I work in two areas – innovation and mindfulness. I mention
this while introducing myself. A natural question that I get after this is –
are these two areas related? I see them as closely related. However, I could be
biased. Hence, I thought of jotting my thoughts down and see if I get any
inputs. This is an attempt in that direction.
Before exploring the relationship between innovation and
mindfulness, it might be easier to see the relationship between innovation and
mindlessness. Let’s take an extreme example – 9/11 attack
masterminded by Osama Bin Laden’s organization. 9/11 attack has all the
elements of a radical innovation – A novel idea creating a huge impact when
executed. The impact was positive when seen from Laden’s organization. They
were trying to make the world a better place – from their perspective. It so
turned out – their perspective was quite contradictory to the perspective of
many others. In fact, rest of the world labelled this act as mindless. Thus an
innovation may be the result of mindless thinking and may result into mindless action
– at least as seen from a section of society.
Innovation is a creative response to the perceived
challenge. And mindfulness is about perceptual clarity – seeing what is. If
what you perceive is distorted or muddled up, no matter how hard you try, no
matter how many geniuses you put together, the response will be muddled up. If
you don’t have the ability to see if you are solving the right problem, then
you may be hurting humanity even if you have the best of intentions.
Let’s take the case of Uber – a company that is known for
its innovations and a company whose taxi service is running in 600+ cities
across the world. I am a beneficiary of its service and perhaps you are too. Uber
has had a rapid growth in a short span. However, things become murky when you
ask the question – growth at what cost? It apparently fostered a
culture where “back stabbing” of co-workers was encouraged and mistreatment
of female employees was ignored. An investigation into sexual harassment issues
led to the termination of 20 employees and eventually resulted in the resignation
of the company CEO.
Uber is a case where the intent of treating all stakeholders
fairly got into conflict with the intent of growing the business at a certain
speed. And the intent to grow overpowered everything else. Perhaps Uber is not
unique and that every organization that is chasing a quarter-on-quarter
revenue-profit targets is undergoing similar pressure. To make sound decisions
under such circumstances needs intense awareness of not only what is going on
outside – in the meeting room, in the company, in the market but also inside
one’s own mind – the anxiety of falling short of the growth target, the damage
to self-image for not meeting the investor expectations etc. This awareness is
mindfulness.
In short, innovation and mindfulness are connected deeply at
the problem definition. Unless one is mindful of the distortions created by one’s
own anxieties and aspirations one ends up solving the wrong problem. And
nurturing a wrong problem is similar to nourishing a monster. You never know
what shape it may take in future.
Image source: wikipedia.org
Relationship between innovation and mindfulness is very well clarified.
ReplyDeleteThanks Baba
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