The Dance of Risk

RISK IS BEAUTIFUL. It’s to be embraced, then danced with – intelligently and creatively. Risk needs to be reclaimed. The thoughtful dance with risk is what separates the modern from the pre-modern era. It is a mindset that was simply unavailable to most people who have ever lived. And its honorable application has given us a quality of life unimaginable to the supermajority of our ancestors.

We need to engage Risk…while we can’t force the outcome (then it wouldn’t be Risk, would it?), neither are we inert, passive actors. We can significantly increase the odds of getting the results we want. At its most basic, isn’t that what we get paid for? Isn’t that the deal we’ve signed up for?

A horrible macroeconomic meltdown came from a criminal distortion of risk – letting the risk takers have all the upside of the obviously irresponsible risk they took, then socializing all the downside. Truly unforgiveable. And obviously, bulls%^t. If we let the kleptoterrorists redefine risk as the lie that they perpetrated, they will have won. They’re already getting away/got away with too much. We cannot let them get away with robbing us of our birthright as people who have benefitted from the enthusiastic engagement of risk.

I wanna dance with the one what brung me.

Hunch

I am becoming increasingly enamored of, and chastised, haunted and just plain bothered by this word.  Back to the etymology and we get a bit of a murky provenance (isn’t that perfect?…you continue to blow my mind, Hunch!) that looks something like this:

originally (1581) a verb, “to push, thrust,” of unknown origin. Meaning “raise or bend into a hump” is 1598, in hunchbacked. Perhaps a variant of bunch. Figurative sense of “hint, tip” (a “push” toward a solution or answer), first recorded 1849, led to that of “premonition, presentiment” (1904). (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hunch)

With Hunch, we’re not solving anything yet, just pushing some things together to create a rough, lumpy form.  Any bystander sees an amorphous blob, but we, as the hunch-formers, benefit from seeing the movement as this malformed, Quasimodo (literally, “half-made”…is that cool or what?) of an idea emerges from previous nada, and feeling the first stirrings of “what can be” as they send a dopamine cocktail to us with a cool mint sprig in it.

We innovation fankids need to step this up. More musing!  More foolish wondering!  More kicking things around, in crude, malformed ways!  Banish the premature fixation about being right!  Let’s have a lot more “be,” period!

As innovationistas, our task is to create options.  Tom Hustad, founding editor of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and a PDMA Crawford Fellow of Innovation (also, to my great fortune, my friend, mentor and teacher in my days at IU) gave a moving speech at PDMA’s International Conference in Santa Clara, CA one month after 9-11, where he contrasted the limiting, option- and life-destroying worldview that had just wreaked such horrific havoc with the noble effort of innovation.  Some key points from this (my takeaway) – innovation creates options.  Innovation opens opportunity.  It’s not just about a bunch of new products – it’s about more choice, more opportunity.  It’s about being part of the arc of human effort toward the ideal.  It’s honest work.  It’s deeply human work. It is noble. It is vital.  It is needed.

And it all begins with a hunch.

Innovationfanboy Hall of Fame Inductee #1

The Innovationfanboy Hall of Fame is an opportunity to recognize some of the folks who have played important roles in the formation of the Innovationfanboy perspective.  While I take full responsibility for whatever misapplications of thought I have made from these influences, I want to honor what has been some important insight for me – ideas that have excited me and helped make me the raging, inexorable thunderlizard* innovation fanboy that I am. I will never be able to thank these folks sufficiently.

Inductee # 1.  The envelope, please.

Edward de Bono

Per Wikipedia (so we know it’s bulletproof), “Edward de Bono (born May 19, 1933, in Malta) is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He is best known as the originator of the term lateral thinking and a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.”

My first flirtations with innovation and creativity as process/system came from reading deBono.  I found the following two deBonan (?) ideas about ideas exciting, and, more importantly, really helpful in my own thinking:

• Forced associations/random provocation. This is a great riff on Einstein’s “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” Ah, the power of relating the previously unrelated to create new conceptual space.  By stretching beyond the expected, the linear, first-tier adjacent/similar areas to go to random/wild/forced associations, we pull ourselves out of perceptual ruts.  For example, if we were working on compelling new sink ideas, where do we go if we collide “sink” with “luxury furs?”  ”Fur sink” opens up completely new sink territory for me such as soft sink, sinks with much richer tactile experiences, sinks that integrate other parts of the washing process such as washrag/benefits such as scrubability, etc.  Each of these spaces is fresh and unexpected, and I need not continue now with “fur sink” and can play with those areas as starting points now, which leads me to…

• Ideas as vehicle v. destination. A certain degree of cognitive nimbleness can be really helpful.  deBono talks about using ideas, particularly the crazier ideas,  for their “movement” power rather than simply judging them per se.  Where the idea takes you is at least as important as the merits of the idea itself.  Look at ideas as means first, and perhaps later as ends in themselves. A provocative idea sets the stage for you to generate another seven, eight or 40, because it opens degrees of freedom that previous assumptions (particularly unconscious assumptions) had nailed safely shut.

Dr. deBono, we are unlikely to meet, but I owe you a solid (or 200).  Thank you for ideas that drew me to the path.  Thanks for the ideas that pack the killer combination of conceptual excitement and immediately pragmatic payout. Thank you, thank you.

*The cat that this term comes from will be recognized later on.