Trust Your Audience
My head is still buzzing with all the stories from this week’s Collaborative Innovation Summit, BIF-5. The cliché, like a kid in a candy story, doesn’t seem to do the experience justice. Two days of total immersion in bone jarring, compelling, and personal stories of innovation. The stories were so wonderfully eclectic as to defy any attempt at grouping them in convenient buckets. The emotive storytellers were daring us to hone our pattern recognition and sense making skills.
Fortunately the 300 participants at BIF-5 were all wired the same way, we are all innovators. The magical Trinity Rep theatre was jammed with innovators who share a belief that there is always a better way. The room was overflowing with a collective self-awareness that we are always missing something and an obsession for discovery, making us open to exploring the gray areas between our silos, disciplines, and organizational boundaries.
Our culture media was a perfect mix of rapid-fire provocative storytellers, the dissonance of seemingly unrelated innovation stories, and knowing we were among fellow innovators sharing a common quest. The environment was an ideal communal petri dish in which to grow connections and insights. Incubation was spontaneous and palpable. It was as if there were chemi-luminescent tags lighting a synaptic path networking us together. It was an electric feeling of potential and possibilities. It was remarkable, exhilarating, and exhausting.
It was all made possible by trusting the audience to determine for themselves what patterns are relevant, what connections valuable, which stories most energizing. Seems so basic, yet it is our nature to be prescriptive, to tell people what they are supposed to get out of an event, what conclusions they are supposed to reach, who they should be collaborating with, and what they should be working on. Nonsense. That is so limiting and boring. If you trust the audience to create the insights and connections that make sense to them and provide an environment that is conducive to connecting the unusual suspects and ideas the magic will happen.
Magic happens at each BIF summit and I look forward to it every year. This year was no exception. Patterns are already starting to emerge as I listened to the conversations during the event and begin to read and hear the after summit conversations. I am excited to dig deeper into the ideas already emerging including the vulnerability of innovators, role of play in the learning and innovation process, convergence of social and business innovation, putting design thinking and process to work, self organization and free agents, redefining wellness, going from doing to knowing instead of from knowing to doing, and transforming education just to name a few.
I trust the audience and the growing BIF community of innovators to come up with a better list, your own list, which I hope you will share with us. It is time for mobilizing purposeful networks and to put all of these ideas to work in the real world solving real problems. To borrow the words of my friend and BIF-5 storyteller Alan Webber, talking about it is not the same as doing it. I am grateful for the opportunity to be around so many inspiring innovators. Batteries recharged thanks to all that made BIF-5 a great success. Let’s go.
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“Patterns are already starting to emerge as I listened to the conversations during the event and begin to read and hear the after summit conversations.”
Actually, what was beautiful to see (which I haven’t seen at other conferences, though I have seen at dinner parties) was that the patterns began emerging in the stories themselves. Storytellers raised themes that would meander through the twitterverse, only to be re-surfaced and re-fried by other storytellers. Eva Gardner and testicles are notable examples, but certainly there were others.
With regards to my own ‘list’ of patterns, much of what I encountered was not very new, which I interpret to mean that I spent two days luxuriously surrounded by folks who are riding the crest of this wave of collective consciousness with me. So Lovely. That said, two thoughts at the intersection of Neri Oxman x other storytellers:
1) Neri Oxman x Roger Martin and Len Schesinger: what would it mean to apply ecological principles to the design of businesses and business education? I don’t mean eco-business, i.e. business that’s environmentally sustainable, but business that, to use Neri’s example, integrates multiple functions seamlessly and therefore performs them simultaneously. What would it mean to create conditions conducive to the evolution of non-jargon spewing economic vandals? And since the theme of creative destruction emerged in the twitterverse, specifically regarding the question of whether crisis is necessary for transformative change, what can be learned from designed change in natural systems, as with agroforestry? In agroforestry, there are multiple phases of plant succession, and some and more lucrative than others (later diverse phases have cash-ier crops than earlier shrub-dominated ones). So that farmers don’t experience a ‘crisis’ each time they have to ‘creatively destroy’ a later phase into an earlier phase, they keep different plots in different phases of succession, and therefore are always ensured a hedged source of income. Can this practice somehow speak to engaging in creative destruction in the business arena?
2) Neri Oxman x Natalie Jeremijenko: Neri proposed that nature and information are becoming one. My thinking is that nature’s information channels have been evolving and refining themselves for a long time; the soil bacteria communicate information with the mycelia communicate information with the tree roots communicate information with the tree leaves communicate information with the birds etcetera etcetera etcetera. So imho it’s not necessarily that nature and information are becoming one, but that we humans (finally! and as with many who came before us…) are joining the conversation. Which Natalie is doing with urban critters in some adorable ways - joining the conversation with tadpoles and fishes and birds.
Oy ve. Clearly it’s time to stop squatting in your comment section and write a blog post of my own. Forthcoming. But in the meantime, infinite thanks for creating conditions conducive to such brilliant cross-pollination.