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[In case you’re wondering what you’ve stumbled into, this is one chapter from the
book and blog about The Economist's 'Project Red Stripe' innovation programme.]
One of the many tensions (and I mean tension in a Newton's 3rd Law kind of way)
apparent in Project Red Stripe related to direction-finding, goals, intentions and
wandering around.
With its very broad remit, Project Red Stripe gave its
members enormous scope for 'wandering about' and
looking for, or waiting for, inspiration. Now, of course,
this is in the very nature of an innovation team and
one of the primary characteristics that distinguishes
it from a more goal-oriented project team. Yet, this
innovation team had a very clear sense of having a
goal: 'creating an innovative and web-based product,
service or business model'. It just didn't yet know what the goal looked like. Its
task was to locate the goal and then get there.
This set up tensions from the outset. There was a feeling amongst the team at
different times that they were wasting time. Against this was the clear sense that
the team ought to take its time in identifying the right idea - because there was
surely no point in spending six months writing business and marketing plans,
developing websites and other infrastructure, working with partners and
commercialising the idea, if they hadn't chosen the right one in the first place.
Drifting
All of this 'over-determination' in the city or in the zoo makes it hard to 'just
drift'.
Some of these same rules come into play in an innovation project. The team
members have their own expectations and associations, have their own
experience of groups, reactions to rules and authority, working preferences and
so on. They will also tend, such being our habit in this country and at this time,
to look for some rules and guidelines, to establish where the power and the
authority lies, to set down - if there aren't any already in place - codes of conduct,
attendance times and working policies.
Inevitably, this sought-after regimentation can be at odds with the 'right to roam',
which is the passport of the innovative and inventive mind. Just as drifting
largely dispenses with maps and destinations and attempts to journey without
intention (what Walter Benjamin - quoted here - has called 'the rhythmics of...
slumber'), so we can suppose that innovation might attempt to dispense with as
many limiting conventions as possible, in order to facilitate the emergence of
ideas. Though creating a regime within which regimentation is discouraged is
itself paradoxical.
Panic
That may sound ridiculously grand. I'm sure none of the members of the team felt
they were experiencing existential angst. But there was a sense of panic at times,
when the team realised that they could do anything, but that they only had six
months to do it. And I also connect that panic with their need to find the 'big
idea', the becoming-whale-of-an-idea.
Movement artist Sandra Reeve says much the same when discussing action
preceding intention:
In Move into Life practice, I often start from movement tasks or moving with no
fixed intention in a natural environment and allow associations, feelings,
images and ultimately meaning to emerge from a constantly shifting context.
Sometimes I introduce a theme, in order to guide the direction of my creative
response... This corresponds with Gibson's theory of affordances: that is, how
we pick up information appropriate to our needs directly from the
environment.
[Incidentally, I like these words of Borges: 'la inminencia de una revelación, que
no se produce' (the imminence of a revelation that does not take place). They
seem to me to characterise much of the early part of Project Red Stripe's existence
and, perhaps, that of many other such innovation projects].
Weaving
Dilemmas:
Drifting 'aimlessly' can be a profoundly creative process, but it's also anxiety-
inducing. Participants (and Finance Directors) may want something more
regimented. Rules and guidelines can offer direction or serve as blinkers.
It's vitally important to ensure that you've picked the right idea before embarking
on commercialising it. But equally important to know when to stop looking for the
right idea and accept that the one you have is good enough.
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