Zipfluence

Lost in a game of storms

One from the archives: Circa 2013

Q. So when did the crisis in 21st Century innovation begin?

If I had to put a time frame on it I would suggest the crisis began with the introduction of brain storming. There are of course other techniques. Design thinking for one. But in essence each of these methods reinterpreted the process of design as a communal experience.

Of course these ideas. like much of what came to be popular early 21st Century thinking, emerged out of the mid 1950's. They took a while to catch on. But by the early 21st Century the approach had become mainstream. It dominated innovation thinking in the West. Some much so it was best understood as a global hobby. Where once teenagers would spend the weekend playing music in a band or Pimping up their ride. Now they attended hackathons, demo days and the occasional TED conference. Design and innovation had become a distinctly social experience. A shared experience.

Back in those days people paid good money to participate in the design experience. They purchased the right to belong to the design community. If only for a day.

Q. What do you mean by that?

The design experience was pure theatre. Or more accurately thinking as a performance. Less science more art. At its best it was pure Dada. A delicious absurdity. But more often than not it was pure soap. A grinding battle. A crushing cast of mediocrity. A game of storms that more often than not resulted in a shipwreck of talent and ideas.

At the heart of the problem was of course the belief that quantity is infinitely more valuable than quality. A room full of grinding mediocrity could produce a better idea than one professional left alone to sing in the shower.

Design was everywhere and nowhere. The solution to everything was at hand, by Design. One just had to collaborate, by design. To share, by design. Contribute, by design. Think, by design.

Q. And yet their economy was crushed. Why was that?

Very simply brainstorming and its derivatives excused people from deep thinking. It encouraged then to talk, to converse freely, without deep thinking. Without thinking the problem through completely before contributing a suggestion or indeed an answer.

It was the difference between Shakespeare and an exercise in adlibbing. Experiencing design in the moment rather than designing for the future.

Design as a "parlour" game, an entertainment, rather than as a craft or a profession. A game of endless remixes.

Q. Which of course alludes to your comment gamification equals garbage. Can you elaborate on that idea?

Put very simply the rules of the game distort the way the game is played. So in the context of gathering metrics be aware that the data is skewed by the rules of play. Think of it as game bias.

In the context of social media if *LIKE* is the score then it becomes the objective so the game becomes awash with fake LIKES. The same applies to the idea of followers or friends. The game becomes awash with Fake friendships. At the same time the data pool explodes with garbage. In the end the big data being generated is purely a signifier of the success of the rules defining the game in shaping the habits and behaviours of the participants.

This is not rocket science. Simply an observation of complex adaptive systems in action. They adapt to the conditions they encounter.

Understand this and you will realise the fundamental weakness of adopting the design experience as the engine room of economic growth. Put a group of people in a room and they will play the game rather than solve the real problem.

It simple another example of how culture eats strategy for lunch, dinner, morning tea and breakfast.

So it isn't about the people. The talent you have to work with. If you are looking for a different outcome you need to change the rules of the game.

To understand the nature of the crisis in innovation that West faced in the early 21st Century you need to understand the rules of the game they were happily playing.

Q. And what were those rules?

When innovation is a game it thrives on rules that limit the flow of funds. Think of it as a game of the survival of the fittest. As less funds become available only the strongest survive because it is only the strongest ideas that find a market. A paying customer.

If the game being played is awash with funds then it weakens the pool. Innovation doesn't have to find a paying customer. It is feed by the game.

The problem in the early 21st Century was the innovation game was awash with funds. Easy money. Cheap money. Money looking for a home.

Innovation stalled in an age of abundance.

Now that sound paradoxical I know. But you need to understand the innovation game is played on many levels. There is the ideas dimension but there is also other dimensions. Intelligence being one. Investment another.

The rules of the investment game looked something like this.

The Government of the West introduced rules that encouraged massive inflows of funds into Pension and investment schemes. This money needed to find a home if it was to deliver an ROI. It needed to be managed. In return for managing this inflows the managers of those funds received a management fee. This fee was a percentage of the total funds under management.

So think about that as a game. The objective is to maximise your management fee. How do you do that? You increase the value of the funds under management. There are two ways of doing that. You can increase the inflow of capital from investors. This is a marketing and branding exercise. Or, you can improve the value of the portfolio of investments you have made with this money. And the easiest way to do that is to create a bubble. Why? because if all boats are rising with the tide then, along with your competitors, so are your management fees.

The bubble economy. Be it tech, housing, mining, commodities, stocks or bonds is simply a function of how the game is played to maximise the position of all the participants. Just another example of how gamification equals garbage.

Understand that and you may be able to profit from it. If you don't like it then, don't try and change the game, simply change the rules.

Within the rules of the current game the optimum model is fractal. A fund or investment product, that invests in a fund or investment product, that invests in a fund or investment product, and so on to infinity while at the same time the children can invest in their great, great, great grand parents and so on to infinity. CDS for example.

You see real innovation. Real design. Is about solving the real problem. The deeper problem. The problem nobody see until you make them aware of it by changing the way they think and see their world.

It is about either changing the rules of the game or maximising the rules to your advantage. It is about changing the way the game is played. It's about making a room full of people think WOW!. Why didn't I think of that?

At least until next time...

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