Bloggtoons

To understand a system you need the stories in the system, it is these stories that makes it possible for us to navigate in the system, may it be the company you are working in, the community you are in or your own family, any system that we are interacting within. The stories are what makes us understand and feel the culture of the system. But what happens when we encounter stories that is not longer valid, maybe they are so old that it is not possible to understand them anymore, we lost the context of where they where created.

Here is an old Swedish story from Österlen in Skåne, first in Swedish and then an attempt on translating:

“De fostras upp i kobläddor och är en halv näve långa, de är röda och i ena änden är det ett kattahuve och i andra ett hungahuve. Blir man biden av en sån så dör man, såna har jag slagit ihjäl många.”

“They are raised in cowpat and are half a fist long, they are red and at one end it is a cat head and at the other a scoundrels head. If you are bitten by someone like that, you die, I have killed many.”

For most of us this is not easy to decipher and understand. We do not have the context nor the vocabulary needed and this is the case in all systems. Stories that are alive and valid change to make the point that they are supposed to but sometimes they freeze. What was once true and important turns stale and becomes an invalid old truth. But that doesn’t mean that they are buried and forgotten, they can still live there in a zombie like state affecting and blocking the system. I guess most of you have heard a story that starts or ends like this “we have already tried that….”. What is needed is the will to understand, question and change. A god way of doing that is to use the pattern from Sociocracy 3.0 called Navigate via tension. In brief it is a way to make use of tensions in order to understand and to modify the system bit by bit so that it eventually fit better to the need and purpose of those within the system.

Communication and specialization

Why are we acting as if we are waiting for the goods of innovation to hit us with an idea in the head and until we feel the the pain of the hit we make sure to keep ourselves busy, ticking off items in an ever growing backlog. Innovation does not suddenly appear we must expose ourselves and seek out innovation, it is a discovery process. There are two major lines of innovation, the first line is called incremental innovation, it is the kind of innovation you see played out on the savanna when the gasell, through natural selection evolves to gets faster so that it can avoid the cheetah and the cheetah, in turn, evolves to run faster in order to catch the gasell and so it continues, in biology this is called evolution.

The second one is different, sometimes things happens that was not intended or known, something that originally had a different purpose gets a new unintended use that totally changes the future. In evolutionary terms this is called exaptation, a common example of this is the feathers of birds that from the beginning was a way for the dinosaurs to regulate body heating but later evolved for flight and the beginning birds. There are many cases exaptation or radical repurposing through the history of human innovation, from the discovery of gunpowder originally develop to find the elixir of life then repurposed into fireworks and then again repurposed as a way to propel small metall pieces in a barel to make an effective and revolutionary way to kill people, or a more modern example in todays viagra, originally developed for cardiovascular problems that was later repurposed because it had a surprising side effect.

These two different lines of innovation both needs time and attention to be discovered but for radical repurposing we also need to have a way of seeing things in new perspectives, being interested and open to other peoples perspectives and inputs. Steve Jobs did not like the idea of the iPhone it id not fit in his idea of what Apple was about but the people he surrounded himself with was allowed to influence and give new perspectives to him and eventually he was convinced. So if you are a decision maker or a person with a different perspective be open and helpful, listen with an open heart or you might miss out on a great new ride.

“I do not know anything about luck, but the more I practice the more luck I seem to have.” - Ingmar Stenmark one of the greatest slalom and giant slalom specialist of all time.

Links:

• Reinvention - Ted Radio Hour
• The evolution of ideas
• Jumpstarting creativity - Ted Radio Hour