Incentives or Innovation?

Is it incentives or innovation? I believe that many entrepreneurs enjoy seeing their innovations or ideas make an impact regardless of the incentives or the chance to make a profit. The profit motive for these innovators is secondary to them. Whether or not their innovations have an impact and can make a difference is their target. It just so happens that usually that ability to make an impact and "make a difference" translates into uniqueness and hopefully profits for their business.

I've been impressed more and more with the people around me now that I know about Kegan's Theory of Adult Development and the final stage, the Self-Transforming mind. I wrote a while back about the self-transforming or self-authoring mind (here). When I consider the work my grandfather did, and I look at how our CEO who has been in our industry and growing this safety training business for over 30 years, I see how that mentality of "letting go of preconceived notions of how they should behave" (Carabi, 2020) and of having the ability to "to step back and reflect on something and make decisions about" (Shifting Thinking, 2017) about projects and systems.



The more I work in this non-profit safety training organization and community the more I see people who have achieved that stage 5 mindset. When working in the contracting community there was still that drive for increased revenues and decreasing costs. Now, in this community, there is a desire to see the industry become safer despite the drivers of cost and revenue, but rather for the benefit of the trainee and the industry.



I've been reading on Kegan's stage 5 and what the features of this mindset include, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between that mindset and a need to "make an impact" which is the wording I used to begin this post. Haven't seen it specifically yet.



Carabi, A. (2020). Only 1% of People Have a Self-Transforming Mind: Lean How to Think in Grayscale. Wealth Fit. https://wealthfit.com/lifestyle/adult-development-theory/ (Links to an external site.)



Shifting Thinking. (2017). A Change Theory: Key Concepts for Understanding the word of Robert Kegan. Shifting to 21st Century Thinking in Education and Training. http://www.shiftingthinking.org/?page_id=449