Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” about the changing times of the newspaper business is one of the best things I’ve read on innovation culture. (Thanks Daring Fireball for pointing it out.)
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
One of the key aspects of an innovation culture that it highlights is the important role experimentation plays. Innovative companies try stuff. They aren’t sure everything is going to work. Some things will fail. But as the article points out (as it looks back to the invention of print as another moment of historical change and innovation):
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. … That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
Those quotes are juicy. The whole article is worthwhile.
Two related asides:
At MX09, Margaret Gould Stewart talked about Google’s culture and that you rarely hear people at Google use the “I” word. Innovation is just business as usual. And as this article mentioned, if your company has an “Innovation Department”, you probably have a serious problem.
Experimentation is linked to curiosity. And as the New York Times points out, it’s curiosity that’s behind Amazon’s Jeff Bezos spending a week working on the floor of their distribution warehouse.
