What’s the blueprint for innovation? Take a lesson from evolution
You can boost your innovation culture by mimicking the solution that evolution found to make sure that we thrive in the face of constant change. People are either great explorers, with a low resistance to trying out something new, or exploiters, making the most of every opportunity. These skillsets need different brain settings, and it doesn’t work to squeeze them into the same person.
Researchers looking for some of the character traits that make people successful at exploring find that they are the very same traits associated with ADHD. People with dyslexia, autism and other neurodiversities, as well as neurotypical team members, bring other specializations to the table. If you combine all these specializations together and provide an environment where everyone can thrive, your innovation will be best-in-class.
Moral of the story? Make sure your organization is attractive to both explorers and exploiters, so you have a load of great ideas and also the skills to implement them. The quickest and most sustainable way to do this is to build a culture that makes sure everyone can do what they do best.
Let me know if you’d like an informal chat about the benefits available to your innovation culture and how we could release them.
Three key takeaways
- Innovation is about stepping into the unknown. We excel at adapting to the unfamiliar — it’s why humans are still on the planet, so looking at how evolution solved innovation is a winning strategy. That strategy balances the behaviors of exploration and exploitation. Explorers have a low resistance to change and think about problems in unusual ways. Exploiters are good at making the most of every opportunity by evidence-based planning. People specialize in one mode; humanity has thrived by pooling all these skills in a social group.
- Researchers have uncovered the traits of good explorers. The people who achieved the highest scores in a virtual game to collect the most berries from patches of bushes were the ones who were more likely to move to the next patch before the berries in front of them ran out. Another study showed that some children, whose searches gave just as good and sometimes better results than others, used more meandering searching strategies that were more likely to reveal unexpected connections. Both groups of specialized explorers had a higher prevalence of ADHD traits.
- ADHD is part of the evolutionary solution to thriving in the face of change. People with ADHD offer exceptional exploring skills to groups they participate in. Mixing in people with other kinds of neurodiversities supplies other specializations, and neurotypicals are great at deepening our knowledge to gain maximum benefit from each opportunity. When you need innovation to keep growing and stay competitive, your best solution is to is to copy evolution and make your organization a place that attracts all of these specializations. Create an organizational culture that welcomes neurodivergent people as well as neurotypical. It’s doable.
Let me know if you’d like an informal chat about how we could design and implement this innovation culture at your organization:
· Email me
Innovation is change. It is about stepping into the unknown. You might want to make a process take half as long. Perhaps you want to move to a new business model because your current one is based on factors that made sense 20 years ago. Or maybe you want to improve the happiness and satisfaction of your employees. Whatever the change is, you need to brave the unknown.
Humans excel at adapting to change. Change used to be about surviving predator threats, or food and water shortages. Now it is about continuing business growth and remaining competitive. But the behavior we need to succeed now remains the same.
So, if you want to make sure your organization thrives when faced with change, your best bet is to mimic what evolution has had hundreds of thousands of years to get right, when the price of getting it wrong would have been an end to humankind. After all, the price of getting it wrong now might be your organization.
How exactly has evolution solved innovation?
Evolution has understood that facing change is essentially a search. When you’re searching for food, mates, ideas, memories — anything — you need to be good at balancing two very different behaviors: exploration and exploitation. Researchers in many different domains have written about it; you can find the references I’ve used at the end.
Good explorers have a low resistance to change. They find it relatively easy to decide to leave the old behind and try something new. They can quickly grasp the pros and cons of the current situation. They can think about things in a different way, free of the constraints of what most others think is ‘right’. They question assumptions.
Good exploiters make the most of the opportunity in front of them. They are fantastic at analysis and pattern recognition. They use the information available to them to create a plan. They can resist the lure of instant gratification because they know that the rewards will be bigger later, and they think they are worth waiting for.
I think that executing the plan is a third behavior. It’s about action, not planning and analysis. It’s about coordinating people and resource availability, communicating, motivating, monitoring. It’s the ability to follow someone else’s plan and make decisions within the constraints it sets out.
Evolution found that these skillsets need different brain settings. If you try to put all these specializations into one person, they don’t excel at any of them (and they died out and aren’t around anymore). The solution is to split up the specializations between people, so that we each excel at one type of thinking. A fantastic explorer is not very good at exploiting.
The result is that humans are social so that we can all have access to all of the skills, shared by different members of our group. This is described by the new and, I think, extremely exciting Theory of Complementary Cognition for which there is a load of evidence.
How can we see that different brains are specialized in different ways?
One example: a recent paper investigated what makes someone great at exploring. They asked more than 450 people to pretend that they were trying to survive by finding food and looked at the effectiveness of their survival strategies. In an online game, participants needed to collect as many berries growing on bushes as possible in 2 minutes. Each participant chose whether to ‘exploit’ the same patch of bushes by continuing to collect berries from it, or to ‘explore’ by moving to a new patch. Moving to a new patch came with a time penalty of not being able to collect berries while they ‘moved’. Participants knew that there were limitless patches of berry bushes available, and that a berry patch would eventually be empty if they kept on collecting from it.
The people who collected the most berries stayed at their patches for a shorter time. They were quicker to decide to leave a patch and didn’t wait for the berry bushes to empty. Their decisions matched most closely with the theoretical optimal strategy for foraging as predicted by the Marginal Value Theorem.
After their virtual foraging, the participants all completed an ADHD self-screening survey. Those who collected the most berries also rated the highest for traits associated with ADHD.
If I’d started by describing these traits as distractibility, restlessness, risk taking, a focus on instant gratification, and difficulty controlling behavior in return for later gain, you might have recognized it as a typical description of ADHD which tends to focus on the negative interpretation. But I’m betting there’s a good chance that you didn’t recognize it until I mentioned the self-screening survey. However we label the behaviors associated with ADHD, they give the best results when we want to explore the unknown.
Another study that looked at searching itself, instead of the decision to move to something new, also found that being good at exploring is associated with ADHD characteristics. Children searched for as many silhouettes of bells as they could on a page filled with silhouettes of all kinds of things; all children found about the same number, but those with stronger ADHD traits found them in a different way. Their route was longer and more variable, so they were more likely to notice other things as well — obviously useful for exploring the unknown. The same children also named as many animals as possible, and those with ADHD traits thought of the most unique animals, although they repeated some of the same ones more. ADHD traits enable searching behavior that is more likely to reveal unexpected opportunities.
ADHD is a specialization for exploring the unknown
ADHD is an solution, honed through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to being outstanding at deciding to risk exploring the unknown. Interestingly, nomadic tribes are more genetic variants associated with ADHD than those who stay put.
Exploring is no good if you can’t exploit what you find. Other neurodiversities, such as dyslexia and autism, fill in other specializations. And neurotypical people are amazing at deepening our knowledge so that we get the most out of every risky step ito the unknown.
If you put everything together, in conditions that allow everyone to do what they do best, then you have the most innovative group you can get.
Mimic evolution’s solution for thriving in the face of change in your organization
If you want to bet on your organization being able to succeed when faced with change, your best solution is to mimic what evolution has had hundreds of thousands of years to perfect. Different styles of thinking are all needed in certain circumstances. Make sure your organization is a place where people who bring the full range of specializations are able to gather to contribute all of those styles.
The best way is to adjust your organizational culture so you’re ready for anything. It might sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s doable. I’ve experienced and lead change like this, and I can work the same magic for you. Let me know if you’d like an informal chat about the benefits awaiting your organization, and how we could deliver them:
· Email me
References
Search is about the balance between exploration and exploitation: Thomas Hills, Peter Todd, David Lazer, David Redish, Iain Couzin, and the Cognitive Search Research Group (2015) ‘Exploration versus exploitation in space, mind and society’, Trends in Cognitive Science 19(1) pp. 46–54.
Theory of Complementary Cognition: Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes and Sarah Wraight (2021) ‘The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 32(1), pp. 61–77.
People with ADHD traits are superior at exploring, as judged by virtually foraging for berries: D.L. Barack, V.U. Ludwig, F. Parodi, N. Ahmed, E.M. Brannon, A. Ramakrishnan and M.L. Platt (2024) ‘Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291, article number 20222584.
People with ADHD traits show more diverse searching strategies: C. Van den Driessche, F. Chevrier, A. Cleeremans and J. Sackur (2019) ‘Lower Attentional Skills predict increased exploratory foraging patterns’, Scientific Reports 9, article number 10948.
