Creativity is the most effective responses to rapid change, and all breakthroughs rely heavily on creativity. However, champions are not independent, isolated creators. Instead, champions bond with their counterparts in the alliance as kindred spirits in co-creation, that is, they are typically co-creative synthesizers, linking new ideas and innovations together, building bridges with other creative individuals whose voices have not previously been heard. Champions typically do not require full credit for an idea to satisfy their egos, because they know that the idea itself is less than 10 percent of the game.
Paradigm shifts come not from incremental thinking but from fundamentally new ideas,
typically originating from outside of the mainstream of accepted thought. Carl Gustav Jung foresaw an alliance’s greatest strategic potential when he said: “The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension between opposites.”
Alliances create breakthroughs as a result of differentials in thinking. Inherent in the
differences between two alliance partners is the champion’s unique opportunity to initiate the creative tension that can generate the essential shift in perception and thinking that underpins all true innovation. Managing this synergy of compatible differences through the process of co-creation is a fundamental attitude and skill of the best champions.
Champions see that the real value in an alliance lies in the diversity of thinking across the boundaries of different organizational cultures, perspectives, and thinking.
Fundamentally, champions must honor the dignity of diverse thinking, a point of view that can often evoke strong negative emotions from conservative traditionalists bound to the status quo within the alliance’s parent organization.
“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not’?”
– George Bernard Shaw
Selection 4 from HOW TO FOSTER CHAMPIONS
By Robert Porter Lynch
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