The Story Behind Spark
I was recently in Kenya with my family when I had an experience that made me rethink the mechanics of innovation. We were on safari in a game reserve called Lewa Downs. One evening, we watched three cheetahs hunting. Cheetahs are beautiful, sleek animals; at 75 to 120 pounds, they are small by African cat standards. They are quite ferocious, typically solitary animals that are able to run 70 miles an hour to catch their prey. When hunting, they are dependent on these great bursts of speed.
Yet the energy required to run this fast can sometimes overwhelm them, causing them to require several hours of rest to regain enough energy to hunt again. This energy expenditure, coupled with their timid nature among other animals, often causes cheetahs to leave a kill if a lion or hyena challenges them. The three cheetahs we saw hunting together looked unusual compared to other cheetahs we had observed.
It seems that these three young cheetahs, all brothers, had formed an alliance. Not only did they still live together at the age of 5, but they hunted together, as well. This organized effort of hunting gave the brothers a great advantage. First, they could hunt while expending much less energy, using tactics that incorporated all of their skills. Second, no lion or hyena was going to mess with them when they had made a kill. Hence, they also ate more than the average cheetah, by forming an alliance and being innovative.
As a result, these three cheetahs looked more like leopards and weighed fifty percent more than the average cheetah. These brothers had figured out intuitively that if they shared the responsibility of hunting, they would have a better chance of surviving and thriving on the African plains.
In observing them, I realized that innovation is not something that is exclusive to business, but is important to every living thing as it tries to adapt to a changing environment and survive. Often by forming an alliance or community around a challenge and by co-creating a solution with others, the opportunity to be successful increases dramatically.
The drive to be more innovative has been hoisted onto the shoulders of all companies because, in fact, everyone is affected by broader innovations such as the Internet and information technology. This has created a hyper-competitive marketplace, where the linear work processes of the industrial age are being replaced by the non-linear paradigm of the information age. Hence, just like the cheetahs, being innovative is not an option; it is imperative to survive in our radically changing world.
As humans, we are all innovative by nature. We have the innate ability to adapt to our ever-changing environment. Unfortunately, much like intuition, our ability to innovate has diminished as we have learned to adapt to the more linear needs of our modern culture. Likewise at work, our ability to be innovative has been slowly stripped away replaced, instead, by mechanics of the modern work environment and the need to get things done in a timely and predictable fashion.
To be innovative, we must capture the sense of wonder and possibility we all had as children. We must unlearn many of the more linear processes that inhibit our ability and flexibility to be more creative and innovative.
But in the context of work, what does innovation really mean? I’ve always liked Peter Drucker’s take on innovation, “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” Today, companies must strive to be more entrepreneurial, moving faster to survive and thrive.
