Innovation blind spots

There is a lot of talk about the how and why we need to embrace and foster innovation. Disruptive tech, young & creative startups, emerging markets and new ground-breaking ideas seem to be an ever-present part the business and social landscape. Now we know - innovation is good. Innovation is the future anchored to the present. So far, so good.

The spirit of innovation is nothing new (pun unintended) to human culture. Many flourishing civilizations and individuals have embraced the innovation mindset and were ahead of their times throughout recorded history. I hate to break this to you, but innovation does not belong exclusively to our times. Ironically it’s as old as history. What is different and peculiar to our current situation is that innovation is not just a driving force. It’s an emergency. The scale of our global problems, the greater complexity of our societies, the fact that we are more connected through technology and the slow but increasing awareness that our unsustainable collective footprint is detroying our life support is what is making innovation a non-option.

The collective ego has once more succeeded in reducing and trivialising the idea into sound-bites and a catchy buzz word in pretty blogs and corporate white papers. Innovation is not just tech or business. Innovation is an attitude we have to recognise and step into. But most of all it’s not a trend that we follow. Innovators are trend-setters and not trend-followers. If we want to innovate ourselves and the world we live in, we need to get off our ass and start creating instead of consuming like grazing sheep. Stop relying on the silicon valley wizz kids and starry eyed visionaries and embrace the idea that we are all innovators if we choose to. It’s starts from here and now. It starts from an idea.

We can slide in the innovation mindset by first sliding out of its blind spots - fear, habituation, comfort zones, clinging on to the known and ‘certain’. At the core of innovation there is the surrendering to and embracing the idea that everything is uncertain and ever-changing on the one hand, and the resolve to change our ways, methods and structures to accommodate it on the other

Movement Forward and Within

Innovation is forward movement. On an individual and psychological level it is about getting unstuck from those thought patterns and old beliefs that stifle inner movement and change. It is about clearing the mind from the noise that drowns the clear-headed voice of intuition, insight and creativity. It’s about de-conditioning and de-patterning. Most of all it is about learning new pathways to use our internal resources more efficiently and effectively. All of this is what brings us to embrace the spirit of innovation that starts from you, the individual.

Organisations are not innovative. That’s bull crap. Individuals are. They are those misunderstood and marginalized individuals cooking up something on the fringes of society - the real incubator and work top of innovation. Some organisations then pull in those innovative ideas into the mainstream world and the ideas become an everyday commodity. So innovation doesn’t start from the inner centre of social structures and institutions. It starts from within the individual. It’s a movement inwards as much as it is a movement forward.

What does moving inwards mean and why is it tied to living with and through uncertainty? Throughout our history Man has always been searching and exploring. Exploration is good but it has been misguided especially post industrial revolution. It is all about outer exploration. Now we have to re-orient ourselves from outer exploration to inner exploration. Our chances of making it through collectively as a species hinges on this one prescription. Inner exploration is about knowing the Self, its darkest corners and it fullest potential and resources. It is about understanding our truths, the essence that lies free from the layers of conditioning, mind constructed illusions and other bullshit.

Breaking Old patterns

One of the toughest and most painful parts of dealing with change and uncertainty is breaking habits and letting go of the known. The mind is a habit-forming engine. Repeated patterns create and etch ‘grooves’ in our minds that guide new experiences to be responded with the same behaviour; the same perceptions and interpretations. Breaking from old patterns of behaviour is work, a lot of work. It starts from a very simple and powerful place - our awareness - a place where practically everything else is born.

We have to first become conscious and aware that we are stuck in a rut and not moving forward. We have to realise that more of the same will not push us through life, or the next century, quite gracefully. Something has to give way and it shouldn’t be the things around us or the health of the planet. We have to become aware, resolve to change, see the bigger picture and grow out of our damn egocentric vision of the universe. In crude lingo - we have to stop being fucking babies and put our shit together.

Cycles with no end

The ancients knew it of course. The universe dances and swings around cycles, some local, some planetary, some galactic and some cosmic. They come and go through the stretch of the ages. One thing they were quite sure of was that these cycles have no end. They are endless and infinite. As individuals, but also as a whole species through time, we are experiencing only a infinitesimal part of a galactic or cosmic cycle. From a more grounded perspective, we also experience other much shorter cycles that revolve around us as humans - political and economic shifts, war and peace, birth and death, etc. Again, these cycles might have changed fashion throughout time but they never went away. They kept on coming and coming. They are here to stay.
So our long view of the future should not be linear. Oddly it should be both exponential and cyclical > It’s a spiral of consciousness. A spiral moving in cycles but also moving forward exponentially. The universe is in constant movement - to be precise in constant spiralling. Everything spins from quarks to atoms to planets, galaxies and super-celestial structures. This is one of the secrets of life and the Universe we yet do not have an answer as to why. It just is.

What we can take home from this is that when dealing with uncertainty and the future we have to remember of that most natural dance of the Universe in mind - the Spiral. To embrace and trust the cycles of life and the universe; to understand and learn from past cycles (dont’ forget modern Man is amnesiac); to know that we are both moving in circles and forward and to put this in any of our models of change. To have courage in the fact that everything comes and go and that we should let go of our tense and tight grip on our knowns and comfort zones. Dive in. Most of all to step out of our God damn self-importance - we are dust in the wind of change. Star dust that will form and reform countless of times in countless of forms. Cheer up it’s all right Roger.