The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

The race for tomorrow

Once we accept that the future is going to be a series of discontinuities, some of them with potentially disruptive consequences, it becomes clear that we need to alter our perspective toward the dynamics of whatever business we are in. Instead of viewing change as a constantly irritating and threatening aberration from the way things are supposed to be, we need to start embracing this endless stream of aberrations as the new norm. In fact, we have to realize that the only way to ensure the continuity of a company over time is to make certain it is changing as fast as the world is changing.

Jack Welch, the illustrious ex-CEO of GE, once remarked, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”⁴⁷ This is a message every organization should take to heart. There is a pressing need for acceleration, not just in the pace at which we generally do business, but in the pace at which we develop foresight about the future and then use that foresight to adapt and evolve our corporations. We need to speed up our efforts to understand the portent of discontinuous change, as well as our efforts to harness the power of that change in our products, services, strategies, and business models. One of the fundamental lessons of our times is that business success is increasingly transient; it must be rapidly and incessantly renewed if it is to be sustained.

Many senior executives, if they are honest, would admit that they are ...