Now-to-New is a way of thinking, doing and being, directed towards transcending the mundane, imagining what could be, bringing it into being and enriching the world with value, meaning and joy.
Now-to-New is a term I came up with in the 1990s when working as an independent consultant specialising in innovation, change and multi-stakeholder co-creation, as well as continuing my longstanding inquiry into how the new comes into being, and how this changes into that, beyond prevailing models and methods.
At first, Now-to-New was simply a blanket term covering innovation, change and problem solving work.
No matter how the project is framed by the people involved, the purpose of any innovation, change or problem solving project is bringing about a shift from the way things are right Now to a New reality, a new Now, in which the desired results have been accomplished. The new product or service has been launched, the change has happened or the problematic situation is a thing of the past.
Imagine that three people meet to discuss a prospective joint project. Person A frames it as an innovation project. Person B thinks it’s a problem solving project. Person C considers it a change project. Consequently there’s no shared language, no common mental model and no collective understanding, resulting in crossed wires and the design and deployment of a suboptimal intervention.
Now-to-New fosters unity of purpose and focused collaborative action by providing clear distinctions and straightforward conceptual frameworks that everyone agrees to adopt.
Today, Now-to-New also refers to a way of thinking, doing and being with the purpose of transcending the mundane, imagining what could be, creating the new and generating maximum downstream value.
Human beings are built for converting Now into New, with mind, body (not mentioned by John Steinbeck) and spirit working in concert.
Although Now-to-New workers are able to draw from a large pool of concepts, models and methods, their principal creative instrument is the totality of themselves.
This website is a non-commercial venture. You are free to reuse material I’ve created as specified in the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. In essence, leave things intact and credit Jack Martin Leith. Note that this does not extend to the many text excerpts and images drawn from external sources.
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