What do genius thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Albert Einstein, and creative business leaders such as Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs or Richard Branson have in common? They are creative top achievers who produce Wow thinking and outstanding, extraordinary results because they think differently and do things differently than the majority of other people.

What if there were a course that teaches you about the success mindsets and cognitive strategies of geniuses and creative leaders? What if there were a program that provides you with exercises to acquire a genius mindset and become an authentic creative leader for the innovation economy? What if you got the secret keys to unlock your full creative potential and realize the genius inside of you? Well, guess what: Thinkergy has created such a method for you. We call it Genius Journey.

Thinkergy’s Genius Journey is a creative leadership method that we designed to cater to a wider unsatisfied need that we noticed in the leadership development market: The need to create authentic creative leaders. With our Genius Journey method, we send creative leader candidates on a experiential journey to adopt and adapt cognitive strategies of authentic creative leaders and cultivate a genius mindset.

In the 2010 Global CEO Study of IBM, most surveyed CEOs of the world’s leading corporations agreed that creativity is the most important leadership skill for the future. Creative leadership helps companies to cope with the increasingly fast, complex, risky and ever-changing business environment of the early 21st century, and to become a leader in the innovation economy. In a related follow-up study, however, IBM also found out that most companies acknowledged that they have no idea on how to develop authentic creative leaders.

“To instill the dexterity and flexibility necessary… companies must move beyond traditional leadership development methods and find ways to inject within their leadership candidates… the cognitive skills to drive creative solutions. The learning initiatives that enable this objective must be at least as creative as the leaders they seek to foster,” write the authors of IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study. Genius Journey is Thinkergy’s response to this call for a truly creative learning format for creative leadership development.

Genius Journey is a creative leader development method that transforms a normal (business) person into an authentic creative (business) leader, and allows everyday people to realize their inner genius potential. Achieving such a transformation is not a sudden shift or an easy quick fix, but rather a gradual, evolutionary process. In other words, creative leader candidates evolve by gradually expanding their consciousness to the higher levels of genius.

The Genius Journey Method distinguishes 8 Levels of Genius. Currently, the mind of every creative leader candidate is on one of these eight levels, and typically it’s on one of the lower levels. The 8 Levels of Genius is one of two core methodological concepts that are key to Thinkergy’s creative leader development method. The other one is the journey-aspect in the Genius Journey.

Genius Journey has 10 destination stops that all creative leader candidates travel to on their journey:

At each destination stop, we introduce the candidates to a limiting mindset or cognitive strategy (“STOP factor”) that stops them from realizing their inherent genius potential, that squarely keeps them trapped in-the-box, that makes them think and act in conventional ways.

At each destination, they also learn about the corresponding “START factor”, i.e., an empowering alternative mindset and cognitive strategy practiced by geniuses and authentic creative leaders. In other words, the candidates learn how to think and act like a genius by gaining control over their STOP factor and instead beginning to cultivate the corresponding START factor.

This means that for each positive genius factor that is conducive for creativity, there is an antagonistic negative opponent that blocks your creative flow and keeps you squarely thinking inside-the-box.

Once the creative leader candidates shifts all factors on a genius level from STOP to START, they acquire a higher level of consciousness and move up to a higher level of genius and success potential.