An Experiment With History
Last Friday, after months of work and years of thinking, I finally got the chance to launch an experiment for a passion project of mine.
A museum. Specifically a series of ultra-portable exhibits exploring the history of innovation and disruption. The goal of the experiment is to see if we can get people thinking differently about change — and the impact of change.
Not the normal thing I work on. But a topic I’m passionate about.
The idea originated back in 2019, when we were offered an opportunity to sponsor a conference at no cost. I personally don’t think that exhibition booths at conferences have a huge impact, so I wanted to create a different way of engaging with people. What I came up with was the idea to create a series of museum exhibits that people could explore. And better still, portable exhibits that I could take with me to other conferences around the world. While that conference ended up being cancelled when the pandemic hit, the idea stuck around.
When, a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to bring this idea back to life for the LAST conference here in Melbourne, I jumped at it. My goal was 3 fold.
- First, to get people thinking about change differently by showing them the unexpected impact of different innovations and inventions throughout history.
- Second, to highlight the importance of seizing emergent opportunities.
- And third, to create a series of ultra-portable museum exhibits that I could pack up into a suitcase and travel around the world with.
In the end, I ended up having the opportunity to put together 5 exhibits (although I have ideas for about 20). Each of these had a disruptive impact well beyond what was intended or expected and changed the world in completely unexpected ways. The 5 exhibits we decided to go with were
- the shipping container,
- the bitumen/macadam road,
- the contraceptive pill,
- the Gutenberg printing press and
- the Haber-Bosch Ammonia process.
I asked an engineer friend of mine, Yaameen Al-Muttaqi, to help design the exhibit infrastructure. I gave him the simplest design brief — it had to be ultra-light and portable. After building a few prototypes, he designed something absolutely genius using a combination of off-the-shelf camera tripods, 3D printed parts, and foamboard. This design weighs less than a kilo and packs down into a very small space — while at the same time being stable when set up.
As we work through the next iteration, I will share more blogs about this design and the incremental improvements that we are making to it.
The exhibits themselves were highly informational and required a lot of research to get right. Finding the impact and unintended consequences for some of these weren’t a simple matter. We had to go deep into academic papers and revisit common assumptions and anecdotes. But, with a lot of late nights, I managed to condense the most interesting information into 4 information plaques.
However, information can be pretty boring no matter how good of a writer I am. So, I wanted to make each of the exhibits interactive.
This is the fun part.
To make these exhibits come to life, I ended up buying a 3D printer to help me prototype and build my ideas. For the shipping container exhibit, the idea was to have 2 container ship models, one with a series of ISO standard containers and the other with a series of randomly sized crates and chests. The idea is that people can play with the containers and see which is easier and faster to stack on a ship.
For the Haber-Bosch process, Yaameen, designed and built an LED matrix to show how many, and how fast, crops grew and were harvested using different tilling and fertilizing methods.
For Bitumen/Macadam roads, I designed and 3d-printed two different roads; one cobblestone and the other bitumen. On these we placed 2 small matchbox cars where people could feel the impact of “driving” over these roads.
Lastly the printing press. This, I am most proud of. I literally designed and built a working scale replica of a Gutenberg printing press. Scaled to be able print on post-it notes using actual movable type. Obviously the model had to have some modifications to work (not least of which is the size). The movable type was modern rubber type, rather than the original metal movable type. For which, the galleys were scaled to fit accordingly. But, despite these modifications the printing press works pretty much as intended.
The experiment itself was a success. The feedback from everyone who played with it was that it was informative and interesting. They loved, and were surprised by, the various topics.
I think a lot of people were expecting “agile” topics — rather than innovations from history. So, I’m actually glad that we surprised them. We did get some constructive feedback and have a few ideas on how to improve it. The next experiment for this museum will be at the Business Agility Conference next year.
I’m going to keep a regular blog about all of the changes that we make and why we make them. Stay tuned!
