Jargogled Impressions.

I see this all the time. Companies with a few decades under their belt struggling to make sense of innovation and how to transcend the inertia that comes with size.

It’s not just spend and budgetary constraints around trying out something new, but also a mindset towards change that inhibits progress on inside-out innovation.

Company ethos built around constant change (Amazon Day One) is interesting but is geared around a specific type of company and we may well see hurdles appear when we move beyond the current wave of innovation in the digital realm. There’s a temporality with innovation that is hard to predict and prepare an organization towards.

Some companies indeed journey over this horizon and stay abreast of the sea of changes they navigate around. But the exceptions prove the rule..

I like thinking of organizations as super-organisms. Evolution is in the DNA of living things, and organizations may not be much different. Organization is a species with their own set of evolutionary parameters, and the fittest indeed survive, at least for a while. What can organizations – which have been in existence less than a few centuries – learn from natural organisms with ancient heritages and ways of working to survive?

Termites, ants, mole rats, fungi, and honeybees trace a long arc of evolutionary history since thousands of years. They organize themselves minus hierarchy and top-down 5-year plans to nurture themselves, survive, and thrive as much as they can. They embody ‘leading from the edge’ through their armies of volunteers constantly shaping their environments, responding to internal/external threats, collaborating at the extreme, and constantly active at maintaining a lead over the evolutionary threats they face. Heck they have survived far longer than humans even.

What this tells me is, that unless you emphasize on providing power to the legions of your workers, your employees, and your battalion of suppliers – you will be hard pressed to match pace with the tremors of the business world. Technologies are but merely tools that help organizations be the ones who can be quick to respond to changes and they have been used that way thus far. But putting technology to work on transferring power, incentive, and the excitement to the edge, to the grass-roots, to the folks at the front-line of attack can be the ultimate objective of technology. It’s commandment or the holy grail.

Innovation is multi-faceted. It’s different from invention or from technological experimentation. It’s when the rubber hits the road that you can really test the mettle of your innovation capabilities. It’s hard, especially when you rely too much on your brain and fail to listen to what your body is telling you. Much like organisms.