Seven Habits of Zen Innovator
by Kouji Miki
I seize him with a terrific struggle. His great will and power are inexhaustible.
He charges to the high plateau far above the cloud-mists, Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.
Seven Essential Capabilities for Innovation Needed in the Future
In the age of the new coronavirus, the world of management has entered a truly warlike era. It will be difficult to manage properly, let alone innovate, with the mechanistic management methods of the past. In order to survive this era of turmoil, a new type of leadership, the Zen innovator, is needed.
The emergence of Zen innovators is a summary in this blog of what I have noticed in my four years of running zenschool, a school for creating Zen innovators, and Zen2.0, the world’s largest Zen and mindfulness event.
While it is difficult to see tangible results from innovation driven by the times, I have been watching people and companies that have succeeded in creating new businesses through zenschool. Through zenschool, I have seen people and companies that have succeeded in creating new businesses, and I have analyzed the capabilities that successful innovators have in common. As a result, I have come to understand that successful innovation requires the following seven capabilities. Let me explain each of these capabilities.
1. Knowledge
2. Rational thinking
3. Ability to feel
4. Ability to formulate inquiring
5. Creativity
6. Ability to interact and involve others
7. Ability to let go of the ego
Feeling→Observing→Inquiring→Dialog→Creating→PDCA
1. Knowledge
In the past, memory was an essential ability when starting a new business in a capitalist society. Therefore, in the pre-Internet era, education focused on memory, and the examinations used to evaluate the results of education also relied heavily on memory. In my generation, a mark-sheet-based test called the “Common Entrance Examination” was adopted, which is equivalent to today’s National Center Test, and all students preparing for university entrance exams had to take the Common Entrance Examination first.
However, with the spread of the Internet, everything can be found in an instant by using search engines such as Google. As a result, the importance of memory in setting up a new business is relatively decreasing.
In fact, in recent years, the mainstream of university entrance examinations has become AO examinations based on interviews and essays that test the ability to think rather than the ability to remember. In the future, in the business world as well, the ability to think and the ability to involve others in the realization of ideas will be evaluated more highly than the ability to remember.
2. Rational Thinking Ability
Since the beginning of capitalism, the ability to think rationally, to construct a business as logic, has been closely related to the success of that business. Until recently, this ability was also considered important in creating new businesses.
However, times are changing drastically, and as symbolized by the victory of Google’s Alpha GO over the human world champion, AI (artificial intelligence), a new type of intelligence, will lead the human race in the areas of critical thinking and logical thinking. AI (artificial intelligence), a new type of intelligence, will lead the human race in the areas of critical thinking and logical thinking.
In the world of science and business, it has been common knowledge that logical thinking is important, but in the future, its value will be relatively low. This is because logical thinking is no match for AI.
Rational thinking is still necessary, of course. However, as external AI and other technologies perform better, the importance of rational thinking skills will decrease as we adopt them more wisely and efficiently.
3. The ability to feel
The most important ability for innovation in the future will be the ability to feel. In particular, the power of intuition will be emphasized. There are many ways to develop this ability, but I would like to mention that training to increase sensitivity, especially in the physical senses, such as zazen, meditation, and yoga, will be an effective method.
It is known that through zazen and meditation, one’s senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and tongue become more sensitive. As a result, the situation around you will come into your mind more clearly and with a higher resolution.
Based on the information we receive from our senses, we reconfigure our instincts taken from our consciousness as the world and establish ourselves.
When the information you receive is clear and high resolution, the ideas and information that come from within you will also have a high resolution and will be able to have an impact on the outside world.
This will lead to a higher probability of success in the business, academic, and creative worlds.
Previous brain research using meditation has shown that the volume of the prefrontal cortex of meditators who have been meditating for years is larger than that of non-meditators. The prefrontal cortex is the center of the brain that controls thinking and creativity.
It is hypothesized that long-time meditation practitioners gather information from their senses and highly integrate this input through the frontal lobe of the brain to create the world.
Since the prefrontal cortex is more developed in meditation practitioners than in non-meditators, they are able to perceive the world with a higher resolution. By perceiving the world clearly, we are able to perceive various events more multilaterally.
For example, it will be easier to read the emotions of others from their facial expressions, words and actions. It may also be easier to infer the situation from small changes in the surrounding environment and arrive at the right decision.
In turn, this may lead to thinking that can help us find better solutions to problems and create new innovations.
4. Ability to formulate inquiring
As I mentioned earlier, design thinking is a method of thinking that has been attracting attention recently. Rather than data-driven marketing, in which decision-making and planning are based on sales performance and customer data, design thinking is a method that first identifies “issues,” then closely follows the target group of the product or service, repeatedly observes and interviews them to find out their latent needs, and then develops products and services that can be used. Design Thinking is a method for developing products and services that can be used.
Design Thinking has been adopted by many companies, and its workshops attract many participants from all over the world.
In addition, some companies are holding hackathon events to bring together their internal staff and external clients, using the keyword “open innovation” as a clue.
I was once involved in an open innovation type product development conference where engineers and designers interacted in an open space, extracted business ideas, created product prototypes, and finally commercialized them.
The event attracted a truly sparkling array of talented people, including some of Japan’s leading universities, engineers from major manufacturers, designers working for major manufacturers, and young employees from foreign consulting firms.
The ultimate goal of the project was to develop products that would address environmental and poverty issues by concentrating their skills and talents for the benefit of the world’s poorest regions.
We were excited to see what kind of wonderful products would be created and turned into businesses by such a talented group of people in the project.
Supported by the personal connections of the participants, some of the projects were planned outside of the project and led to large-scale product development. However, unfortunately, none of the products planned and presented in the project were actually commercialized in the end.
Some novel products were created, but all of them were only prototypes, and none of them were actually commercialized.
Most of the members who participated in the project were employed by companies. Most of the members who participated in the project were working at companies, and they may have had their own day jobs and had a lot of time constraints. Maybe they didn’t feel attracted enough to make a business out of their own lives.
Many of them were motivated by the high aspiration of using technology to solve a “problem” for someone other than themselves. So, I don’t necessarily disagree with their activities. However, I believe that setting a goal to solve someone else’s “problem” does not make it personal in the end, and may not have been effective in manufacturing, which requires a long time and a certain amount of development funds.
On the other hand, a single person’s thoughts can have an impact that can change the world. The act of creating such an idea, in other words, is to ask yourself a question. Let me give you an example of this.
One of my friends in Kamakura is Mr. Yasuhiko Imamura, a professional jazz musician and entrepreneur who develops audio-related products in Kamakura. He is what is known as a “Makers” entrepreneur. His desire was to “create more spaces in the world to enjoy music”. It is a strong urge to provide the world with a place where people can freely enjoy music. However, although he himself had a long experience in the music industry, he had never developed a product before.
What he had was a rough sketch of a product design, a simple proposal, and a strong “passion” for music. Later, with our support, he made the first prototype of the product and succeeded in raising a total of over 50 million yen through the international crowdfunding site Kickstarter and the Japanese site MAKUAKE. This is an unbelievably perfect project accomplishment for a Makers who had almost no experience in manufacturing and created a product for the first time. His passion led to mass production.
So what was the difference between an open-minded group of people with various talents and a single jazz drummer with a passion for music?
The biggest difference was in the stance of the former, who made products “not for myself but to enrich the lives of others,” while the latter created products “to realize the world that ‘I’ really want to realize.
Here I would like to present a diagram. The vertical axis is the time axis, and the horizontal axis is the number of people involved in the project. In the open innovation approach to manufacturing on the left, a large number of diverse people are initially involved in the planning of the product.
On the other hand, the right type of manufacturing starts with a single person’s idea. He has a hidden passion for the idea and works on the project alone. Influenced by this idea and his passion, members gradually gather.
In open innovation, as time goes by, the number of participating members becomes smaller and smaller. As time goes by, the number of members who participate in open innovation becomes smaller and smaller, because in the end, the project does not become a part of them. After a certain amount of time, the number of members becomes smaller and smaller, and the project eventually disappears.
In the case of a one-man project, when the planner speaks passionately about his or her own “idea,” members who share the idea will come together one after another like a snowball. The later the project goes, the more vigorous it becomes, and the results far exceed the initial expectations, and the product is launched to the world with great success. In many cases, the results are far beyond the capabilities of the project planners.
What is the difference between the former “open innovation” type product development conference and the latter “one-man manufacturing”?
It is that in the former, they were looking for a “problem” for someone else and how to solve that problem with technology, whereas in the case of the latter’s one-person product development, a clear “inquiring” was set, “I want to increase the space for enjoying music in this world,” and the central person in the project In the case of a one-person product development project, a clear “inquiring” has been set: “I want to increase the number of spaces where people can enjoy music. No matter what the obstacles were, there was a clear “inquiring” to overcome them and realize the project.
What is the difference between a “Problem-solving" and a “Setting up your world”?
So what is the difference between a “problem” and a “inquiring”?
In English, a “problem” is a “public problem,” and a “inquiring” is “What would you like this world to be? At first glance, “problem” and “inquiring” seem to read the same, but when you put them into words, it becomes obvious which one can be taken as a personal matter, and which one has more power.
“What do I want the world to look like? The inquiring of “How do you want the world to be” is a question of how you interpret the world and what you want to do with it. This is a thought that comes from a deeper place in a person. The thoughts that come from deep within can be judged by the signs that come out of your body, especially your facial expressions. That’s why we pay special attention to facial expressions in our zenschool dialogues, to distinguish whether what the innovator really wants to do is a “challenge” or a “inquiring”.
Creativity is inherent in every human being. However, in today’s life, we have become overwhelmed by the importance of rational thinking and the evidence that supports it.
Once we remove the pressure of rational thinking, evidence, and the peer pressure of the organization we belong to, we can release our innate creativity.
A person who is fully equipped with the ability to feel is able to integrate information from the five senses in the prefrontal cortex and describe his or her world in consciousness with the high resolution of his or her brain.
With the ability to perceive events at a high resolution, we are able to see things as they are, as they should be. In order to break free from existing ties and habits of thought, zenschool offers a very effective meditation technique called “Remembering the Summer Vacation of a 10-Year-Old” (see page 6).
When you were 10 years old, especially during the summer vacation, most of the things you saw and heard as your information must have been exciting and thrilling for many people.
By remembering the summer vacation of a 10-year-old, we can extract the essence of his or her personality.
6. “Dialogue” and the ability to involve others
No matter how advanced AI becomes, it simply provides information. Only human beings will be able to think of something new to do with that information. And to do so, we need to have the ability to take actual action. This is an essential ability for commercialization.
The ability to consolidate the direction of the “questions” you feel and to gradually involve the people around you by focusing on them is necessary to move your own project forward. In this case, the project planner will have to be more careful to verbalize the “questions” and talk about his vision to the people he wants to involve in the project and get them involved. Rather than forcing people to get involved in the project, the project planner and the project collaborators will have an intense “dialogue” to create a relationship in which the participants will willingly participate in the project.
This is an ability that will be needed as AI spreads throughout the world, as we proactively meet people we think are necessary for the projects we are working on after connecting with them through SNS and other means. In this way, you can build relationships with each person and become a part of the same project.
Imaginatively, there is a planner who has a “question” at the center of the project, and by speaking passionately about his “question” to the people around him, he is able to involve more and more people from outside the project. In this process of involvement, what is necessary is that the leader’s goal is not only for his or her own benefit, but also to transcend the ego.
7. Ability to let go of the ego
Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful.I use no magic to extend my life; Now, before me, the dead trees.
In order to accomplish tasks that are beyond one’s ability, the ability to entrust one’s intentions to something beyond oneself is necessary. Large corporations, government bureaucracies, and the military are all pyramidal organizations. This is because it is the most efficient organizational structure.
In a pyramidal organization, the performance of the top management of the organization is directly related to the overall performance of the organization. Decisions made by that person are passed down from the top to the bottom. Information at the end is also fed back to the top through the hierarchy.
This organizational structure is most efficient when the environment is stable and the cause-and-effect relationship is clear.
However, when the surrounding environment is changing rapidly and there are many variables, it is extremely difficult to predict that doing A will result in B. In such an environment, a handful of people may not be able to do anything. In such an environment, a pyramidal organizational system that leaves the decision of organizational survival to the judgment of a handful of people at the top is highly risky.
How can we flexibly deal with unprecedented situations that we have never experienced before? The best way is for each person in the organization to act on his or her own judgment.
In order to do this, it is important for the leader to be able to make objective judgments, not by sticking to his or her own ideas, but by exercising the metacognitive ability to look at oneself objectively and, to some extent, letting things flow.
If a leader dares to let go of his or her ego, rather than clinging to a single conclusion, the members will spontaneously come up with various ideas. Moreover, when their ideas are adopted, individual motivation will increase.
As a result, not only will the performance of the organization as a whole increase, but the dilemma of the weakness of the pyramidal organization in the past, where the ability of the entire organization is limited by the ability of the top management, will be overcome. The entire organization will be able to produce performance that far exceeds the capabilities of the top management.
These are the seven capabilities that are necessary for successful innovation. On the other hand, the ability to feel, the ability to create, the ability to ask questions, the ability to mobilize and involve others, and the ability to let go of ego will become relatively more important.
However, the abilities that have been emphasized in school education up to now are the abilities from 1 to 2, while the abilities from 3 to 7 have been neglected in existing school education, and the only way to acquire them is through self-education, in other words, relying on practical knowledge.
Not only in Japan, but also in the world, there are very few places where you can learn the three to seven skills. Therefore, there is a need for a place where people can relearn skills 3 to 5, even if they are once working adults.
What is the most important of the seven abilities I have mentioned? I believe it is the fourth one, “Ability to formulate inquiring".
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. We would like to publish “True Innovation”, a book about Zen innovation theory written in Japanese, in English and other languages. If you are a publisher and would like to help us, please contact us.
BOOK “True Innovation”
