William is my dog. By all customary and conventional measures, Willy is not a nice dog. He is not a dog you would encourage your children to entertain. But I love him. Willy is a sad, mad dog because he cannot forget the abuses of his early doghood before his rescue.
We, like our dogs, are creatures of habit. Up to a certain degree, we nonetheless learn new tricks. Now, Willy, whose nipping victims run into double digits, has no Kaizen ambitions. But the rest of us want to learn and grow, pursue our personal and professional program of continuous improvement, even “reinvention.” Industries and organizations also develop habits, biases and precious assumptions. We talk a good deal about reinvention, but breaking up with habits is hard to do.
And here is the conundrum. Large transformational endeavors, building new and different capabilities for emergent challenges, investing in expansive skill-sets are vital but learning is always easier than forgetting. As de Toqueville lamented for the post- revolution French aristocrats “Ils n’ont rien appris de rien oublier.” They have learnt nothing because they have forgotten nothing. He implies, and surely this is also true of organizational behavior, that what you decide to relinquish and jettison can be more vital to learning and reinvention than what you try to embed as new practice.
Every Sunday, I walk my dogs in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West. We make our familiar circuit. The parallel of strategy and budget cycles in large organizations springs to mind. There’s some unpredictability. At what point in the process will one be called upon to perform the scoop, conceal and dispose ritual. The corporate analogy abides.
It was a light-winded lucid September morning. I decided to take the road less traveled. Prospect Park is the sibling of Manhattan’s Central Park and married less well. The Manhattan match, despite difficult patches, has been more generous than the Brooklyn liaison. Prospect Park offers up her memories in dilapidated corners and dejected masonry. But we love her. So I broke my habit, to momentary canine confusion, and wandered into a quiet lakeside trail. I was thinking of Emerson, although this was no Walden Pond, of de Tocqueville, although this was no Grand Tour, and of what to make for lunch – although I rarely cook on Sundays, I like to live the fantasy. “My gift of fantasy” Einstein asserted, was more valuable than intellect. Disingenuous or not, the recognition that “genius” is sparked at the intersection of imagination and intellect is increasingly relevant to corporations seeking to innovate.
At a more prosaic intersection Willy (a.k.a. “Satan’s puppy”) slipped his leash. Now I’m thinking of the nip-vulnerable ankles of unsuspecting birdwatchers. Since William is about 170 in human years, the sprint was bursty and brief. This is when we came upon it. Ambergill: “The Lost and Found Fountain.”
The funny thing about people is our tenacious adherence to the creed of knowledge. The funny thing about organizations is their tenacious adherence to the creed of experience. We are what we know and we are the sum of what we’ve done. These conventions hold that future action and capacity can be extrapolated from this instant summation of the person. This is a seemingly irresistible thesis and encouraging in its confidence that tomorrow will be just like today; that tomorrow’s business, social, political, cultural needs can be met by yesterday’s experts. You would have to be barking mad to buy that.
Numerous surveys whose responses are inevitably imbued with the gravitas and authority of the surveyor: McKinsey, Booz Allen, The Economist etc. (that not even remotely, motley crew) exhort us consistently to innovate, to jettison received opinion, to question and create (to slip our leash). Change has changed in velocity and scale. So too must we, or we’ll be left behind. We can avail ourselves of processes to smooth the transition. The sticking point is that ex ante crisis, few businesses and even fewer successful people perceive their “core competence” as bathwater rather than baby. Faced with corporate infanticide, best to puncture the tub so the assumptions and practices of others can seep incrementally away without danger to our baby. Hell, Sartre may have concluded, had he ever had a “real” job, is other people’s habits.
My first question in assessing the innovation ambitions of any business is always “What would you never change?” This is as economic as existential as diagnoses get.
Having caught up with the capricious canine, I paused. Pausing is underrated as an action. I recommend it. I read the story on the Prospect Park Alliance guide. Ambergill was lost, literally. The waterfall had been swallowed up in the overgrowth and had disappeared for decades until its very existence was forgotten.
Imagining that which does not yet exist is the creative gymnastic that catapults innovation. When Frederick Law Olmstead, possibly the innovator of landscape architecture, and Calvert Vaux conceived and designed Prospect Park following their landmark creation Manhattan’s Central Park, the traces of the Civil War battles had not yet disappeared.
Men and boys died on the rocks and soil where this then suburban nature-scape would be. Envisioning a park out of a battlefield epitomizes transformational change.
A (civil) army of immigrant workers would hand- dig the expanse of lake, little imagining that a century after them this exquisite man-made sanctuary would be the hub of a jogging loop and that spitting, swearing men in Lycra on titanium bikes would hurtle past both battle memorials and botanical beauty unaware.
The architects did not imagine themselves in the business of transience. Projects of such ambition and scale went from good to great. A celebration of a high-growth, vibrant economy. Absorbed with our currently successful core businesses, we rarely anticipate stagnation and irrelevance. The architects could not have envisioned that urban decline and financial strife would cause Ambergill to be taken back by nature and quietly disappear.
Great design and bold intent (and the conflation of the two) do not expect obsolescence and evaporation. These are built to last. Alpha leaders of any pack must exude confidence in continuity. But the tendrils of change insinuate their way in, at first subtly, then more aggressively until it is too late. We just don’t see it coming.
William was retrieved quickly, this time. Ambergill slowly. The important feature of Ambergill’s rediscovery is that it was an accident, a lucky coincidence of another investigation. If we keep open to accident and re-discovery, we can actually systematically find new insights from apparently unrelated sources. Just because the fountain was not new does not mean its recovery was not discovery. There is innovation inside the box, if we probe and question.
That is the innovator’s, designer’s, searcher’s, investigator’s business. We form unlikely and improbable relationships with bad ideas; then forge a powerful idea from that union. We create synthetic patterns and then step outside of them, exploring another track. We get lost and see what that experience reveals. We let go of what we know in favor or what we might discover. We never cease to be surprised.
The.American.Word. 