What can Charles Darwin teach us about innovation?

The essence of Darwinism is that progress is created by adaptation to changing circumstances. What starts off as a random mutation often spreads throughout a population to eventually become the norm through a process of natural selection. The same is surely true with innovation. New ideas are mutations created through chaos and adaptation, especially when two or more old ideas combine or reproduce in unusual or unexpected ways. In short, innovation = inheritance (history) + variation + selection.

Serendipity clearly plays an important part in this process and the list of things created by accident is impressive; Acorn Computers, Aspirin, Band-Aids, credit cards, DNA finger printing, dynamite, inoculation, Jell-O, Ferrari, Lamborghini, microwave ovens, penicillin, ink-jet printers, X-rays, nylon, heart pacemakers, Coca-Cola, Teflon, Vulcanised rubber, Nintendo, Lego, Smart Dust, matches, dynamite (yikes), safety glass, Corn Flakes, Super Glue, Viagra and Velcro to name just a few.

Pursuing experiments - and tolerating the inevitable failures that result - is therefore one practical way to make an organisation more innovative. But is there is another option? Is there a strategy, process or even a culture that will embed innovative thinking at the very core of an organisation’s being? Think about when individuals and institutions are at their most innovative.

I would suggest that it is when they cross-fertilise disciplines and experience. One way to kick-start innovative thinking is therefore to create highly diverse teams. Another is to design physical spaces where diverse people will bump into each other in a random manner. Office kitchens and staircases immediately spring to mind. Lunch is even better.

A Harvard Business Review article once claimed that P&G had attempted to “systemise the serendipity” that so often sparks innovation. When the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer heard about this he commented: “that’s what we call lunch.”

Another route is to combine the energy and naivety of youth with the wisdom and cynicism of old age. This can work too. Reverse mentoring is a very practical idea championed by the likes of former GE boss Jack Welsh.

Or there’s the thought of recruiting both the newest and the oldest members of staff for brainstorms.

Of course, there’s the idea that if you generate enough ideas, one will surely be good enough to use. This does occasionally work, although in my experience not very often. I prefer the opposite, which involves thinking inside a small box rather than thinking outside a big one. Read, for example, Adam Morgan’s book called A Beautiful Constraint.

So, what’s my big idea for generating big ideas? What’s my billion- dollar idea? Death. That’s right, demise, departure, disappearance, extinction, the grim reaper. Hold on, am I seriously suggesting that we kill companies and organisations just to reinvent them? Sort of.

It strikes me that true clarity only arrives occasionally and generally it’s when we think we are going to die. If we are looking down the barrel of a gun – or a microscope – we tend to see our death (and with it our entire life) in high definition. This creates a tremendous sense of urgency. This might not be of much use if we have seconds to live, but if we are given weeks or months, we’re often able to focus on the things we really want to do and separate what’s merely urgent from what’s important. Relationships are rekindled, ideas are hatched, things get reinvented.

Sometimes we are fortunate. We think we are going to die, but we don’t. The tests or the analysis are proved wrong. The threat fails to materialise. We’re lucky. Sometimes the change resulting from serious threats is enduring, although often we revert to our bad old ways once the grim reaper has gone elsewhere. This is true for institutions as much as it’s true for individuals. And it’s possibly true of the pandemic too. During the first lockdown many people had time for the first time and many people thought about how they’d change their lives if they survived. But most didn’t.

One of the reasons that Apple, often cited as the world’s most valuable company, is so innovative might be to do with the fact it was 90 days away from being bankrupt back in 1997. Similar near-death experiences abound, ranging from Telsa, SpaceX and KFC to Airbnb, FedEx, and IBM.

Asking people what they’d do if they had a year left to live can be a good way to reveal what they really think about things, including themselves. Asking a leadership team inside a large organisation to do the same is a similarly good way to reveal not only priorities, but potentially to revaluate strategies.

After all, if you have absolutely nothing to lose you will behave very differently than if you do. You will try things that are riskier and be far less concerned with what others might think of you. In short, you will be brave and be led by your heart as much as your head. You’ll dream big and be less inclined to get stuck on practicalities. And, of course, we only truly appreciate what we have been given when there’s a real chance that these same things will be taken away. Many years ago, Dan Pink wrote a book called The Power of Regret in which he reverse engineered research asking people what they regretted most in life to reveal what people valued the most.

Try using a narrative of rapidly changing circumstances and ultimately the imminent extinction of organisation to radically revaluate and pivot where you are going and how you might get there.