In a recent Fast Company article “Why Millennials Don’t Want to Buy Stuff,” the author states that “Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We are starting to think differently about what it means to ‘own’ something.”
Technology is facilitating this evolution, and new generations are championing it and “the big push behind it all is our thinking is changing.”
So how is our thinking changing, from what and to what? What is driving this supposed evolutionary shift and what can we do as coaches to align to it?
In our interconnected world, we can find practically anything we want, at any time, through the “unending flea market of the Internet.” This is altering the balance between supply and demand and is overwhelming us with choices—people’s concept of value and their motivations for purchasing are constantly shifting.
This is causing organizations to not only redefine what value means in the eyes of their customers and potential users, but also to find new ways of connecting our clients as to how their product or service can:
- Make people’s lives better.
- Connect people to a broader community.
- Connect people to something bigger than themselves.
Doing this enables us to explore new ways of helping our clients to better ignite people’s motivations for purchase.
This requires us to help our clients create:
- Sharp deviations from conventional thinking, planning and development processes for new products and services so that they create the real value customers and potential users are seeking.
- Major disruptions to how they see, attend to and connect with the whole so that they know how to generate creative ideas and innovative solutions that solve customers, business and society’s most inherent and wicked problems.
Perhaps the first key step is to work on attending to and evolving our own consciousness because to solve a problem, we need to shift from the same consciousness that created it.
To shift our consciousness, we first need to be aware of it and pay deep attention to it to shift our blind spots.
A first key step is to know how to see the world in new ways.
Developed by Otto Scharmer and described in his book “Theory U,” he states that “What we pay attention to and how we pay attention—both individually and collectively—is key to what we create.
What often prevents us from “attending” are what Scharmer calls our “blind spots,” the inner place from which each of us operates.
Learning to be present to and become aware of our blind spots is critical to bringing forth the profound strategic, systemic and innovative changes our clients are seeking in business today.
To generate discovery, we need know how to prototype, verify and manifest the new.
The next key step is to know how to enable our client to generate discovery. Joseph Jaworski, in his book “Source,” describes the generative discovery process as a way of:
(1) Being open to alternate and differing world views;
(2) Operating from the stance of human possibility;
(3) Tapping into the generative order of the universe, the field of active information—the Source.
Jaworski broadly outlines the seven core practices:
- Preparation: Undertaking a disciplined path of inner self-management.
- Igniting passionate purpose: Defining your own unique necessity, for an innovative solution to a clearly defined problem, with the personal foreknowledge that the solution exists in the realm of human possibility.
- Observing and immersing: Seeing reality with fresh eyes, suspending judgment and immersing oneself in the whole system.
- Letting go: Releasing old mental models, mindsets and world views that will not serve your own innovation intention and process, beginning a period of incubation.
- Indwelling and illumination: Living in the undertaking, surrendering oneself to the work, retreating and reflecting, being in nature as a portal and receiving illumination—the perception of a new reality, discovering the hidden solution.
- Crystallizing and Prototyping: Transforming the business problem into an innovative vision and prototype.
- Testing and Verifying: Transforming the new knowledge into commercially viable and useable products, services and strategies in ways that people will connect to, value and cherish.
Imagine if we could encourage our clients and their organizations to invest in evolving their consciousness?
To disrupt their habitual short term “stimulus-response” ways of operating in order to seriously connect with and redefine what value really means in the eyes of customers and potential users?
To find new ways of connecting people in organizations with their products or services that could really make their lives better, connect them to a broader community and to something bigger than themselves?
Wouldn’t the world be a better place for it?
This article was originally published on the ICF Blog.