Lang praises the power of innovation
Amanda Lang says it was the day when she wanted to stage an intervention, right there and then in an airport.
She was walking through the terminal when she saw a family, harried and hassled, making their way through the facility. At one point, she overheard the father say to his young son. “Well, if I tell you the answer to that, then you’ll just ask another one.”
What the father was obviously talking about was a question — and that story illustrates our society’s dismissive attitude toward the kind of questioning that creates the breakthroughs that change economies and societies.
Lang’s high-energy talk Monday night to the Chartered Financial Analysts Society Saskatchewan’s annual forecast dinner focused on productivity, something that’s been an economic problem for this country for decades. Things aren’t getting any better — and the peppery CBC business journalist wants that to change.
Like that little boy in her story, we’re all born with it. What breeds it out of us are parents who treat it as an annoyance and then teachers — at least most of them — who do the same. One of the most innovation-unfriendly places is the workplace, she added, though some firms go to extraordinary lengths to actually encourage innovation
She told the story of an engineer from India whose specialty was using lasers to make computer chips. At home on Thanksgiving, he found himself wondering what his lasers could do with a chunk of the turkey meat he was looking at.
He went to work on the turkey meat, slicing it with his laser and keeping careful notes that eventually were analyzed, for he worked at IBM, which cares about ideas.
“Welcome to Lasik eye surgery,” said Lang.
Another impressive example is Google, which lets employees spend 20 per cent of their time pursuing their own projects. So positive is this atmosphere that from it has emerged in only a few years Google Earth, Google Glass and Google Maps. The attitude exists at Google that if your idea isn’t selected for development, “then you should simply have another idea,” Lang said.
And her final story came from the United States Army, which has amazed Lang for its interest in innovation. She collected from one senior general the story of a private who took seriously the general’s request for ideas.
First, he suggested a way of quieting the trucks that rumbled past his barracks, then a phone booth in the soldiers’ common area. Both requests were accepted.
Finally, this lowly private offered an idea so good, so visionary it’s still classified, decades later.
The point, Lang said, is that “giving ourselves permission and other people around us permission is the most powerful gift that we can give.”