Is it easier to motivate people to change by scaring them or by inspiring them? And is it more effective to marshal data points, or to craft a narrative? I'm at the Imagine Solutions conference in Naples, Florida, and change is on everyone's mind. But though we're ostensibly debating issues like health care, the environment, energy, and the economy, I keep picking up on the meta-debate about what kind of leadership these issues require. Dean Ornish, for instance, spoke Monday morning about the motivational power of focusing on the positive. He's a doctor who champions preventive medicine (he's the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute). He lambasted what he called the false choices between what is "fun" and what is healthy, and instead called on medical leaders who focus on the benefits — the fun side effects, as it were — of living a healthier life. And to convince us, he presented intense quantitative data culled from his research: tumors arrested (and by how much), heart disease reversed (and how quickly), genes expressed and unexpressed (with color-coded diagrams.) (Yes, living healthier can actually turn harmful genes "off." But I digress.)

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At the Imagine Solutions conference, the watchword was change. Whether they wanted to bring down the national debt (like Niall Ferguson), reform Washington (like David Walker), halt global climate change (like Carter Roberts), or reinvent health care (like Patch Adams), everyone agreed that the world needed changing, even if they didn't quite agree on the specifics of what that change should look like. Yet it became clear as the conference progressed that the speakers also disagreed on how much change was enough. When tackling daunting problems in health care, the environment, politics, or the economy, can incremental adjustments make a real difference? Or is anything less than total transformation not even worth the effort?

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I don' think I have ever seen a better visualization of leadership. This is genuinely worth offering as an introduction to any leadership workshop you might want to run.It is funny, memorable, down right inspiring and humbling.

Here are two highly contrasting personal stories about innovation in major technology companies, Microsoft and Google - in Microsoft's case from a former Vice President and in Google's case, an employee who has been with the organisation for one month. This is a fascinating comparison between an idealistic starter at Google, eyes wide open as if experiencing the candy shop for the first time, where all before him seems like an unclimbed snow covered mountain peak full of wonder and awe offering the glorious challenges of a lifetime, not without its dangers, that can be conquered in the due process of time and a former Microsoft Vice President, who like many true innovators in organisations was thwarted over time not by his will or want to innovate or for that matter the organisation's publicly expressed desire to do so but by the organisation's internal culture and processes and the inherent power struggles which regularly conceal and undermine the inherent nuances and subtleties required for organisational innovation. These articles read together offer compelling examples of the importance of idealism, yet show its powerful constraints and undoing. The real mystery in innovation is seeking the balance between imagination and pragmatism. This piece begins with the untainted imaginationand ends...well read on.

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David Magellin Horth is one of the most highly experienced and knowledgeable creativity and innovation facilitators I know and have had the pleasure to work with.He is a global leader in the field of innovation thinking and his experimentation and design work around creativity and innovation processes and tools reaches back some 30 odd years. He is currently the President of the US Creative Education Foundation and his book The Leaders Edge is a standard text for all our programmes. So when he has an article published in Forbes, it would be remiss of me not to reproduce it fully for the Creative Leadership Forum readers.

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