I was MC for the tech stage at the Fifteen Seconds Festival in Graz, Austria. My friend Greg Satell joined me on stage and wrapped his change framework around the compelling question: “How Can We Save The World From AI.”
Hire For Neurosignature Train For Skill. In a changing workplace, rather than hiring solely based on skill, we might consider a candidate’s neurosignature. Each neurosignature brings unique strengths to the table. Hiring for neurosignature and training for skill might lead to higher workplace happiness, higher revenue and lower employee turnover.
Incremental innovation remains a critical component for organisations. However, when an organisation only rewards incremental endeavours (recognition, remuneration and promotion), why would anybody want to risk their career with transformational effort? Give the customer a 12-blade razor, a chai-latte-flavoured soda or a 6G Origami phone. By all means, be a fast-moving caterpillar-cake copycat, but invest some of the profits from the incremental present into the transformational future. Don’t use the future to fuel your present.
Helen Edwards book, “Marginal to Mainstream” shows why businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs need to break free from their ‘mainstream inhibition’ and turn their attention to the margins – to confront, evaluate and embrace the ‘strangeness’ of behaviours, ideas and ways of life at the fringes.
Friction s an often-overlooked aspect of innovation and new product development. The following stories illustrate the importance of empathy, jobs-to-be-done research and understanding the balance of friction and progress.
David Cutler’s “The GAME of Innovation” book, shares a flexible methodology for designing powerhouse innovation GAMEs (Guidelines, Arena, Materials, Experience), Aligning teams with five problem-solving “lenses.
The Aboriginal tradition of “Right Way Fire” involves the controlled use of fire to maintain and restore ecosystems. Strategic small-scale slow burns in targeted areas during the early dry season minimise the risks of uncontrollable wildfires in the dry season. This practice is deeply rooted in the understanding that mindfully clearing away the old and stagnant creates space for new growth and vitality. This collective ancestral wisdom, long ignored, is now changing practices across several countries with similar savannah grasslands.)
“Tenant farmers don’t pick up rocks.” Just as tenant farmers, who have short-term leases on the land they cultivate, lack the incentive to invest in long-term improvements like clearing the fields of rocks, some leaders with increasingly short tenures hesitate to make crucial investments in the future of their organisations. Rather than focus on initiatives that require time and resources to bear fruit, they often shutter them, earn a bonus on their efforts, and are out the gate before the lack of seedcorn becomes apparent. Consequently, the organisation becomes stuck in a cycle of short-term gains, missing out on the long-term benefits that arise from seedcorn investments and productivity programmes akin to picking up rocks.
To successfully navigate the new world, we must humbly accept; that we don’t know what we don’t know. Like the mapmakers of the past, we must accept that accepting ignorance had to come before embracing knowledge. In the business world, this means a departure from the world of a five-year plan (map) in favour of the uncertain harbour of a five-year direction, where an organisational North Star serves as a magnetic force. This new mental map leaves enough room for uncertainty, deviation and exploration, just like the Ribeiro map.
The Seneca Effect, also known as the Seneca Cliff or Seneca Collapse, is a concept named after the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The effect is based on Seneca’s quote, “Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid.” He observed that many things in nature, including human affairs, systems and civilisations, tend to decline much more rapidly than they ascend.