Innovation and the Change Hydra

When Human Needs Change Faster Than the Pace of Implementation, Foresight is Necessary for Disruptive Innovation.

Change leads to growth, and growth leads to complexity. You can relate if you’ve ever reflected on life a decade ago and noted the rise in baseline athletic performance, or the additional considerations today’s parents navigate, or the increased expectations surrounding college acceptance. But even if you’ve never considered any of those things, this is a concept you can personally connect with as long as you’ve come through puberty a more complex person.

Like personal growth, the evolution of change-leading-to-complexity is both timeless and constructive. We are maturing and adapting as a global society; and, for many people, that change is intimidating. However, there are also some of us who view complexity as a more engaging puzzle to put together. The practice of sense-making has adopted many titles over the decades, but it’s always attracted those drawn to the forces of both creation and destruction: artists, scientists, philosophers. 

Today, we call the human-centered practice of sense-making and pattern creation Design Strategy. Design Strategy acknowledges the growing complexities and inter-relations of our world— starting with observations of the world at large and gathering learnings inside— as well as outside— the field or industry of interest. Learnings are analyzed to create a collection of deep, layered insights that frame the original problem in the context of its root causes. Design Strategy allows these deep, layered insights to inform creative problem-solving and bring about useful innovation.

Yet, Design Strategy alone can no longer generate innovation that changes the world and leapfrogs the competition. In the 2020s, the pace of change is so rapid that observations of today’s world alone are insufficient to spur ideas guaranteed to remain transformative by the time they reach the end user. The world we’re living in is a geriatric Change Hydra: plan for one shift, and BAM, three more changes shift the landscape before your design helps its first user. If we accept that change leads to complexity, and we accept that the pace of change is accelerating*, then we must accept that we are living in exceptionally complex times. Further, this complexity is continuing to deepen.

Living in a geriatric Change Hydra means we no longer have the luxury of ignoring the practice of strategic foresight if we want to create disruptive, transformative innovation.

Happily, transformative innovation is still possible in exceptionally complex times if we layer a discipline called Strategic Foresight on top of Design Strategy. The practice still starts with observations of the world at large and inside/outside learnings. However, we take an additional step and imagine outcomes of the natural convergence of trends and issues to create functional views of several possible futures. These windows to possible futures allow designers to empathize with needs several years from materialization. Strategic Foresight requires the ability to:

• Stay informed, continuously looking for information with a consciously open mind

• Imagine potential outcomes of the natural convergence of trends, issues and the forces of human nature that dictate behavior

• Create patterns from the intersection of trends, values and implications

• Develop sympathetic characters and engaging stories, bringing others into imagined futures and creating unity around a specific vision

• Think in multiples, considering many paths to create resilient strategies and move beyond incremental thinking into transformational invention

• Translate possible futures and resilient strategies back to the present, informing decisions today 

Agile organizations can move quickly to Design Strategy, taking learnings from both present day and possible futures and translating them into insights for transformative innovation. Organizations that need to bring a lot of people with them on this transformation journey (e.g. governments, legacy companies, member-based organizations) will realize increased benefit if they take the time to translate those functional views into engaging stories before moving to Design Strategy. Engaging stories unify people around a specific vision, allowing large groups of people to develop shared experiences that guide creative problem-solving and thoughtful decision-making. As my friends at The Futures School say: “Stories help us synchronize our activity.”

With or without engaging stories to bring others along for the ride, the only way to achieve transformative innovation in a generations-old Change Hydra is to use both Design Strategy and Strategic Foresight.

*Read about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Postnormal Times if you need more help accepting that the pace of change is accelerating.