll use a cookie to save your choice.

I'm OK with analytics cookies

Don't use analytics cookies

     
There are parallels between the processes of innovation that ‘work’ and the experience of intimacy. To innovate is to be – at least in part, and to some extent – intimate; and to be intimate is to be innovative, or if not innovative, there is at least a possibility of something new in intimacy.

To some extent all innovation involve a ‘change-of-mind’ – and yet we do not often see it as such; we dwell on the ‘change-of-behaviour’ interpretation of innovation – rather than recognise the graffiti-wisdom of ‘change your mind and your ass will follow’.Intimate innovation is innovation re-imagined.

Innovation is the antithesis of tyranny. I can consent to innovation; you cannot gain my compliance. Coercion destroys consent; coercion destroys intimacy. You cannot tell anyone to have a new idea. The new idea has to have you.

 In essence this is about how things-effect-you; about how you let someone (or something) else ‘in’; or – in other words – how you ‘take-on-board’; how you internalise.I want to problematise the notion of ‘buy in’ (as in ‘buy-into-an-innovation’ or ‘buy-into-a-change-programme’) and propose that if you neglect intimacy, then ‘buy-in’ is experienced as a form of ‘sell-out’.

But I also want to share with you my sense of the ‘day-to-day-ness’ of this theme; how innovation (viewed from a more intimate perspective) is not a rare, or ‘one-off’ experience – but rather more something that is taking place continually. I am constantly changing my mind, making my mind up.There is more scope for lasting change in relating to the real than the imagined. Most leaders have relationships with imagined versions of their followers.

 I suggest that there is a co-creation, a co-construction of meaning involved in this – and an assumption of a high degree of plasticity, under which we are all impressionable.I tend to learn through shared experience.

I change my mind through shared experience. innovation is about changing minds. I innovate through sharing experience with you.How might we re-design experience, together?

When intimate I am open to betrayal because we are close. One of the fears of innovation is that there is ‘no turning back’.

Intimate innovation depends on dynamic technologies – on ways of working together to find different ways of making meaning.

 Intimacy is the dna of innovation. Intimacy is the hypertext of innovation.Innovation involves ‘insight’ – a glance, a gaze – and it involves mutual connection – it involves ‘regulation.’ It is a nanotechnology.Surprise is the opposite of compliance.

I want to share with you my surprise that these themes seem to be so little acknowledged – that they are there, ‘hidden in plain sight’, in our day to day experience at work (and elsewhere). And yet rarely described or considered. Why might this be?

I would go so far as to say that intimacy is a driver of innovation – and yet remains unexamined, as if we had a blind spot about it.