How to Create Innovation: The Ultimate Guide to Proven Strategies and Business Models to Drive Innovation and Digital Transformation
Stefan F. Dieffenbacher, Caroline Hüttinger, Susanne M. Zaninelli, Douglas Lines, and Andreas Rein…in collaboration with 60+ other thought leaders
Wiley (June 2024)

How to think creatively when understanding and navigating innovation and transformation

Years ago during my interview of John Kotter, I asked him what seems to be the greatest challenge to change agents. He replied, “changing how people think about change.”  I agree with Kotter and also with James O’Toole who once suggested that the strongest resistance is usually cultural in nature, the result of what he so aotly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny if custom.”

In their book, Stefan F. Dieffenbacher, Caroline Hüttinger, Susanne M. Zaninelli, Douglas Lines, and Andreas Rein — in collaboration with 60+ other thought leaders — offer “a guide to creating a world worth living in.” More specifically. their book contains more than 50 tools, models, canvases, approaches, and frameworks that cover the entire domain of innovation and transformation. You can download the models, including critical variations, usage instructions, examples, and print-ready versions for workshops at a website identified in the first chapter.

Some acronyms are more helpful than others. UNITE is one of the better ones. Dieffenbacher, Hüttinger, Zaninelli, Lines, and Rein introduce it as an “umbrella” (i.e. the E) concept for Understanding and Navigating Innovation and Transformation:

o Knowing what to do and how to do it effectively
o Completing the journey to the given destination through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity
o Creating a healthy workplace culture within which innovative thinking is most likely to thrive
o Creating new or better processes, products, and/or services

“When we UNITE, we are greater than the sum of our parts. What we really want to create under the umbrella is a [begin BOLD face] movement [end BOLD face]. Let’s UNITE and start rethinking how we deliver innovation and transformation.”

I congratulate the co-authors and their colleagues on their brilliant contribution to thought leadership. Bravo!

Here are a few observations and suggestions of my own. First, creating innovation and completing digital transformation require effective communication, cooperation, and especially, collaboration. Also, it is imperative to combine patience with persistence, and, a compelling vision with rigorous attention to detail. Even with brilliant leadership, wide and deep buy-in, and abundant resources, change initiatives are inevitably messy, often frustrating, and never easy. Meanwhile, keep two African proverbs in mind:  ” Trust but verify,” and, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

And now two suggestions while you are reading How to Create Innovation. First, highlight key passages Also, perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at- hand, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to head notes and key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific or major issues or questions addressed, especially the comments at the conclusion of chapters.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.