Gaia Grant

Gaia Grant Speaking Topics

• Purpose-driven Innovation Leadership

  Gaia has just realised a brand-new book based her cutting edge specialised research with global innovation leaders which all leaders will be keen to hear about.

  The topic covers: ‘Why purpose-driven innovation is no longer an option’ , and ‘How to lead innovation responsibly’. Gaia addresses the paradox of how leadership teams can understand and deal with the unique competing demands when innovating responsibly, and she includes examples from interviews & research with companies such as Atlassian through to the OpenAI debacle.

• Other topic headings can include…

  INNOVATE:

  • The Innovation Race: Becoming Future Ready. Who will win, lose and be eliminated? What does successful & sustainable Innovation look like? Includes: best practices• Countries, Companies, Cultures & Innovation Leaders.
  • Ambidextrous Leadership: Identifying Paradoxical Innovation Orientations in Teams
  • Are you an Innovative Leader? Creating agile leadership teams: Identifying ambidexterity across different occupational profiles. Innovation profiling.

  CREATE:

  • Harnessing Creative Intelligence (CQ) • for a Competitive Advantage.
  • Who Killed Creativity? And How to Get it Back? From the Classroom to the Boardroom.
  • The 7 Critical Creative Thinking Strategies for Designing New Innovations, & why Design Thinking often fails.

  COLLABORATE

  • The Collaboration Deception: A gamified simulation social experiment, to explore building collaborative teams in a competitive environment

Who Killed Creativity?... And how can we get it back?+ Harnessing Creative Intelligence (CQ) skills for a competitive business advantage:

Identifying the key psychological blocks to creative thinking and how to deal with them.

We need to be creative to be innovative. But the relentless push to innovate faster may be undermining the whole creative process. In our rush for end results, we could ironically be killing the very thing that will lead us to innovation: creativity. Recent research has revealed that creative thinking will be the most important leadership attribute in the next 10 years. Yet it has been identified that even though IQ has been on the rise, creative thinking (CQ) has been rapidly declining since the 1990s. CQ has also been found to drop over an individual’s lifespan. We are now at a point where all the design thinking strategies and innovation labs in the world won’t help a team if there are significant psychological or environmental and cultural blocks to the creative probes. This session takes the participants on a journey from the classroom to the boardroom to understand the impact of the current creativity crisis. The session covers the implications for the workplace and reveals how it is possible to develop a creative and innovative culture.

Are you an Ambidextrous Innovation Leader?

What the latest research reveals about how to lead for sustainable innovation

“What it means to be an ambidextrous innovation leader: Developing greater agility for sustainability in a rapidly changing world” How is it possible to deal with the challenges of constant change in order to innovate and thrive? This session includes a fascinating validated assessment and interactive exercises to help explore individual unique Innovation Change Leadership (iCLi) profiles. Gaia Grant’s latest research reveals how understanding ‘Paradoxical Innovation Orientations’ (PIOs) and applying the ‘Polar Positioning Tool’ (PoP) at the individual, team and organisation levels can assist with fuelling innovation. In this session participants learn how to manage the dynamic tension between the principles of exploration, for breakthrough new innovation ideas, and preservation, for incremental continuous improvement. They learn how to lead teams so they are propelled forward by the creative dynamic between these positions rather than ripped apart by the tension, and through this process come to appreciate the importance of becoming ambidextrous innovation leaders. Drawing from her research with thousands of survey responses, multiple interviews with heads of innovation and a deep dive case study immersions – along with fascinating case studies from her consulting work with organisations over 30 years – this session reveals how leaders can fuel sustainable development. (Academic version with White Paper also available)

The Innovation Paradox: Are you an innovative leader?

We need to be creative to be innovative. But the relentless push to innovate faster is producing a toxic culture that may undermine the whole creative process. In our rush for end results fast, we could ironically be killing the very thing that will lead us to innovation: creativity. Creativity and innovation are not interchangeable words, and it’s important for effective businesses to understand why. In these sessions we explore why we need both, and the paradoxes behind this that can impact our work.