Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Innovation
What is innovation? — it is not so much about having ideas as it is about connecting and nurturing ideas.
“History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort — not just from a narrow group of young white men in California.” —Mariana Mazzucato
Markets do not work in isolation from the public sector. Everything is connected. The lone genius does not exist. Networks of trust are what create value for society.
“In the agrarian age of the 19th century, when schools meant one-room rural schoolhouses, teaching morality and morals and character was all important. That’s because society needed, and so demanded, good moral character.”—Nineshift
Not so long ago ‘gee’ was an offensive word in the USA. It was considered to be short for Jesus. But a focus on morality shifted to a focus on responsibility, as we entered the factory era, where timeliness was necessary to keep the machines moving. We are nearing the end of this era, but its influence is still in our schools.
So today ‘responsibility’ means:
* Being present, not absent.
* Showing up on time.
* Handing in your homework on time.
—Nineshift
Why have certain cities fostered creativity over time?
“First, the protection of personal and economic freedoms changed the local culture, making it more receptive to innovations and new ideas. Second, the new institutions also changed incentives, through a more meritocratic and inclusive social environment, but also by encouraging works of art and innovations that would enhance the prestige of the city. Third, free cities attracted talented and creative individuals who escaped censorship and persecution elsewhere, and this created role models and facilitated social learning, breeding new generations of innovators.” —VOX 2018-01-06
This study of European city development showed that first the space must be amenable to creative individuals and then people can flourish. This is similar to the conclusions of Eric Weiner in The Geography of Genius who identified diversity, disorder, and discernment as keys to creative genius.
In writing almost 100 posts on innovation since 2007, it’s time to put the core observations together into a cohesive narrative. Here goes.
Innovation is fifteen different things to fifteen different people.
“An innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations.” —OECD
As Marina Gorbis concludes in The Nature of the Future, “much new value and innovation will move from commodity-or-market-based production to socialstructed creation.” Innovation today is people making connections. Innovation is dependent on learning in networks. Social learning is about getting things done in networks. It is a constant flow of listening, observing, doing, and sharing. Effective working in networks requires cooperation, meaning there is no fixed plan, structure, or direct feedback. Through social learning we can co-develop emergent practices. Social learning is how we move from transactions to relationships and foster knowledge mobilization.
Innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about connecting and nurturing ideas. Tim Kastelle says that, “Innovation is the process of idea management.” Effective knowledge networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network shifts its focus again. The network enables infinite combinations between unique nodes. For example, better connections enabled a high school student to create a better cancer diagnostic tool. Connected discoveries will be the hallmark of the network era.
The connection between innovation and learning is evident and we cannot be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. It sounds easy, but it’s a major cultural change because it questions some common assumptions about work —
“There is a need to deal with the problem independent of the solutions at hand. We have a tendency to define the problem in terms of the solutions we already have. We fail most often not because we fail to solve the problem we face, but because we fail to face the right problem. Rather than doing what we should, we do what we can. In the systems view, it is the solution that has to fit the problem, not vice versa.” — Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture
Systems thinking seems to be missing in many parts of our society. For example, green energy proponents refuse to consider low carbon nuclear power as an option, including new nuclear technologies like molten salt. I am not sure what the optimal solution is but there is a significant cost to solar energy. Using only “the solutions at hand” can blind us to other options. Once we have taken up our positions, we seldom question them. This is one of our greatest mistakes, especially since more of our challenges will be complex in a connected world of seven billion people with degraded natural resources and facing climate change.
“Welcome to Magic School. Here is your schedule.”
“Thanks! But…”
“Yes?”
“This is just ‘Ethics’ and ‘Human rights’ and things like that.”
“Correct, that’s the first year curriculum.”
“Do we have to learn all this?”
“Of course! What do you think this is, software engineering?”
—@MicroSFF
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There is a certain irony that the most popular TED Talk — Do schools kill creativity? — is seriously questioned in a TEDx talk over a decade later. Ken Robinson’s talk on creativity has had over 55 million views. Basically he says that our schools suck the creativity out of children.
“Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.” —Ken Robinson
With only 2,000 views to date, Elisabeth McClure, a researcher with the LEGO foundation, presents a case that counters Robinson’s views on creativity — Are children really more creative than adults? McClure starts by stating there is no evidence that the cited Land & Jarman study on creativity was ever published and may never have happened. NASA has no record of it.
Innovation is about making connections — connecting people and connecting ideas. The broader and deeper the connections, the more potential for serendipity. This is why systemic factors like gender or racial bias put organizations and societies at a disadvantage. They lose diversity and they become less innovative. History has shown us this, such as the chase for the atomic bomb during the Second World War. The Germans refused to engage Jewish scientists, some of whom then worked for the eventually successful US Manhattan Project. Looking further back in time, when Tasmania was cut off from the rest of the Australian continent 10,000 years ago, Tasmanian society began to lose much of its collective knowledge.
“If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population.” –How Culture Drove Human Evolution
As Esko Kilpi states, “Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity.”
Our echo-chambers can kill us.
Distributed governance was part of the conversation at RESET18 in Helsinki last month, where I discussed networks, communities of practice, knowledge-sharing, and sense-making, in the context of the Finnish civil service. I concluded that a network society needs networked models for organizing and for learning. Governments and their departments need to transition to the network form. Each network form will be different, so there are few best practices to follow. New practices have to emerge from those testing the new methods.
New practices, and literacies, are needed to maintain our democracies and to help each citizen thrive in this newly connected world. Frameworks like personal knowledge mastery provide the key concepts and vocabulary to become network literate.
“The complexity of the media landscape today places high demands on our own digital and media literacies and the role of adult education, and indeed the entire education sector, is crucial if we are going to raise awareness of both the dangers and the opportunities of the digital world that is forming around us.
However, the task of enabling citizens to make sense of and navigate today’s ever-changing media landscape (i.e. media and information literacy) depends on a major coordinated investment in training and research involving many sectors of society. For this to happen we need coordination and incentives from governmental level, something that may be difficult in countries.” —Alistair Creelman
While in Helsinki I was interviewed on a number of questions that had been provided by civil servants, to inform part of a public sector training program. These interviews were put together as a five-part video and are available free online at eLearning Finland [eOppiva].
1. Civil servants using networks
2. Seek > Sense > Share model
3. Differences in working and learning in networks
4. Efficient networking
5. Civil servants in external networks
Several graphics are included in the presentation and I have put these together as a PDF — PKM for Civil Servants.
The co-founders of Creative Startups have published a book that is a guide for anyone interested in the creative economy at any level — Creative Economy Entrepreneurs. This book is a good read but it is more of text book, sprinkled with anecdotes and data, than a single narrative. I would recommend it for anyone working in economic development today. The authors share their 25 years of experience and compile a lot of information in an accessible form.
The premise of this book is that the fourth industrial revolution is changing the nature of work and the economy.
“Now, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, economies are evolving to handle and process our enormous mass of accessible information. With so much information available and so many methods of analysis, access to knowledge is no longer the challenge. Everything is connected, and these connections happen instantly. The challenge for the Fourth Industrial Revolution becomes interpretation, reflection, and innovation. How do we create new value out of our hyperconnected knowledge?”