News and Ideas

Innovation through placing a bet and doing multiple experiments

Innovation through placing a bet and doing multiple experiments

“The whole idea is this: if you really want to be innovative, you have to experiment. If you know the outcome of what you’re going to do, it’s not an experiment. It’s more like a demonstration.”

Amazon’s vice president for global innovation policy and communications, Paul Misener

Introducing this kind of approach to innovation into most organisations takes a fair bit of courage, a shift in mindset about causality and the exercise of a range of somewhat different skills and capabilities.

Adaptive Action and Schroedinger’s Cat

Adaptive Action and Schroedinger’s Cat

Two articles particularly caught my eye this week. Both are well worth a read. The first, by Lisa Gill, begins by quoting Margaret Wheatley who suggests that: “I realised I had been living in a Schroedinger’s cat world in every organisation I had ever been in. Each of these organisations had myriad boxes, drawn in endess …

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“Feelings of tendency”

“Feelings of tendency”

This is taken from William James “Stream of Thought” chapter. In it he argues that we have often ignored the “transitive” parts of the the stream of our thing and placed undue emphasis on the “substantive” parts. By doing so, he suggests, we have tended to confuse ” …the thoughts themselves … and the things …

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Words in their speaking

Words in their speaking

We don’t just use words and language to name and describe things. More often than not our words are designed to do things: to direct; to evoke; to command; to unsettle and to pacify or calm – and much more!. As obvious as this may seem, and as central as it is to how we …

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