I see a difference between innovation as it relates to particular products, services, or ideas, and innovation as it relates to the great changes that are shuffling their feet in the wings, ready to come on stage and change our lives. To assure long life as a company making goods to sell at a profit, we need a lot of the first kind of innovation; we need, in other words, to continually improve the way we develop and exploit our industrial methods. To assure life at all as a developed economy — a planet even — we need a whole lot of the second kind; we need, in other words, to break with the past …
Author
Lee Devin
Jul 062007
I want to pick up on something Ken Orr mentioned in his recent Trends Advisor essay on summer reading. He wrote briefly about research that has confirmed a human faculty theatre artists have exploited for a couple of thousand years, and which we can put to use in working together. In the theatre it’s the currency of daily work, the key to the iterative, collaborative rehearsal process used to make plays. In other kinds of team work we (my colleagues and I in Artful Making) call it “deep listening.” Deep listening involves releasing your mind into empathy with the person who’s talking with you, treating the ideas you hear as if they were feelings you …
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