ABSTRACT
Generating new ideas and ways of operating are quite complex and replete with unintended consequences. Organizations are not designed to serve innovation and ongoing operations equally. Innovation is just one more aspect of adaptation that firms must effectively deal with but it fights with the status quo. To adopt innovation, firms do well to challenge orthodoxies, harness discontinuities, leverage competencies, and understand unarticulated needs. Managers must develop the ability to analyze and synthesize because one creates direction and the other clarifies and orders the direction. Using Systems Thinking is a means to analyze and synthesize the challenges facing firms. Firms use both qualitative data (pictures) and quantitative (numbers) to inform their decision making. However, hard, measurable data generally becomes the default means to measure performance. For firms to grow and for their members to buy-in to the proposition leaders must marshal trust, logic, and power. Using tools like exploring the seventh sense, is a practice in which members can engage, exploit, and bring to life true innovative and growth-driving movements. Contagion is a means to accelerate adoption.
