Innovation Tips

…a monthly internet letter addressing key aspects of

collaborative innovation

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Understanding the Starting Point

During our days as poor undergraduate students in Kentucky, my friends and I sometimes entertained ourselves by exploring rural roads to see what we might find. As you would expect, on some of these journeys we became hopelessly lost. On one such occasion, we stopped to ask an old man working on a fence near his barn how we could get back to the city. He listened intently, paused before answering and then said prosaically, “Well, if I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Over the years, his answer has provided us with much amusement. With the passing of time, however, I have also come to see the wisdom in this simple statement. Often, when faced with a problem, our response is to set a course for change. What we often neglect, however, is the time needed to fully understand our starting point, the current state of affairs that is producing the perceived need for change. Without a thorough understanding of where we are, we may keep our destination in mind but try to get there by setting a course from the wrong starting point.

In the ‘50s, shipping by boat was too slow. Everyone agreed that changes needed to be made and that the ultimate goal was to deliver products to their destination more quickly. For years, the response to this challenge was to improve the ships that carried the cargo. Engineers found ways to build faster vessels carrying larger loads with smaller crews.

What the industry leaders had failed to understand was that the problem was not slow moving ships; it was a bottleneck at the docks where the ships were unloaded. Increasing the speed of the ships just made the bottleneck worse. As my college friends and I had done, these shipping companies may have had the correct destination in mind, but they were setting off from the wrong starting point.

Social scientists have often suggested that, in order to fully understand a situation, we must be willing to become “strangers in a familiar world”; in other words, we must not assume that we really know the environment in which we operate. Truly innovative thinking requires setting a course for the innovation, but only after we fully understand the starting point from which we will take that innovative journey.

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