Slowly. Getting there.
This blog will be about my thoughts on how novel ideas emerge and how to facilitate for that to happen. But before that, please let me explain why I’m writing this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this space lately, mostly for really sad reasons to be honest. Time is a bit scarce and so is my courage and self confidence, an excellent recepie for procrastination as some of you might know. I have a rather great list of topics that I intend to write about, but before I do that I figure that it can be good to try to express why I’ll be writing here in the first place (which accidentally turns out to be another great way to procrastinate).
My whole career has evolved around how technology can be shaped in order to make the world — may it be people’s everyday life or the sustainable development goals — better off. I’m not an engineer though so my take has always been to try to understand whats’s going on in a variety of domains/areas/fields (including technology of course) relating to a problem, situation, or opportunity, and then formulate some sort of designed proposal for it. Seen from a hightech industry perspective it’s pretty much all about looking at technology from the outside in. Or just being a designer I guess.
Since 2005 I’ve been doing design driven research about the future as part of the research division at a major hightech company. The texts here are not about this company so I leave the name of it out, but anyone is free to Google as much as they want. However, and as I just wrote: This is not about the company I work for nor am I expressing any opinions other than my own, just to be clear about that.
Anyways. I started in a rather senior position and adding almost 13 years, well you do the math… Some years back my manager took on another assignment within the company leaving me and the team I belonged to with two options: Either one of us took on the role as manager or we opened up the position for someone else. In reality it was an open process but considering the profile of the team (design oriented in a very engineering heavy company) one of us would be a very strong candidate. So I applied and all of a sudden I was the lowest level manager in a multinational corporation. Mixed feelings that day for a Royal College of Art alumni, to say the least.
The change wasn’t that dramatic though. For some years I had been one of the team’s most senior members so I had done some on the job training when it came to the everyday stuff relating to management. However, being a manager obviously also introduced new things to deal with, including thinking about myself and my field of expertise in new ways. We’re a small team so I still did practical stuff but to my (somewhat) surprise I also found that being a manager allowed — or forced — me to reflect quite a bit about what it means to manage teams that are supposed to drive activities aimed at generating adjacent and/or radical ideas and inventions. Gradually I started to form my own thoughts and approach to this based on our team’s failures and successes and that is what this blog will be about.
I’ll try to formulate some of the things that I’ve figured out, and still trying to figure out I guess, when it comes to fascilitate for novel ideas and thoughts to emerge. As it happens I believe that I and our team are pretty good at it, but contrary to many other management writers I do not claim to have figured out THE approach to innovation, nor have I any ambitions to be some sort of guru or self proclaimned expert. This is all about me trying to sort my thoughts out and inviting others to agree, disagree, or simply ignore them. I’ve found that when I force myself to formulate my thinking in writing I tend to get better at reflection, as well as at identifying my intellectual shortcomings (not good enough as any reader of this will become aware of as I publish here in the future…). This is what I’ll do here.
More to come.
