Erik Micheelsen on Simple Systems Innovation

We’ve got all the climate innovation workshops set up for the next four months and this is going to be a blast! There’s just one thing I want to add – this is about making infrastructures due to the change of our climate, because new technologies make new things possible and because the way we are going to innovate these infrastructures is with such a radical approach that it’s worth introducing to the world.

Have a look at CareCubicle.

This can be like oil & water. They don’t mix well. Now, that sounds problem oriented so let’s bypass the problem and focus in on what works.

Practically speaking, up until for just a few hours ago – figuratively speaking – the success of a business was measured bottom line. This new thing turned up called Corporate Social Responsibility hit the news not too long ago without changing anything over night. As a key executive for a major corporation told me at the High Level ICT Climate Conference three weeks ago: “It still has to be good business”.

Now of course he’s right. But not the way he thinks. The discussion we had was very much centred on the idea of being able to know how a CSR project would be good business now. I only want to make two comments: 1) You can’t do that and 2) that’s not the 1st priority of CSR.

Businesses need to continually renew themselves. Their environment is changing and either your business is up to date or it’s not. To be up to date, a business needs to look at the world with new eyes. You’ve got to get: That is literally impossible from inside the box. You really really really need “what’s out there” to “get in here” in such a way that it changes the whole perspective of the business.

That’s where CSR is an important tool for the business side of things. This way, you actually get to help someone, to be of service AND keep you’re business on it’s toes. That’s one way of getting to “thinking out of the box” from within the box. So it’s not tangibly and measurably now and here that a CSR builds a business but the way it builds the business prowess.

The thing is, no business can do what I just wrote, if the people who make up the business don’t get what the prowess of the business is. This is what set’s very innovative business apart from innovation seeking businesses. Employees and leaders get what they are about and are continuously looking for new ways to express that.

Read the last sentence again because if you execute on that one sentence, you’re business will never be the same again.

So what the heck does that mean. Look at Apple; If you were CEO – would you EVER have allowed the IPOD-ITUNES business plan to be executed? Don’t answer, please! The very obvious question is: How did Steve Jobs know this was the right move for the company? What Apple is continuously expressing is “if computer appliances could be held in your hand like an apple, taste like an apple, be designed like an apple – what would they be like”. Look at Nokia “Connecting People”. Most people get lost here thinking “Connecting People” is a PayOff but that ain’t it. It’s what they do. And they are re-newing it all the time. Had Nokia existed 17 century, they would be sending boats across the sea to “connect people”. Today it’s mobile phones… and tomorrow?

Who knows. They don’t even know. Not until they get brand new knowledge in the door. That knowledge will go against the basis of their bottom line today. It wont add to it.

But the whole of that exercise is impossible if the success of the business is measured bottom line. You got to get that sequence is everything! Step 1 is not to look at what will add to your bottom line but how to express the prowess of you’re business. That’s of course, only if you want you’re business to be innovative.

I’ll tell you more about step 1 next time including how to lead that process and how to determine the prowess of you’re business.

Tom Peters once said that innovation was made by really pissed off people. That means, within orgainsations, standard operating procedures go out the window including the “positive communication” thing: People who are pissed off have zero patience, are not polically correct, they’re very much to the point and they’ll probably break a lot of corporate rules. But if the result is innovation, then everything is fine. The problem is that pissed off people present knowledge you as a manager would rather be without.

What’s “knowledge you’d rather be without”? Acting on the consequences means breaking all the rules, you’ll jepordize you’re career and it get’s worse because the chain of command will be flipped. Here’s the scenario; let’s say we are on board a ship from Spain to England in 1732 and there’s no land in sight because of fog, the wind is a gale and there are strong currents. If the navigator says course 16 degrees and the Captain calls it out, then that’s the heading. Now what if one of the ship mates came up to the captain and said “actually, I’ve been following your log and my calculations say we should be heading course 22 degrees” or we are all going to die. That ship mate would be flogged! Or hanged. There’s no room for creativity on board a ship. Free Knowledge, as I like to call it, is only so much “free”.

But when it is free, amazing things happen. This is when there is a chance of “emergent property” meaning the chance for something astonishing to happen: the light bulb, the walk man, the computers or the internet are all good examples.

Businesses have always wanted to harness such results for themselves but let’s face it. Businesses find it really difficult! Except for handfull who’s names we all know.

So why is that? Why can these companies work with “knowledge they would rather be without” and are they too “really pissed off”?

I’ll give you my observations on Wednesday.