Over the last five months I created think space to ponder what it is that I want to do in the next five years. I pondered what my “why” is, what it is that drives me from bed in the mornings early, what it is that draws me into books, articles and podcasts.
I realised that my passion is innovation. Not the “design a new mousetrap” variety, but the kind of innovation that happens when leaders decide that they want to improve their environment. This means product/service innovation, process/system innovation and also business model or strategic innovation.
Coaching has always been an essential part of what I did, but it mostly played a secondary role. I would be contracted to conduct some kind of capacity building or consulting work, and would spend a lot of time coaching individuals or whole teams. Now I want coaching to become more prominent, with my technical experience providing content and backup.
Towards the end of last year I decided to participate in an advanced coaching course to refine my skills. During this course I realised how much I yearned to help leaders transform their workplaces, their organisations and their communities.
I believe that anybody, any team, any organisation can be more innovative. When people can contribute and actively participate in innovation processes, they are more fulfilled and creative. Therefore they are also more productive and more valuable to the organisation and society. But teams that are not used to “thinking” together over diverse functions, levels or even systems needs help from a coach.
I also believe that central to innovation is a process of dialogue. It is ongoing and ever expanding over functions, boundaries and even organisations. This dialogue is not just about talking, it is about leveraging knowledge, challenging paradigms and exploring ideas, concepts and possibilities.
However, it is not easy to get started.
For this reason I created the Innovation Coach offer. Head over to www.innovationcoach.co.za for more information. I have developed an option for individual leaders, as well as an option for teams. There is also an option to coach inter-organisational change and innovation processes, like when organisations wants to improve their role in an innovation systems, clusters or communities.
For my regular followers, this blog will remain the place where I think out loud. Here I will express my thinking in half-baked and fully baked ideas.
The Innovation Coach website will have its own blog feed and email subscription options. For the moment you would have to subscribe to both if you want to stay abreast of my thinking on innovation, change and development.
My reasoning behind creating the Innovation Coach as a standalone offer is that I intend to position this offer to clients and organisations who do not identify with economic development. They are somewhere in a business, an university or a team. They need a coach who can guide them through a process of widening, rethinking or deepening their innovation, knowledge creation and organisational development offers.
You can help me by sharing the address of the site with your friends, with leaders in the systems where you are working in who you know can benefit from a coach.
