Innovation – a subtle disease?
I just posted a reply to Umair Haque’s question over at the Harvard Business Review:
“Is sustainability the long-overdue nemesis of the innovation fever that’s gripped boardrooms for the last decade”
As a trained molecular biologist, I spent 4 years at Oxford studying the basic systems supporting life, and much of my extracurricular reading is focused on the questions of ‘what makes systems work’ (I especially like discussion of the emergent properties of systems – when 2+2=5, like how a billion little neurons zipping electric charges around can lead to a complex, sentient, singular identity – Phil.
Little surprise, then, that my answer – which disagrees with Umair’s hypothesis – is based on biology, ecology, and broader discussion of micro, macro, static and dynamic equilibria in systems!
I disagree – if we learn anything from biology and ecology, it’s that innovation and change are ESSENTIAL components to sustained function of any system. Consider forest fire – destructive, mass extinction (at the local level) events that to the bystander, caught in the moment, causes nothing but anguish and worry about the ecosystem going up in flames. But in every attempt to create a savanna, one lesson keeps coming back: fire is essential to the proper functioning of a savanna ecosystem. The fire triggers seed opening, creates new habitats in the crooks of fallen, carbonised trees, removes hard-to-get-to solid wood, redistributing the carbon to tender shoots and greenwood, and trims back weed growth. Likewise, corals need typhoon storms and huge waves – destructive though they are – to wash spores around.
The lesson is clear – systems that seek equibilibrium and stable states based on zero change and destructive interference – i.e. innovation-free – are dead. Not just because life is expert at adapting to change and that to some extent this ‘pushes the wheel round’ – but for the more obvious reason that a monoculture environment has so little (temporal/cyclical, plus gene/meme) diversity that force majeure changes cause system collapse – the system, cobwebbed, streamlined and only illlusorily sustainable at the micro level, has no response to the changing circumstances.
The truly sustainable systems, though shaky, tumultuous, and full of new genes/memes/species/competitors/predators/prey, are dynamically stable – viewed from the macro level, they’re the most sustainable of all.
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