Last week, I was permitted to attend a very special conference. It was the LEADERSHIP FOR INNOVATION, supported by the Peter Pribilla Foundation. It was about VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE. The event was in Munich, at TUM, or – to be precise -, at IAS on the Campus Garching between April, 25th and April, 26th, 2013.
Even the fact that it was a rather conventional conference did not do any harm. There were quite a few rather “innovative” sessions. Being one of the first-timers, I quickly realized that it was mainly about “meeting” – in the environment of an important network and with the right kinds of people.
Quite logically, the highlight of those two days was the evening event “Network Convention 2013″ on Friday honouring Herrn Prof. Reichswald, who had celebrated his seventieth birthday in April, 1st, 2013. And during this event at the Seehaus in the Englischer Garten, everything was “Boundless Interaction” in the truest sense of the word.
During those two days, I talked with quite a few people about highly exciting things. There were so many new ideas raining in on me that the first thing I had to do was mentally process all the input. Here are a few personal thoughts after my first round of digestion.
DOMINANT LOGIC
It seems to be one of the main problems of our species, both in professional and private life, that we always want to solve challenges with “dominant logic”. However, “real life” is always part of the evolutionary process and said evolutionary process is all but “domineering and logical”. Today, innovation is our attempt at influencing evolution to our advantage.
To me, it seems that this is one of the central tasks of entrepreneurial behaviour: to influence the evolution every enterprise will experience anyway while undergoing the evolutionary “aging process” in such a way that its negative consequences are at least balanced by the positive “innovative change”.
And that is something you cannot do with ratio or logic. You cannot explain the ineffectiveness of dominant logic by dominant logic. All you can do is explain it with experience and wisdom gained from life. Consequently, entrepreneurs will have to live in the “now” and find out what is good and bad for the enterprise, before they hopefully come up with more “right” decisions than wrong ones.
If you deduce decisions with dominant logic from common rules, you will fail. You will end up with many wrong decisions, some of them with profound negative consequences. That is what experience shows us. In order to find more correct decisions in the innovative sense, your criteria for deciding must be based on culture and values.
Examples for absolutely common (and in my understanding detrimental) business rules are: “growth is a must”, “we have to be number one world-wide in our business sector” or “increased shareholder value is the one and only goal of the enterprise”. These are platitudes with no conceptual background, but not rational sources for behavioural incentives.
Here are a few examples for useful cultural rules: “The Golden Rule“ (Die goldene Regel), “human beings are not resources”, “creativity needs fear-free areas”, “successful communication calls for meeting at eye-level”, “generating knowledge creates new knowledge”, “leadership means respect for others”, “consideration and civil courage are the most important virtues”…
The application of these and similar rules will generate more correct decisions in the sense of a sustainable and consequently innovative enterprise development that is mindful of resources. After all, an enterprise, too, is just a social system with a business purpose.
And if management truly wants a sustainable development, the enterprise will have to live by these cultural rules when making decisions. The process may (and must) well be based on ratio and common sense. Because, ethics, too, has a lot to do with ratio – otherwise it can easily cause wrong dogmata. Mind you, even if we stick by that rule, we will not be able to avoid evolution, but maybe we can influence it a little bit to our advantage by applying innovation.
Business leaders often try to learn from mistakes and transfer what they learned into the future. This is also an area where I suspect it will not work if the basis is “dominant logic”. Because dominant logic will always fail when it comes to humans and their social systems.
I am often tempted to prove these theses by using “dominant logic”. Naturally, this cannot be done. After all, what makes evolution so sensational is the fact that it cannot be rationally explained. Instead, it is free of purpose – thus having nothing to do with “dominant logic”. It is not about survival of the fittest“ and perhaps not a “huge, collaborative process”, either. Innovation will always depend on the stream of evolution. We humans alone are bold enough to try and modify evolution through ratio and logic innovatively. But in order to do so, we need “evolutionary knowledge” that can NOT be projected on spread-sheets.
Well – and then there is this other, for me central, characteristic:
OPEN
We will never create evolutionary knowledge without being “OPEN”! We have to share our knowledge and our experience. With as many other persons as possible. Without any reservations and at eye-level. It is the only way to generate positive innovation as a modification of evolution in order to improve matters both in our enterprises and on this our only world. And this will never be done by one person alone. It will have to be a cooperation of many who will often play totally different roles.
Otherwise, evolution will waste no time in extinguishing us humans from this our planet. To be sure, in the cosmic dimension of things, it would not be much of a loss, but still: wouldn’t it be a pity?
To put it plainly: you cannot see what is invisible, can you? This is especially true for an individual being. But perhaps we can augur it, like in feel it?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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