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‘We broke-down, broke-free andthen broke-through, and weretransformed by the process.’

What’s different

Breaking free to breakthrough

Marshalling the energy for breakthrough

Tuning teams

Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

Building ecosystems and cultures of innovation.

‘We stand on the brink of a technologicalrevolution that will fundamentally alter the

way we live, work and relate to one another.In its scale, scope and complexity, thetransformation will be unlike anythinghumankind has experienced before.’

Klaus SchwabFounder and Executive Chairman,World Economic Forum, Dec 2015

A need for a different approach

In a world that is evolving at an exponential rate, doing more of thesame, or even chasing excellence ( just the high-end of a norm), isno longer good enough. If we are not shaping the future we arevulnerable to it; and in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous(VUCA) world it is our capacity to continually innovate and transformourselves that enables us to stand up, stand out and grow.

Innovation and transformation arise from a series and sequence ofbreakthroughs – those sudden moments of insight, that in turn leadto the gradual emergence of new patterns of thought and action.They require us, individually, and more importantly collectively, toleverage what we know, and then go beyond what we know. Inshort, we need to break free to breakthrough at each and everystage of an innovation process and a transformational journey.

Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough is a learnedcapacity, based on a teachable practice. It is a vital capacity for teams(and their leaders) who are tasked to generate and deliverbreakthrough strategies, innovations and transformations. And it isa critical capacity for executive and senior teams who need to helptheir people to continually breakthrough their own organisationaldogmas, orthodoxies and engrained habits and to shape peakperforming cultures.

So how can we move beyond…

• an impatient push, push, push energy, that rushes to action andcrowds out new thinking – so we're stuck working harder not smarter?

• incremental and copycat approaches to strategy and innovation,that keep us trapped doing more of the same but a little bitdifferent?

• teams of very bright people, who don’t know how to tune intoeach other, let alone into the higher states and qualities ofcollective consciousness necessary for catalysing innovationand transformation ie. presencing, collective intelligence, patternrecognition and flow?

It’s time to recognise that the rate and quality of innovation andtransformation needed in a VUCA world can only come from teams(and ultimately organisations) that know how to ride the highs andlows of the creative process and generate moments ofbreakthrough, time and time again.

A different approach

Working as a team at your creative edge, in search of moments ofbreakthrough, is tough. It requires skill, energy and a diverse set ofquality relationships that allow each and everyone one of us to standpowerfully and proudly in our differences, break free of what weknow, step into the unknown, and hold the tension of not-knowing.This tension is natural. It is also a necessary part of the creativeprocess. And, if harnessed, is the rocket fuel for insight andbreakthrough.

The problem is that most teams haven’t learnt how to hold thiscreative tension. In fact, they often avoid it, minimise it and deflect itat all costs. They have never been taught how to break free tobreakthrough, so they just work harder and longer, with good intent,doing more of the same. They also don’t know how to ‘organise’themselves for innovation and transformation, so they fall back onhabitual ways of working and leading that are simply out of date, andwholly inadequate for navigating the VUCA world.

This is why the nowhere practice focuses on three levers:

• Tuning teams into higher, co-creative frequencies• Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

strategies and innovations• Building eco-systems and cultures of innovation to make

these capacities, skills, tools and mindsets replicable, scalableand self-sustaining

Three simple things

Tuning teams Designing, catalysing andchoreographing breakthroughs

Building eco-systems andcultures of innovation

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Tuning teams

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Breakthrough is fundamentally a human activity, born fromputting our differences into creative relationship, in order tocreate a plethora of new and novel intersections, and a myriadof empty spaces – all full of latent potential.

For this reason, our capacity to breakthrough is dependent onthe quality of contact and relationships we build in a team.

Much research has been done on what makes a team highlyproductive, peak performing and creative. Is it the right mix ofintroverts and extroverts, of followers and leaders, or ofpersonality types? Or is it more about group norms, unwrittenrules, conversational turn-taking, social sensitivities?

Latest research would posit that the key to breakthrough teamsand productive meetings is ‘psychological safety’ ie. it is safeto speak up, voice differences of opinion, think out loud, takerisks, disclose, fail fast etc.

Psychological safety, and the trust that ensues is, from ourexperience, one of the four allied states of mind that enablebreakthrough teams to work at their creative edge and makethe unmade future.

The other states of mind are: • having a shared passion, belief in and commitment to

something larger than ourselves

• the willingness and resilience to wander with wonder intothe unknown together

• and the ability to see and work with pattern so you canmove like a flock of birds

The beauty is that when we move into these allied states ofmind together, breakthrough teams begin to manifest likeflames.

Unfortunately, if one or more of the team lack the self-awareness, interpersonal skills or behaviours needed to workin this way, these allied states of mind become undermined ordistorted. The team then struggles to establish and maintaintheir creative relationships, and become unable to marshal theenergy needed for breakthrough. The team and the worksimply fragment and collapse back to being less than the sumof the parts.

The first challenge, therefore, is for teams to raise theirawareness to those states and qualities of mind that take themout of creative relationship, and those that put them intocreative relationship. Then they need to learn how to interruptthose that distort them, individually and communally, andamplify those that ally them. Finally, they need to master theirallies so they can call them forward in various sequences andforms to help them catalyse breakthrough and generate newlevels of peak performance.

Tuning teams

Tuning teams

Some of the tools we use for tuning teams and organisations intothese higher creative frequencies include:

• nMaps: a unique framework, and iterative practice ofexperimentation and reflection, that reveals the hidden code forhow teams and leaders can become greater than the sum oftheir parts.

• Micro-Skills: introducing ways of working in the moment thatopen us, connect us, shift us and move us – so we are able tosee, feel and capture those fragile and fleeting moments ofinsight and breakthrough.

• Meeting Forms: transforming the way we meet by learning howto work with time, space, energy and information differently tosignificantly increase focus, productivity and creativity.

• Holding Space: teaching leaders to hold space (instead oftaking it up) such that diverse talent can come together, in newand novel ways, and surprise themselves with what they canachieve.

• Co-Creative Conferences: moving beyond ‘tell, sell and party’ toa next generation of large group interventions that focus energyon shared intent and activate collective intelligence in real time.

• Backbones: creating shared meaning and commitment aroundwho you are, what you stand for, where you have come from,where you are going, and how you are going to get there.

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Green Micro-Skillsopen spaces of new possibility

Breakthrough Questionskick-start the creative process

Setting Contextbuilds shared understanding

PO³

creates clarity of expectations

Storytellingopens our minds to new perspectives

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Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

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Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

Building shared intent and deepening the quality of relationshipswithin a team are prerequisites for being able to work with the highsand lows of the creative process and undertake breakthrough work.

To generate breakthrough, the team must also have the capabilityto tune into what they already know (their collective experience andexpertise), then move beyond it into the unknown, and linger therelong enough for moments of insight and breakthrough to emerge.We call this ‘riding the creative-rollercoaster’.

Our practice helps business critical teams learn to ride this creative-rollercoaster … moving beyond their assumptions and beliefs,priming them with new information and experience, tapping into awider collective intelligence, and noticing and capturing the subtlemoments that make the difference.

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Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

By developing the mindset, skills, tools and human processes to ridethe creative rollercoaster, the nowhere practice enables teams togenerate the discontinuous leaps of thought that allow new orderto emerge from chaos, and new patterns to emerge from complexity.

For us, these breakthroughs have two vital characteristics:

• an innovative output: something other than ourselves ie. abreakthrough strategy, product, service, business model,process, systems…

• a transformational outcome ie. we have been transformed bythe process because something has repatterned in us as well asthe work. This means we can no longer go back to thinking whatwe thought before, and are compelled to move forward throughinsight-driven action.

Working in this way binds the team, creating the alignment andenergy that fuels powerful movement. As the team learns to ride thecreative-rollercoaster more often and more powerfully, cycles ofcreative and productive flow and peak performance emerge.

Some of the processes and practices we use for catalysingbreakthrough include:

• Breakthrough innovation projects: A three to six-monthprocess where creative teams form around breakthroughquestions, and use high consequence, rich environment anddeep embodiment methodologies to co-create game-changingsolutions.

• Strategic Landscapes: A three-day workshop that breaks downinternal siloes by syncing different worldviews to co-createoptimal pathways forward.

• Innovation Accelerators: A three-day workshop for intact orproject teams to accelerate business critical issues to first insightand new movement.

• Cross Value Chain Innovation: A three-day workshop fororganisations in a value chain to move into creative relationshipand co-create around a key innovation challenge.

• Strategic Chessboards: A new framework and methodology forcreating breakthrough strategies ie. finding and testing the mostelegant movements through time and space.

• Visions of the Future: Learning to step into the future, andinnovate from the future back.

Designing, catalysing and choreographing breakthrough

Building eco-systems andcultures of innovation

Building eco-systems andcultures of innovation

As problems and opportunities become more complex, blurred,hyper-dependent, digital and diverse, so our established ways ofworking and leading hit up against a cultural ceiling that limits thecreativity, productivity and agility of our response.

The challenge is to think, relate, learn and organise differently.

Having learned how to tune into higher co-creative frequencies, andmaster riding the high and lows of the creative-rollercoaster, the nextchallenge is to learn how to design and choreograph breakthroughon a larger scale ie. across communities of teams and with biggerchallenges, in self-sustaining ways.

This is where we share more about the ‘how’ of breakthrough:• an organising ‘blueprint’ for building eco-systems of innovation• the phases and stages of building cultures of innovation

These new ways of working can be up to 5x more productive and40% more time efficient, while enabling quicker, better and moreintegrated decision-making, and dramatically increasing yourcapacity to innovate within and beyond your organisationalboundaries.

Building eco-systems andcultures of innovation

Gone, therefore, are those linear days when you could come up witha strategy and then implement it. Instead our dynamic contextrequires us to work much more with emergent strategy and agileand iterative implementation. We now need to:

• Build ‘core energy’ around a breakthrough insight, idea,problem or opportunity, that has the power to attract and excitea diverse community of talent around it. It may require a largenumber of interconnected and interdependent teams to work inconcert with one another, so this energy needs to beproportionate to the scale of the breakthrough endeavour.

• Move beyond pyramidal leadership and governance, which isjust too slow, too agenda-driven and unable to creatively keepup with the dynamic context.

• Introduce new organising and meeting forms that enablecommunity of teams to re-order, re-shape and move like a flockof birds, in real-time around emerging insights and adaptivechallenges.

• Have the willingness, confidence and capacity to allowbreakthrough strategies to emerge and continually evolvethrough a series of discontinuous leaps.

• Activate and harness the collective intelligence of the wholeat each and every stage of the work.

Some of the processes and practices we use for building eco-systems and cultures of innovation include:

• Building core teams: teams who have learned how to createand hold the energetic and relational container needed to workwith emergent strategy and lead interconnected communities ofexpert and swarm teams – this includes having clear decision-making rights and developing a whole range of newcommunication skills.

• BrainTrusts: sounding boards of commercial and functionalstakeholders whose role is to support core teams by testingtheir strategic thinking and giving candid but creative feedbackon their work in progress.

• PurposeQuests: a unique approach that uses collective intelligencemethodologies to help companies discover core purpose.

• Catalyst training: upskilling internal change-agents by teachingthem the nowhere practice so they can scale its impact acrosstheir organisation and build sustainable momentum.

• Leading change: applying the practice to minimise resistanceand maximise the momentum of the human dimensions of large-scale change programmes.

• Seeking congruence: syncing and linking core processes,systems and policies like Long Range Planning, AnnualOperating Plans, KPIs and Performance Management to anchorand sustain cultural shifts and new operating models.

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Building eco-systems andcultures of innovation

Some of the breakthroughs wehave helped catalyse include:

• Discovering a $1bn market opportunity thatwas previously valued at $50m

• Generating an eight-fold increase in therate of innovation of a global R&D pipeline

• Optimising the success of a new $4bn perannum peak sales product

• Accelerating the progress of aconglomerate’s top-10 billion dollar ventures

• Speeding up value extraction in lessdeveloped markets

• Halving the annual IT spend withoutdecreasing the quality of service

• Finding a creative way of taking $100mcost out of a Supply Chain

• Crafting the process simplification of allglobal functions

• Reducing R&D timelines (from molecule tomarket) by over 30%

• Significantly increasing the productivity ofa strategically vital manufacturing plant

• Weaving breakthroughs in userexperience, prescient technology and

branded behaviour into a game-changingstrategy

• Transforming a flagship category for one ofthe world’s largest retailers, generating25% upturn in sales from virtually no capitaloutlay

• Saving £8 million by enabling thedisconnected regions of a national charityto think together

• Reshaping policy and corporate andconsumer behaviours by supporting acabinet government department in thehosting and catalysis of a regulatory drivenvalue-chain

• Leveraging a supply chain monopoly inChina to reverse engineer an industryshake up

• Triggering an eco-system strategy that ledto one of the world’s most excitingcompanies becoming a growth economyin its own right

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THE nowhere PRACTICE

Since the mid nineties, nowhere has been working behind the scenes and at thehighest levels, with multi-national companies all over the world, tuning the creativefrequency at which their cultures operate.

Our ‘practice’ is born from a unique blend of insight traditions, creative andorganisational disciplines and doctoral research, and has over twenty years ofdevelopment and refinement with some of the biggest brands and inspiring leaders.

It enables us to work in creative partnership with our clients & partners to:

1. design, catalyse and choreograph breakthroughs – including breakthroughteams & meetings, strategies & innovations, cultures & journeys.

2. transform the way they work so they can breakthrough the cultural ceiling thatmany organisations all over the world are hitting up against ie. thinking that doingmore of the same, but a little bit better, is good enough (it’s not), or thinking youcan work harder and longer hours (you can’t). The challenge is to think, relate,learn and organise differently.

The Hum

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Next Gen ExecutiveDevelopment Curriculum

Evoking a new leadership movement

Empty MirrorHolding Space

Move

Open

momentsWoW

Shift

Connect

Green Micro-Skillsopen spaces of new possibility

Breakthrough Questionskick-start the creative process

Setting Contextbuilds shared understanding

PO³

creates clarity of expectations

Storytellingopens our minds to new perspectives

WoW moments App

WoW Moments Meeting Forms

Holding Space Empty Mirror

Breakthrough Strategy Tuning Culture

Breakthrough Teams Breakthrough Innovation

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Meeting Forms

Purpose Quests

Backbones

P+V (Awards)

Signs, symbols

& artefacts

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CULTURE

Core Processes

Core Te

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Catalysts

Tuning TeamsnMaps

Integrated Leadership CommunitiesComplex Stakeholder Groups

Co-Creative Conferences

TEAMS

Innovation Accelerators

Breakthrough Innovation Projects (BIPs)

Cross Value Chain Innovation (XVCI)

Collaboratories

INNOVATION

Strategic Landscapes

Quests

Strategic Chessboards

Visions of the Future

STRATEGYBreakthrough

Catalysing Breakthrough Next Gen Curriculum

© Copyright nowheregroup ltd 2017

For further information

Please visit www.now-here.com

You can contact us at: enquiries@now-here.com

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