What inner competencies do we need to create meaningful innovation?

Our world is on fire — looming ecological disaster, a widening gap between rich and poor, rising nationalism and xenophobia, existential angst and dystopian digital monopolies. The latest wave of innovators, digital entrepreneurs in the mode of the Silicon Valley, have contributed to and deepened this negative trend.

What we need instead are meaningful innovations. We need companies, organisations and institutions which provide holistic answers to the increasing complexity of the emerging digital-global era and contribute to a more equitable, just and aware society and economy.

For this transformation to work, we need to have a sophisticated understanding of change. One which includes not only the outside world of structures and processes, but also the inner dimension of life. Since the Enlightenment humanity has focused on the outside of life and we can be proud of immense achievements in technology and science. But we have neglected to study our inner world, the way how humans experience the world, our feelings, our needs and the filters through which we perceive reality.

Inner work is not something esoteric and voodoish. Skills like self-reflection, multiperspectivity and intuition are fundamental to navigate in complex and volatile environments. Combining outer and inner work will enable us to flourish – at work and in life.

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Developing New Ways to Work

A whole range of new organisational models, such as agile or lean management, holocracy or „teal organisations“ promise to be better adapted to human needs and our complex, volatile world. But implemented on their own, without the development of new competencies by bosses and team members, these often fall short. Output does not improve, team members are not happier and familiar frustrations return.

When a team reduces external organisational structures and processes, team members need to build up more inner structures in order to stay oriented, stable and innovative. Having steered my own company, betterplace lab, through a transformation to self-management, I learned which inner competencies are necessary for a truly successful and sustainable transformation.

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Exploring New Ways to be Human

On the surface, the current transition to a global-digital age seems to be an outer, technologically and economically driven phenomenon. But over the last decade I have become convinced that digitisation is much deeper than that: it represents a new frontier in the consciousness of humanity.

In a decentralised, highly fluid, and accelerated world, stable structures, such as markets, workplaces and identities, are dissolving. With this transition, the world enters a new phase of instability and uncertainty. No wonder, I myself and so many people around me are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, disoriented. Our inner structures, largely formed in the national-industrial age, haven’t caught up to this outer complexity.

I believe digitisation and globalisation are exerting a huge evolutionary pressure, partly luring, partly forcing us to grow up and mature psychologically and spiritually. We need to meet the complexity of the outside world with enough interior space so that we are able to host this complexity within us.

It is this change I want to explore.

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