One of my partners, Mandalah, have developed an approach to innovation as a process which is beautiful – I encourage you to visit their stunning www site.
They describe this multi-disciplinary method as behavioural based innovation – based on a blend of systems’ thinking, complexity & integral theory, design thinking, and biomimicy. They blend these together in way which are ‘matched’ to their client, and the human beings behind the client (both in the client system, and their customers). In working with Mandalah you experience co-creation workshops, ideation sessions and learning journeys (real life immersions and inspirational trips throughout the world). Their offices in Sao Paulo feel like a conscious ‘home’ from which to work – art, on site cooking and eating together, and on-site therapist (who practices from their premises, but also provides guidance to their company). When I have worked there with them, I feel that we are all working on some kind of meaning-making endeavour in which all kinds of disciplines come together (from meditation to project management).
And they have a particular way of attending to detail – indeed attention-to-detail is a core process, alongside their platinum rule – since they know that every gesture makes a big difference. Nothing is wasted.
This reminds me of the ‘economy of effort’ which a dancer or painter develops – their way of understanding efficiency and value is based on gesture; how you gesture and what your gestures convey. ‘Gesture’ contains the idea of something ’embodied’, closely associated with ‘how-you-carry-yourself’ and what that carrying of yourself, says. Or equally, how you carry something (someone, in the case of a mother’s carrying of her not yet born baby). ‘Gestation’ and ‘gesture’ share the same Latin root – something is being born, being birthed in every gesture. This is a way of re-describing the level of awareness in ‘conscious’ innovation; informed by intimate dynamics.
Slingshot