Earlier this month, as most of the world knows, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) opened the Large Hadron Collider in a 17-mile long tunnel beneath the Jura mountains in Switzerland. When its teething difficulties have been overcome, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator will fire streams of protons against each other at 99.999991% of the speed of light, causing collisions that will re-create conditions that last existed in the first instants of time, fractions of a second after the big bang.
The sub-atomic debris that is generated will, we are told, enable scientists to understand hitherto unanswerable questions such as why matter has mass, what makes up the extraordinarily large proportion of the Universe that is known to exist but cannot be seen, how many dimensions there are, and how nature is put together. I don’t know how it will do this, but apparently it will.
An editorial in the Times headed off at the chase the inevitable argument that the £3.5-plus billion cost of achieving this understanding is too high a price to pay for knowledge which, whilst interesting, will not cure cancer or solve global warming. Its response was that such an argument is based on a misunderstanding of how science and technology progress. Discoveries that change the world, it pointed out, ‘happen when clever men and women are free to follow their intellectual interests as they choose.’ James Clerk Maxwell had no vision of inventing electronics or computers when he developed the equations that describe electro-magnetism in the nineteenth century, any more than Watson and Crick were seeking to develop molecular cancer drugs or herbicide-tolerant crops when they discovered the double helix of DNA. It was, in these and in many other instances, for others to take these insights and exploit them.
This eloquent justification for mankind’s pursuit of knowledge and understanding contains an essential truth for business leaders. Whether it is Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA or William the Conqueror’s military tactics at the Battle of Hastings, Maxwell’s electro-magnetism or Edison’s electric lamp, the sources of insight that drive innovation are truly universal. Any organisation that is serious about innovation will see the entire range of human knowledge and experience as its resource in seeking great ideas. Because every mind works differently and every person finds inspiration in their own cocktail of interests, passions and experiences, there is literally no limit to where great ideas can come from. Serendipity can, of course, play its part and in some of the most famous (and possibly apocryphal) stories of insight it has – Robert the Bruce and the spider, Sir Isaac Newton and the apple, for example. But leadership is about creating an environment, and the environments that genuinely innovative leaders forge for their people are ones in which any source of an idea is a good one, any insight may have value. It’s why some of the most famed creative organisations – Google and Apple spring to mind – are ones in which play and discovery are encouraged, with no thought as to whether the activity will have an end result.
Not every organisational environment needs or could handle the culture of a Google or an Apple, but that isn’t the point. Another attribute of great leaders is the intuitive ability to understand what will work in their world and what won’t, and to play to – and push to the limit – the art of the possible. This involves understanding the culture, the people, how ideas are shared and developed, what will work and what won’t. And when great leaders don’t like what they see in the culture they set out to change it, so that things that didn’t work in the past may do in the future.
The results can be extraordinary. We’ve seen engineers overcome a seemingly intractable problem after studying animal team behaviour at Whipsnade Zoo, IT consultants redesign their service development process after watching a Formula 1 pitstop, health professionals inspired by a conductor’s relationship with his orchestra to rethink their relationship with patients. Human beings have an inexhaustible ability to observe, to learn and to apply. Great leaders recognise their role in enabling, encouraging and exploiting this ability.
The Large Hadron Collider is a great example of human beings pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but in the belief (rather than the certainty) that good will come from it. The scientists who analyse the outcomes of the experiments conducted deep beneath the Swiss mountains will be adding to the vast and ever-growing field of human knowledge and understanding. Their contribution, along with many other discoveries and experiences that take place every day, will add to the rich pool of human insight, making possible some new idea, some new possibility. And some organisations, somewhere, will reap the benefit.
I agree that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake can lead to something highly valuable, and that innovation is an important component of progress. But does this invalidate the focus on achieving measurable outcomes, which has become something of a mantra in many sectors nowadays, or the use of structured project management methodologies to reach a desired end point? It seems to me that these approaches could do with rubbing off against each other. If an innovation project does not lead to a valuable insight then the line of enquiry should be narrowed and attention redirected elsewhere, however inherently fascinating it may be for those involved in it. And if a project is implementing something dull that does not catapult thinking and delivery to the next level – indeed, many projects seem to do quite the reverse – then a bit of free-format innovation, and seeing where the results land you, would not come amiss.
Julian Wheeler — 23 September 2008 @ 2:59 pm