Sir Ken Robinson On Thinking Differently

And now, a word from Sir Ken Robinson:

There was a report published in the fall by IBM called Capitalizing on Complexity. [Download it here.] It was based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs of for-profit companies, non-profits, social entrepreneurship and public sectors from around the world asking what’s on their minds.

What was interesting about it was that this year the CEOs said they had three overall priorities.

The first priority was running organizations that can respond to complexity because the world is getting more complex every day.

Second was how to run organizations that are adaptable and resilient to these changes.

But the top priority was how to promote creativity in organizations.

The answer to these three priorities of complexity is to think differently about people and to reposition the role of leadership.

The truth is, thinking isn’t (necessarily) action.

But it’s pretty hard to get to the right actions without good thinking.

Right now, the busy-ness of the way we work isn’t conducive to any kind of thought, much less the time it takes to get to good thought. As leaders who wish to thrive (and wish for our teams/organizations to thrive) in the emerging economy, we must begin building structures which allow people the space to think well, and to think differently.

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