At THNK, we believe that in order to understand our high-speed world we will have to slow down, practice slow thinking, and focus on a lot of small changes rather than on one big change. We need to acknowledge that we live in a quantum society and all of our institutions are shaped like fractals or, put in more popular language, complex adaptive systems. Change is only temporary, but the future is forever.
Hence, we need to look beyond what is changing and try to find the underlying principles that are shaping our future. We need to look at what is emerging, while being held hostage by our current discourse of thoughts, systems and values, which makes small change almost impossible for us to recognize.
This important aspect of creative leadership—the capacity to practice slow thinking—is indispensable if we want to be able to deal with the complexity of our contemporary world. And dealing with complexity requires a multi-disciplinary approach by definition. Not just the diversity of the team is key, but also the diversity of mind: those who dare to let that divergence bring their minds in constant flux, who dare to allow for some deliberate irrationality, will open the eye of the mind which is essential for the disruptive innovation of large-scale systems, varying from climate change to personalized healthcare.