Partly in the interests of making this blog known to a wider audience, but also for fun, I’ve decided to launch the Mindworks Innovation Awards – aka The Brainies. You can win books, a copy of my Mindworks Box thinking kit, and some of my time (together worth UK£1000) to help you get the most out of the box, simply by telling us what your favourite innovation is and why it’s your favourite. Five runners up will receive copies of the Mindworks Meeting Box.
You can find out what I mean by innovation, and how to enter (ironically, it’s brainlessly simple), and more about the prizes on the new Innovation Awards page I’ve just added to the blog. This also provides more details about the glittering prizes which are available and how they’ll be awarded.
There’s also a tie-breaker which involves thinking up a better name than ‘Brainies’, which shouldn’t be too difficult. (I called it that because everyone who is reading this has a 100 billion neuron most-complex-object-in-the-Universe human brain – we are all brainies and we all innovate in various ways).
There are no restrictions on the kinds of innovation you nominate – everything from the wheel to, say, something your grandmother did that made life better for her family. Technologies, social innovations and the other kinds of innovation I mentioned in the last post are all eligible.
It would be good if you could post your nomination, and your reason, in the comments section on the awards page. You don’t have to use your real name, but you do need to leave an email address (which won’t be displayed) if you want to receive a prize should the judges pick your nomination. But if you prefer you can email your nomination to me via andrew.mindworks@gmail.com and I’ll post it to the comments section, using just your first name.
You can find out more about innovation from this blog and – of course – one of the best innovations ever, the web.
Read this post to find out how I distinguish between inventions and innovations. My nuclear powered tea-pot idea is an invention which still, sadly, only exists in my head (and now, of course, yours). It’s not actually an innovation yet, but as soon as our local Tesco Extra starts selling enriched uranium – and that’s surely only a matter of time, since they sell just about everything else – I’ll be able to start building it.
Together Everybody Achieves More is the kind of slogan you typically find on the office wall of managers who are keen on slogans. Next to it would probably be framed mottos on similar lines: ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’ or ‘Fail to Plan and Plan to Fail’.
It’s easy to mock this kind of thing, but there are often useful and stimulating ideas hidden beneath the corn.
For example, the idea that together everybody really can achieve more has been central to the development of civilisation on this planet. Our early ancestors, as they wandered around the plains of what then wasn’t called East Africa, possessed some unique abilities compared with other species. Their big brains enabled them to picture different futures, develop these pictures into practical ideas for change, implement the changes and then reflect on the results. We know of no other species in the Universe which can do this.
When people think of innovation they tend to think of technological innovation, but social innovation – changes to the ways in which we organise ourselves in groups – can be just as important as new technologies. More so, arguably, because if we can improve how we work together in groups, we can develop all the other kinds of innovation more effectively. Hierarchical organisational structures, planning, legal systems and systems of government are all examples of social innovations. Their development has, of course, had enormous implications for humanity.
Other kinds of innovation have also been very significant: the ability to represent animals and people, as well as abstract concepts, in pictures, story telling, competitive sport and, of course, music are just a few examples.
Returning to social innovation, many people think that our systems of government are broken and are in serious need of a radical overhaul: a root and branch re-design rather than tinkering at the edges. I agree with them. More on that story later.
Isn’t it great what young people can do with technology these days? Here’s a video that our daughter, Roz (she’s the first one to make an appearance) and her friend Becky produced one Saturday afternoon, with a little help from their friend Bushnell, when they were in the sixth form. Those of you who serve on committees might like to know this was produced as part of their campaign to be joint secretaries of the exec committee of a local youth club. Yes, you read that right: there were so many people who wanted to do it that voting was involved.
Even not so young people can do it. See the video of our school fete here. All you need is some digital photos and Windows Movie Maker (it comes bundled with Windows XP/Vista). Incredibly simple to use and I’ve produced a number of other videos since then.
There will be a fair bit of this sort of thing going on if the idea to which I’ve been making oblique references gets of the ground.
Those of you who have been paying attention, and have taught yourself CBT by reading this book or knew about it already, will have recognised straight away that I was catastrophising in that last post. Of course the government isn’t going to blow all our taxes on building and running websites. That would be silly. And anyway, I’m sure there’s a very good reason why the project is costing £60.5m: the civil servants involved would have done their discounted cash flow analyses and I’m sure the numbers all pointed in the right direction. Calm thoughts.
I have catastrophised a couple of times already on this blog, such as when I contemplated the possibity of blogging causing the collapse of civilisation as a result of a Blog Event Horizon or when I said that the idea I (and now a fair number of other people) have been thinking about might spark a diplomatic incident leading to all-out nuclear war and the end of life as we know it.
I think we can all agree that those would be catastrophes.
Thinking about the worst that can happen isn’t always a bad thing though, as this chap points out:
It’s when catastrophising becomes what CBTers call a NAT (negative automatic thought) – in other words, you catastrophise in response to all ‘activating events‘ – that it causes problems. Talking of which, one day I’ll introduce you to my mum.
Thankfully I have realised that Simon was joking in his post about that unfeasibly large contract to Capita to develop and run a website. Very funny Simon – enough of that Irish sense of humour, though.
Incidentally, the guy in the video is obviously a management consultant. Management consultants believe that everything in the universe can be located somewhere on a 2×2 matrix and we spend much of our working lives figuring out exactly how. We spend much of the rest of it doing Venn diagrams. Take a look at this excellent and often (for a management consultant) funny website.
How do we stop this insanity? Hopefully our dear leader will make one of his famous early morning calls to whoever it was that signed this contract. If not, I propose a march on Whitehall. We’ve got to do something. At this rate it won’t be long before the whole of the UK’s GDP will be blown by government departments on websites.
