Iterate is an innovation ecosystem creating impact through creativity, technology and disruption. Read Part 1 - Why we need to rethink impact here.
One day back in the late 1990’s a fellow student told me he had “googled” something. Needless to say, I pretended to know exactly what he meant, only to run off and type it into the first online computer I could find. I was dazzled. And I immediately changed. I stopped using bookmarks. I forgot about portals. I incorporated a new word into my daily vocabulary. And I “googled” everything I could think of. Still unaware of the massive ripple effects for change this new technology would create, I was part of something new. We all were. And to most of us it didn’t take decades or years. It didn’t take months or weeks. It took hours. One word was all we needed to get started.
As human beings we have a love-hate relationship to change. We hate change that’s forced upon us, but we love the kind of change that solves our problems and at the same time makes us feel cooler, smarter and better. I believe this behavior is key to understanding how we can solve today’s sustainability problems: As we saw in Part I, the premise of Rethinking Impact is that we cannot build a sustainable future just by improving what we already have. The perhaps biggest challenge for today’s innovators is to invent new paradigms and to find ways for everyone to transition into them fast.
How
In the rise of the information age we’ve seen many examples of how steps into the unknown can turn into wildly successful innovations. Today, many of these technologies experience a public backlash after years of reckless growth and cynical quest for profit. While these reactions are as understandable as they are deserved, we still shouldn’t forget that the technologies in question also bring with them valuable lessons about change: They started out with no power or influence whatsoever. Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, they started expanding like crazy. Soon after, they had made us all change so fast that we hardly noticed.
They pulled it off not just because they had the opportunity, that they worked hard and were determined to reach their goals. You can say that about any type of successful people. To be a change agent on this level, you also need to free your mind from established ways of thinking, and see the world from a more novel and fresh perspective.
In Think Again, Adam Grant argues how the ability to unlearn and relearn is becoming increasingly important in a world that changes faster and faster. This is especially important for innovators, who cannot succeed by building on the dogmas of the past. We have to stop taking the world as we know it for granted and start challenging it instead. This also means relearning who we are as creative beings and as professionals, what roles we want to play and what missions we want to be part of.
Where do you start and how can you train yourself to make better and more future oriented decisions? To guide your creative journey to go where it really matters, you need to reflect on two fundamental topics:
What are the root causes of the big problems of our time?
What does real change look like?
To understand root causes, we have to zoom out and see the larger systems at play, and the beliefs and philosophy behind them. Although the world has changed massively just in the last 20 years, and almost beyond recognition in the last 50 years, most of today’s trades, institutions, regulations and power centers are either from that age, or are even older. Hence, this is where we find the underlying forces that are behind today’s sustainability problems.
Challenging them by building something new and better constitutes a massive potential for improvement. Seeing the big picture however takes some exercise. Not just because it’s complex, but also because we have become so accustomed to the old concepts that it’s hard for us to imagine any alternatives. And we can’t challenge what we take for granted.
Much of what we hold to be true in the way we live our lives and run our societes aren’t really fundamental truths. Rather, they work more like a contract, saying that this is true as long as we all agree it is, and it ceases to be true the moment we stop believing it is. This might also explain why so many of our questionable truths die hard: It’s highly unlikely that the entire human population at the same time one day decides to stop believing in fashion, stock markets, celebrities, job titles, school grades, job interviews or political ideologies (any particular kind or all of them at once). In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains that we do need shared truths in order to cooperate effectively. He uses money as an example: We all know that a dollar, euro or yen bill in reality is just a piece of worthless paper. But because we all agree to use such paper pieces in everyday transactions, from buying food or clothes to renting a house or doing a job, it’s true that this bill is indeed worth more than the physical object you hold in your hand. Some shared truths are worth preserving. Other shared truths, that may have been useful to us in the past, are starting to cause more harm than good. That’s where we should focus our attention.
An example might be what we know as a premises of a healthy economy today: The continual increase in what we produce and consume. A century or two ago, it made a lot of sense: The more we consume, the more demand on the markets, the more factories we build, the more jobs we get, the more money we earn, the happier we are -- and the more we consume. Keeping it that way has always made our economy and our societies more stable. Moving away from it has always had the opposite effect. We know this phenomenon as continuous growth, and it has become a global gospel about human prosperity and happiness.
We could argue at length about the drawbacks and benefits of such economies, borrowing arguments from a spectrum of political ideologies. But that’s besides my point. Regardless of what narrative we subscribe to, it goes without saying that this self-reinforcing mechanism some day will come to an end. Mother earth has finite resources and none of us will want to drive at 2000 km/h into a stop sign where she says: “Sorry, I’m all sold out.” Even though this problem, known as Limits to Growth, was first articulated all the way back in 1972, we have thus far been unable to do something about it. With rapid population growth and other macro economic factors at play, our economies have been growing even faster since then. And it extends beyond overconsumption of natural resources and pollution: In the same period of time, people and companies have taken on higher and higher levels of debt and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pay it back. Unless, of course, we retain a healthy level of inflation, which we can only do by means of, well, even faster growing economies.
So are we stuck in a vicious cycle? Not necessarily. The economy of the information age builds on new premises that could show ways to transition to something more sustainable. In his book The Price of Tomorrow, Jeff Booth argues that information technology is showing a new path away from the industrial economy. For example, with multi purpose devices, like the smartphone, we don’t need to buy a map, a GPS, a flashlight, a calculator, a camera, a scanner or whatever else that little supercomputer we all have in our pockets can do. Moreover, with sharing economies, who needs to buy a car when we can just use an app to find and unlock one in the street? And if we absolutely have to go shopping, why not buy some digitally sourced used+repaired things, or some digital goods, like an ebook, an online movie, a Fortnite costume or even some NFTs?
It’s early days but younger generations already show an increased willingness to spend their money like this, thereby also possibly showing us a path out of our current growth trap. Gazing into the future it’s even possible to imagine a world economy that shrinks, while at the same time bringing everyone in it to a better place.
Effective and long-lasting solutions to sustainability problems are not likely to be found within established paradigms. Instead, we should have our most creative minds work on knocking down the walls and helping us escape the root causes of our problems. The starting point is that we train ourselves to see and acknowledge these problems, instead of building something “new” on top of them.
But we shouldn’t expect to see the entire new solution at once. It’s better to start out by playing and experimenting with creative and perhaps a little crazy ideas, and to see where they take us. It is when we combine such innovative expeditions with a trained and sharp intuition to spot established truths, that we set ourselves up to find ways to go deep and create real, lasting change (more on this in Part III).
To understand what real change looks like, we need to take a closer look at the whole spectrum of mechanisms for change. Here, history has many examples of both slow and speedy attempts. In this context, slow would mean a transition that takes decades to centuries to complete, whereas speedy would mean a transition that takes years to decades to complete. In the former category, slow change, we find lots of attempts to implement policies, to create higher awareness and to strengthen our sense of responsibility and morality. There are many examples of how this approach leads to real and important improvements. However, they are either too slow to act as an ultimate solution, or they reduce a problem but fail to eliminate it. I keep coming back to a memory from my early childhood when I for the first time heard about deforestation of the Amazonas: In the news was indigenous Brazilian leader and environmentalist Raoni Metuktire together with superstar musician Sting, talking about how the world’s largest rainforest could turn into a desert unless we did something. That was in 1987, when they established the Rainforest Foundation Fund. While their hard work clearly has contributed to the fight against deforestation, I still wonder how Raoni and Sting would have reacted if someone from today were to time travel back to 1987 and tell them the same problem is on the news in 2022. Obviously, we should be grateful for the work of Raoni and Sting. While they didn’t manage to eliminate the problem, they did make another indispensable contribution: They made the rest of us aware of it. However, their story also demonstrates that in order to create durable change, we need something even more than diligent and heroic activism.
This is where I think it’s useful to study the latter category - speedy change - in a broader context. Instead of looking at how people in the past have worked to solve sustainability challenges specifically, we should instead try to understand how any kind of successful change has been implemented. Moreover, as time is of the essence, we should take the closest look at successful change originally initiated by a band of a few, independent people that had little less than a vision and a strong determination in the beginning. Often, this kind of change is a little harder for us to see in hindsight: Change we want, change that brings us value, doesn’t feel that much like change. It’s rather something that “just happened”, as we usually explain it after it happened. Google. Smartphones. Airbnb. Online banking, dating and entertainment. Social Media (for better or for worse, it’s still an example of fast change). And much more.
Yes, these are also examples of new technologies and products, but if we go deeper we also see new systems and economies that have made enduring changes to how we behave, how we distribute value, how we produce and how we consume.
It might just be the most potent type of impact there is: Long-term paradigm change propelled forward by short term benefits to everyone. And the real kicker: These new paradigms don’t need the traditional economy of scale - to scale. Distributed in nature, they get profitable and strong not by reaching high production volumes, but rather by offering products and user experiences that become more valuable the more people who use them. With this new premise for growth, known as network effects, we could build platforms that also allow for much more diversity and creativity in how we connect, collaborate and do business. When we discuss how to build a better future, we should include such inherently scalable ideas: We should find innovations that make a positive impact on the environment, the planet and the future of mankind, while at the same time making everyone enjoy the ride, right from the start.
Going after industrial giants sounds audacious. But we have to remember that all the new technologies and opportunities that emerge all the time are giving significant tailwind to anyone who dears to give it a try. New companies have a tremendous advantage when it comes to embracing and taking advantage of new trends. They have no inheritance, few obligations and not a lot to lose. The giants face the inverse risk profile: They have too much inheritance, too many obligations and a whole lot to lose. It makes them slow, risk averse and fatally hesitant. Just think about the companies and industries that have either disappeared or have been massively transformed just in the last couple of decades. Whatever happened to once superior market leaders like Kodak and Nokia, or the media industry, the car industry, the entertainment industry and more? These stories of massive change show time after time how the seemingly insignificant little startup ultimately brings down invincible giants (or turn them into underdogs of new regimes). We live in the age of disruption, and it’s time we turn it into our advantage also when we’re out to solve sustainability problems.
If you follow the reasoning this far, the next question to ask is how we best can support innovators in pursuit of deep change: Are our current ways of thinking and working ready to develop and support such innovators? Are we selecting the right people for the job? Are we educating and training them the right way? Are we doing enough to help them get started and get going?
In Part III (to be published) we discuss how we can build organisations that help deep thinkers and playful visionaries innovate to the best of their abilities.