I had the opportunity this week to spend a bit of time with Bill Eggers. Bill is the Global Director of Deloitte’s Public Sector practice, is the author of numerous books including If we can put a man on the moon: Getting big things done in government, and is (most importantly) a friend. Bill constantly pushes public sector thinking to the next level and always supports his position with compelling and well-researched examples. His passion for post-bureaucratic government – a model of government that he describes as cheaper, faster, collaborative, open and agile – is both commendable and a source for renewed inspiration.
Disruptive innovation is about breaking trade-offs
In his talk at GTEC Bill argued that disruptive innovation is about breaking traditional and readily-accepted trade-offs. For example Bill argued that modern day smart phones break the historical trade-off between price and performance, citing that a BlackBerry has more computing power than the original Apollo mission. The availability of low-cost and high performance mobile devices has disrupted the market for desktop computers in countries like Africa where consumers are skipping desktops and jumping right into smartphones. The core idea of the argument is that the post-innovation environment looks fundamentally different than the pre-innovation environment, meaning, among other things, that process improvement isn’t the same thing as innovation.
Connecting disruptive innovation to comparative anthropology
I recently finished reading Lewis Hyde‘s Trickster Makes This World. The book, the first chapter of which is available online), uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible and open to change, or as the TED blog explains:
The trickster is anybody who’s a bit of an outsider. They’re the ones who make change. They’re not thinking about making changes, they’re almost doing it in a selfish way. But because they’re working outside the rules, they change the rules. Everything around them is always new, everything is an opportunity …
[T]hey got to the place where they are because they worked outside the system. They do mischievous things, but they’re extremely disciplined. Because that’s the other thing about tricksters: They’re never lazy. They’re very industrious.
It’s important to honour mischief-making, in a constructive and creative way, because that’s how we effect change. And it’s so important that we figure out our inner mischief maker. That’s the creative part of us. And everybody’s capable of it.
Trickster Makes This World is also about the immigrant experience, because immigrants are, at first, outside the system, and figure out how to work with the system. And they end up changing the system.
Innovators as Tricksters?
When I was reading the book I started to connect the mental models of Innovators and Tricksters. What I’d like to do is share some quotations from the book that should help you do the same. In so doing remember the core idea above, that (1) innovation is disruptive and requires breaking traditional trade-offs, and that (2) the post-innovation environment looks fundamentally different than the pre-innovation environment.
What tricksters like is the flexible or movable joint. If a joint comes apart, or if it moves from one place to another, or if it simply loosens up where it had begun to stick and stiffen, some trickster has probably been involved… In many cultures, as we have seen, much of the play of tricksters amounts to a reshaping (disjointing, rejointing) of the world around them. (p.257-258)
You can see the from the quotation above that tricksters are drawn to joints (where two ideas or constructs meet) much as would-be innovators purposely look to separate historical trade-offs. Furthermore, you can see from the quotation below that this separation results in some re-ordering of the status quo:
In trickster’s world, appetite is a pore-seeking power, and thus appetites prophesy. Their prophesy reveals the hidden joints holding an old world together, the hidden pores leading out. If you don’t believe me, try keeping Hermes away from your cattle; try keeping Monkey out of the orchard when the fruit gets ripe. This is the first part of trickster prophecy – appetite seeking the pores of artifice – and it brings directly the second part, the revelation of plenitude. Remember that Krishna, the thief of butter and of hearts, does not steal because the objects of his desires are intrinsically scarce. He steals because they are abundant but human order has limited them. (p.292)
Not only are tricksters drawn to the joints but they actively trying to expose them (if hidden) or exploit them (when not hidden). What interests me here is the latter part of the quotation which indicates that after the trickster breaks the traditional trade-off (the joint) he or she reveals plenitude that “human order” (law, culture or convention) has limited. This makes perfect sense in the context of Bill’s example about smartphones that I invoked earlier. Breaking the trade-off between price and performance has contributed to the massive growth of mobile, and has fundamentally reshaped our lives.
Innovation is tricky
If we follow the joining of these ideas to their natural endpoint, would-be innovators (tricksters!) could learn a few things if they approach Hyde’s book as a tactical manual. By this I mean that innovators should endeavour to draw ideas from from anywhere, adapt as circumstances require and look at issues from a multitude of vantage points:
[Unrequited] belief is single minded and cannot do what trickster does, open the corridors of humor that allow the mind to toy with itself and with its creations. Along with the revelation of plenitude, then, comes revelation of a complex, joint-working consciousness, one that can always find those corridors of humor, one that will play with any concept, no matter how serious it seems, and one that can create new artifice if need be, that can turn to shaping when it tires of shifting…
The landscape is constant potential for that travelling intelligence, because the present situation is always dissolving and things that the horizon once obscured are coming into view. That intelligence belongs to the wanderer who has heard the same object called different names in different cities. It belongs to the time traveller, the immigrant child in all of us. (p.297-298)
Literally …
After having read the book, not only do I agree that Trickster makes this world, but I’m starting to think that it may just make an era of post-bureaucratic government too.
If you are interested in hearing a bit more about the Trickster I suggest you watch Emily Levine’s TED talk (embedded below) called “A Trickster’s Theory of Everything”, its actually the reason I picked up the book in the first place.
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