It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
Massive tectonic shifts are underway that are beyond our control.
One billion people are hungry. Our oceans are overfished and full of plastic. Climate change is beginning to cause terrible disruption to peoples’ lives. Our economic system has shown itself to be bankrupt, built upon a mirage, and conceptually incapable of meeting the challenges ahead.
At the same time, the rise of social technology, from cellphones to the internet, is wiring up our planetary nervous system in unprecedented ways. This is changing everything, because when information flow changes everything else follows. How we relate to our work, to our governance, to our planet and to each other is shifting rapidly.
The future looks very different from the past. Everything that we do as a species needs to change if we want to survive in a meaningful way. It is time to be as creatively adaptive as possible. Creating a global culture of innovation is the key to our future, because innovation is the engine of responsiveness to this massive change.
What are the essential attributes for a culture of deep innovation?
All cultures fall somewhere between creative and conformist, and between collaborative and competitive.
Creative cultures are always looking to create better ways. Conformist cultures want them to stay the same.
Collaborative cultures accelerate the evolution of ideas, because they nurture their cross pollination. Competitive cultures slow down the rate of evolution by locking their ideas away.
To be responsive to massive change, our survival demands that we consciously nurture a global culture of creative collaboration, and collaborative creativity.
Are you part of a culture of innovation?
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I totally agree and I do think that the creatives who are open to change should form some kind of alliance. Many new voices and ideas (including solutions) are needed to tackle the challenges.
I agree in general but question whether competition truly slows innovation. Witness the breakup of AT&T into a competitive telecommunications environment and all the innovations that followed. It is not clear that it would have happened that fast if AT&T had remained a monopoly. Collaboration to some degree can be born within a competitive market.
hmmm. I fear that often we confuse innovation with technology. Innovation is more about thinking–and perhaps questioning simple bipolar metaphors?
How wonderful if we could innovate how we think and what we value rather than what we do.
In this case it is true that competition vastly increased innovation, because the competition drove the creativity. AT&T without the competition was not a creative culture, it was a conformist one. The key is if the intrinsic motivation is towards exploring ways to make things better, or if it is towards making money. If the systemic driver is purely financial then innovation will primarily only be driven by the threat of competition, because creativity is always an inefficient process. That the systemic driver is financial however is an artifact of our human created economic system, which is not a fact of nature. As I've talked about in other blog posts we need to shift the way we measure success within our economic system so that we are aimed towards increasing human wellbeing, not increasing financial growth. The two are not correlated.
I love the idea of Deep Innovation David – definitely worth exploring it in more detail.
Also, thanks for adding my blog to your blogroll – I appreciate it!
Finally – a very screwy question – I use that Darwin quote quite a bit myself. I read somewhere (can't remember where exactly) that it is not actually a direct quote – have you read it directly in something by Darwin, or did you pick it up elsewhere like I have? Would love to find the source for it…
I don't like the divisive nature of the comparisons. We need all four quadrants or we risk repeating the failures of our divisive ancestors. There is no reason we can't have all four of those people in a room agreeing on which direction to take.
That is a good point. There is a dynamic tension to be found in the dance between the polarities. The conformist tendency holds the shape of the system together, the creative tendency is to shift the shape of the system. There is a dynamic interplay between those, just as there also is between the collaborative and the competitive. It is also true that not all aspects of a culture are positioned similarly on a graph (the food of a culture maybe much more conformist than the use of technology for instance). So a group culture is reflected by a fuzzy blob on such a graph, not by a point. However my position is that we need to be aware of these dynamics, and we need to be consciously encouraging those aspects of culture that shift more to the creative and collaborative, to be able to adapt to the deep systemic forces. In such situations of duress many systems actually do the opposite and become more conformist and more competitive, they take refuge in the familiar as it provides the illusion of safety – but that response reduces the viability of the system to changed circumstance.
Thanks Tim. I was actually going to quote something you said the other day about an algorithm for innovation, but the piece shifted direction
And yes I believe you are correct about the quote. I haven't read it directly, and last time I was looking for the source I came across a similiar set of confusions. Seems that it may actually be from Clarence Darrow – http://wiki.answers.com/Q/It_is_not_the_stronge...
Thoughtful article, David. I also like the “deep innovation” concept. Strangely enough I find myself balking at the use of “culture.” Even though I also catch myself referring to “corporate culture,” and while there can be useful conversations about culture at that level, a case could be made that we are are now, in this age, witnessing to and participating in the emergence of a “deep culture” that is at that unsettling, half-painted room moment, in which nothing feels quite right. I'm tempted to try to further label what this “deep culture” would be (a culture of global well-being?), but it seems premature. But I hesitate toward slanting it too soon toward conformity or innovation. That said, the conversation you have opened is vital. Thanks!
I like that concept of deep culture, and that it is a culture of global well-being. Some thoughts arise for me – is a culture defined by what it values? A culture is the emergent set of behaviors that arise from human interaction within a system. Those behaviors will tend to align with what is valued by the largest number of people within that culture. There is a definite current moving in the direction of a global, ecological, compassionate culture that is assisted by the wiring up of our planetary nervous system. Another frame for this emerging deep culture could be that it is a global social culture. Moving away from the individualistic to the communal.
How collaborative a company is will be the defining characteristic of it's success or failure in the new economy
Here is a swell equation for you all see if you can decipher it….
The Pirate Bay + Wikileaks + Flattr + the Pirate Party = Unstoppable positive social, economic, and environment change! Go Swedes!
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