We just won Gold. Again. This time for innovation.
For the second consecutive year, work we created with PVH has received Gold at the Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards, this year for Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program. We’re proud. We’re celebrating.
And then we’re going back to disrupting things.
Perhaps the most useful thing an innovation award can do is make you curious about what comes next. And getting to what comes next often requires something we don’t talk about nearly enough. Letting go.
Not recklessly abandoning what works. Not chasing novelty because new sounds more exciting than established. But becoming willing to loosen our grip on what we already know long enough to discover what else might be possible.
We think that’s harder than generating ideas. Especially when what you already have is good.
Success can be surprisingly difficult to disrupt.
The things most difficult to question are often the things that have worked.
- The program clients love
- The methodology we’ve spent years refining
- The model everyone understands
- The expertise that makes us successful
Success gives us evidence. It also gives us attachment.
Eventually, we can find ourselves innovating around the edges of something we have unconsciously decided must remain at the center. A better version. A refreshed version. A digital version.
All potentially valuable. None necessarily disruptive.
Sometimes innovation begins with a more uncomfortable question: what are we willing to let go of to see something we cannot see from here?
That’s why we have a Disruption Studio.
At Canvas, this is where we deliberately interrupt ourselves. Everything is fair game. Our assumptions. Our intellectual property. Our experience in leadership and development. Sometimes even ideas we created and still love.
We pull things apart. Put things next to each other that don’t obviously belong together. Bring in ideas from science, art, technology, philosophy and other places that make us look at familiar questions differently.
We play. We argue. We imagine. And right now, this feels particularly exciting.
We’re learning to work in a new kind of creative relationship with AI. As we strengthen our Synthetic Relational Fluency, we’re exploring what it means to collaborate with another kind of intelligence while remaining fully responsible for the distinctly human work of judgment, discernment and imagination.
We’re bringing students from Duke University into that exploration too. They’ve created scenarios specifically designed to test human discernment when working with AI: moments when the synthetic collaborator may sound confident, plausible or persuasive, but the human still has to question, challenge, contextualize and ultimately decide what to trust and what to do.
What else are we innovating?
Quite a lot.
Making transformation visible.
We’re exploring how something as complex and deeply human as transformation can be made visible. That work has led us to the Canvas Transformative Engine, our developmental model for understanding how Transformative Intelligence develops through the ongoing process of becoming.
Developing the intelligences this era may demand.
We’re asking what distinctly human capacities might matter more, not less, as the conditions in which we live and lead continue to change. That exploration is taking us into Biological Intelligence, Aesthetic Intelligence, Complexity Intelligence and Synthetic Relational Fluency.
Rethinking assessment.
We’re exploring whether an assessment can do more than capture where someone is today. What if it could make visible the patterns shaping the story they are currently living inside, while also revealing their capacity to examine and evolve that story as conditions change? The TQi™, launching this fall, is our new developmental assessment of Transformative Intelligence, designed not as an endpoint, but as a mirror that becomes the beginning of deeper reflection, coaching and development.
Exploring ways of knowing beyond words.
So much of leadership development lives in language. We talk, analyze, reflect and ask people to articulate what they know. But humans know in other ways too. We’re blending theories and practices that invite people into preverbal, symbolic, sensory and less conscious ways of knowing. What might become visible through an object, image, symbol or spatial relationship before someone can put it into words?
This October, we’ll be sharing this exploration at the International Transformative Learning Conference, fittingly themed “The Art of Co Creating Change: Learning, Acting, and Transforming Collectively.”
And we’re already taking it into our client work. Atelier 2030™ is a new Canvas learning methodology blending cognitive science, visual and symbolic thinking, systems thinking, adult development and immersive storytelling to help leaders make visible what they may already sense or know, but cannot yet articulate.
There are many other things underway in our Disruption Studio that aren’t ready to be named yet. Those may be the most exciting ones. Not everything should survive the Studio. Some ideas should die there or expose a flaw in something we already believe. Some should send us back to something old with a new appreciation for why it works. And some should remain unresolved.
Sometimes transformation asks us to go down
Development is so often represented as an upward journey. We grow. Advance. Rise. Become more. But transformation doesn’t always ask us to add more. Sometimes it asks us to go down.
Down into the body. Into the beliefs and stories beneath our behavior. Into the places we may need to examine before we can move forward differently. This thinking is informing the next evolution of our coaching work, exploring transformation at the level of narrative and identity, not behavior alone.
Perhaps innovation and transformation have always belonged closer together than we tend to put them. Both require us, at some point, to loosen our grip on what is and make room for what might become.
Gold. Then back to disrupting.
That is the peculiar thing about an innovation award. It recognizes something you’ve already created. Innovation asks what you’re willing to disrupt next.
So we’ll celebrate this one. And then we’ll head back into the Disruption Studio, alongside visionary clients like PVH, who are willing to experiment with us, be early adopters and help turn emerging possibilities into real experiences.
