Innovation Strategy for a modern context: blending western process with indigenous mindsets
I moved to New Zealand last year and spent ten months embedded with indigenous tribes. It was a mix of meetings that could have been replicated in any innovative city in the world — San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, Auckland, Wellington — building partnerships between government, business, and start ups. I ran design thinking workshops in remote areas and spent weekends at marae, a focal point for the tribe that serve religious and social purposes, learning their language and the customs they have preserved at great cost. Today, the Maori economy is worth approximately $44 billion, with potential for a ten-fold increase. But the greatest opportunity for the Maori people is not the money, but the benefit to everyone in the community, especially their own people, as they evolve their tribal businesses and development organizations.
Maori tribal leaders face the incredibly complex challenge of preparing their people to adapt to the coming social and tech disruption. Whether it is large scale job loss, spurred by advances like artificial intelligence and robotics, or climate change affecting their environment and agriculture businesses, the likelihood of change in the status quo is assured. Today, most of the businesses are commodity based, and the iwi (Maori word for tribe) business and development arms are organized similar to western models. If they can successfully design business models and approaches to innovation unique to themselves, the iwi will create resilience in their communities and prosperity for generations.
Over the last several decades Maori were able to negotiate treaty settlements, wresting back control of lands and gaining autonomy they had lost. Paradoxically, adopting the practices of the western legal system allowed them the freedom to re-invigorate their language and cultural practices and gain back sovereignty over their land and lives.
A similar adoption of western business practices will not have the effect of growth in profit and impact on Maori companies. While the legal system is fixed and is equally applicable to all citizens, global business does not have the same restrictions. The freedom exists, if Maori seize it, to take lessons from their seafaring past and tupuna like Māui and Kupe, to create new business models and organizational structures. While there are great lessons from successful companies the world over, they are just that — lessons, input to inform the creative practice of designing a unique Maori business approach. As iwi leaders deliberate how to grow their operations from almost risk-free leases and commodity business models, it is tempting to look at this recent history in the legal system for a template on how to preserve Maori culture and create opportunity for their people.
The opportunity for Maori businesses to step out of western molds aligns well with a shift in consumer desires. Several large food companies like Smucker, Kellogg, and General Mills have seen their market share and profits fall, losing ground to startups using healthy, sustainably sourced ingredients with a transparent operating model. The incumbent food companies are finding that their customers want precisely the kind of meaningful engagement, sustainable products, and integrity in action that Maori are poised to offer through their companies and iwi businesses. Concepts like the Āta principle, Te Take pū — Āta, can be a guide for understanding the textures within relationships between global consumers and the people of the iwi and their land, as discussed by Taina Whakaatere Pohatu. Rather than copying commodity models of goods exchanged for money, Maori can incorporate practices like te whakawhitiwhiti whakaaro (to exchange viewpoints openly, acknowledging the integrity of the other) into their innovation practices and design new products and services that serve this growing segment of consumers.
Maori have a unique opportunity to return to the practices of adventure and risk that served them so well 1000 years ago as they journeyed across the Pacific. By selectively using frameworks from design thinking and futures studies, and traditional principles guiding kaitiakitanga (guardianship and protection, symbolizes the Maori world view for protecting the environment), and manaakitanga (loosely translated to hospitality, a traditional value central to Maori society), iwi leaders can create innovation strategies, business models, and services and products that reflect their own world view.
Investments in the growth of iwi businesses and the development arms cannot come soon enough. ‘The coming tech disruption’ sounds like a cliche, and the admonition that 50% of jobs might be lost due to artificial intelligence and robotics has been made so often, it’s easy to tune it out. What’s different now is that the pace has changed, drastically.
In 2016, a team within Google trialled a novel approach to AI. They took just 9 months to replicate and outperform work the Google Translate team had taken a decade to slog through. The current pace of disruption will be felt in tangible ways — jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence, innovations in renewable energy will shutter businesses in the petroleum industry, food consumption habits will change drastically — whether it’s the source of food (insect protein, lab grown meat), the brands producing the food (health and biotech firms), or the supply chain (urban indoor growing operations). All parts of the business model is subject to re-imagination.
By 2050, the number of the earth’s population living in urban areas is expected to grow from 3.9 billion today, to 6.3 billion, with an attendant expected increase in total food production of 50–60%. Companies are launching major experiments to trial new approaches, including AeroFarms which just opened a $30 million indoor growing operation in Camden, New Jersey — just 5 miles from Philadelphia, and 96 miles from New York City.
There will be disruptions that we can’t name, but the uncertainty and disenfranchisement will surely be felt. Algorithms designed to make communities safer and speed up the hiring process have already been proven to be biased; without intervention they will quietly isolate minority communities, pushing them farther from the opportunity that the science and technology discoveries offer.
Feelings of insecurity felt in communities will become a tsunami of lost hope, rural flight, and disenfranchisement from the working world. Iwi leaders have a choice — they can prepare their whanau, or leave them exposed to an onslaught of transformational change.
There are alternatives to a future where adaptation is left to chance. Building resilience into communities means recognizing the threats posed by natural forces like gradual climate change and man-made destruction, like that caused by an influx in tourists, and reacting to them via the various levers of policy, programs, and investment.
Adaptation will be required by every major institution. Education will need to change, focused on lifelong learning and communities as hubs rather than universities. Government, business, and social support organizations will need to work together to identify where technology and scientific discoveries have turned a corner to useful commercial application, and co-create a plan to help their people weather the changes to how they work and how they live. Iwi can lead efforts to adapt to the disruption, and in the process, identify opportunities to thrive. The preparation will require an extremely focused approach to innovation, and the creation and execution of long-term strategies.
Ko te pae tawhiti whāia kia tata,
Ko te pae tata whakamaua kia tīna.
Directly translated as “Seek to bring distant horizons closer, and sustain and maintain those that have been arrived at.” The context of this whakatauki could be interpreted as “It is difficult to say what is impossible for the dreams of yesterday are the hopes of today and the realities of tomorrow”, a perfect metaphor of the journey to build an innovation strategy and grow opportunity for the iwi.
Just as there are frameworks of knowledge for the open ocean navigation that brought Maori to Aotearoa so there are processes and frameworks for navigating the journey to guide an iwi to the kind of prosperity in business that leads to enduring sustainability and a thriving people. The journey to face and address the coming disruption does not have an end point, but it does have a kind of steady state pace. As iwi grow their organization’s capacity, they will have a process analyzing the world around them and constantly generating learnings that fuel further growth. It will become routine work to manage the repeated fluctuations required by an ever changing environment.
This process helps guide iwi leaders to effectively and efficiently guide communities to be equipped for the future. Key to navigating this journey is the appropriate combination of gathering useful data, synthesizing it with various models and visualization tools, and methods to translate insights into action.
- Understand your current context using a mix of data analysis, visualization, and user research methods from design thinking.
- Frame questions to drive the qualitative interviews and quantitative analysis. While these will absolutely change, it’s important to practice focused curiosity, and they will lead to the discovery of valuable data sets and new questions. What are the particular challenges facing your people now? What is the quality of your land and waterways? How is the system of NZ politics and the economy affecting your iwi?
- Think of working at several scales to get a better understanding of your iwi, the needs of your people, and how external forces affect them. Engage individually through interviews like those practiced in design thinking. Map out the journeys of several whanau to understand how challenges affect smaller family units over long periods of time. Use the data available through the Crown to visualize iwi landholdings on the same display as information about your people.
- Sketch and evaluate systems dynamics models to get a sense for unintended feedback loops. The field of system dynamics was launched from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to help business leaders and policymakers understand the systemic effects of decisions. Often problems we’ve identified are actually only symptoms, and trying to ‘fix’ them only leads to degradation of the root problem. In modeling systems, leaders can use a representation that while never replicating the real world, should help them think through patterns in system structure and unintended consequences.
2. Imagine potential futures. Over the last several decades a whole field of study has formed around a set of frameworks for thinking about the future. While many people like to call themselves futurists, and make claims about what is coming, they are generally advocating for their personal bias, for the world they want to see. Rather than listening to the most charismatic theorist about our future, a better approach would be to structure your own thinking using the guidelines of these future frameworks.
- There is a massive amount of information indicating contradictory pathways in the future. When we try to imagine what might come, too often we stick to a linear extension of the lives we are living today. Our smartphones are smarter, and jet planes fly faster. Frameworks from future and foresight studies light the way to go step by step through the shouting experts, news of new tech, and weak signals of upheaval in stock markets to make sense of the noise and craft scenarios. Using four different types of scenarios, we can practice imagining the consequences of various trends. The scenarios should provide diverse perspectives on what living in the future might be like. In crafting them as an iwi, you get the chance to examine the local effect of global influences and collectively write scenarios personal to your iwi.
3. Identify key insights. Once you have thoroughly explored current conditions of your land and people, and a variety of perspectives on what the future might be like, it is important to first identify key insights prior to deciding on action. The work of synthesizing, or crafting insights is very different than summarizing. In crafting insights, iwi boards will identify the most threatening challenges and opportunities with the greatest potential for your iwi. There are several scales at which insights are expressed, from individual to regionally and globally.
- User personas are a common tool in design thinking. They represent the key information identified during user research, or empathy interviews. Designers always go through the step of pouring over their notes from observation and interviewing in order to identify those needs and motivations which stand out to them as particularly meaningful and unique to their users. A board might choose to develop personas on several different segments of their people as well as on consumers of the products sold by their commercial arms.
- Insights from systems models can be particularly useful as a guide to root causes of problems and for identifying organizations or programs that have significant leverage for change.
- While insights can always be revised as leaders gather further information later in the process, it is vital that iwi leaders take the time to shift through all the reports and news items competing for their interest and collectively identify the most critical issues to focus on.
4. Ideation At this point, your team has finally done enough of the preparatory work to start brainstorming. Even this piece of the process has structure to it. You’ll want to bin ideas into one of four areas: infrastructure, process, people, and projects. All of them eventually combine to form the innovation system your iwi uses. The brainstorming is most successful when you allow the team to play with ideas that would never get greenlit. It’s important to give your team permission to entertain concepts that seem implausible in order to expand the space for what is achievable; constraints will come later.
- Take a break from brainstorming and get inspired by stories of how other companies and social organizations have navigated the creation and execution of innovation strategies.
- As you move through the brainstorming process and select concepts that have promise, you’ll need to imagine how they might fit into the innovation system and larger organization of your iwi. Robert McKee, a successful screenwriter, talked with Harvard Business Review about how leaders can craft stories to articulate where they want to take their business and how. Iwi leaders can use these tools of storytelling to build a frame around the new concepts they have generated. The board might want to commit to a STEM strategy for lifelong learning. By crafting a story about how the strategy would be implemented and how it would affect the lives of the people, the board can provide clear direction about how to build and test these concepts.
5. The stories about these concepts are hypotheses. Together, they describe what the future could look like and what it will take to get there.
- Take these ideas and review them as though you are building scientific experiments. The scientific framework helps create a series of tests, in order to best determine the real steps, the real objectives, and the real goals that you should be seeking out.
- Construct these ideas as hypotheses. Most hypotheses look something like this: “If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen.”
- Do some research on your hypotheses, and share them with individuals who know a great deal about your community and technology. Create stronger hypotheses out of this feedback, and choose the best ideas you want to test.
6. Build and Test Prioritize and create a plan for the ideas you’ve come up with, frame them like experiments What do you need to learn, who do you expect to benefit and how? Establishing those criteria at the beginning will aid you in knowing when to kill the experiment or scale it.
7. Kill the Experiment or Scale. The whole point of this process is to create tangible, efficient pathways to building a stronger, more robust and vibrant community. If an experiment does not survive testing, it’s not worth the extra effort. However, if an experiment survives testing and emerges as an important opportunity, it’s worth the resources to grow into something bigger and more impactful. By utilizing this process, participants help define what processes are worth scaling, and which are better killed.
8. Save the list of ideas that are killed. Even though they may not seem to be impactful at the moment, the core concepts that originally inspired them likely have some elements of truth. As you continue through the process, perhaps even many weeks or month into scaling an experiment, you may realize some of the truth in prior assumptions or reach new information that means you need to reconsult your past work. Additionally, individuals may ask you why you’re not doing something else, and by saving the artifacts from your brainstorming and testing on that concept you can save valuable time and build stronger teams.
Caveat: While there are several iwi leading the way as examples of tribal innovation, like Wakatu and their food business Kono, most iwi couldn’t replicate their success. There isn’t a process for innovation strategy tailored to indigenous contexts and there is a sore lack of software tools to analyze and visualize data designed for this particular challenge. A good reference for modern innovation practices in corporations is from the team at Valuer AI.
