Dreaming together and innovation

Transcript of this video:

When I was a child, my favourite TV show was “Thunderbirds.” It showed the exploits of International Rescue as they flew about the planet, rescuing people from landslides and volcanoes or from the clutches of evil criminal syndicates.

And I remember getting hold of a couple of grocery boxes and using a fibre-tip pen to draw on each box the controls of Thunderbird One or Thunderbird Two. And then I could sit at either of those boxes and go on imaginary International Rescue mission, piloting the Thunderbird and operating all of its wonderful controls and contraptions.

And because I had two of these boxes, sometimes a friend would come over and we’d go on a joint International Rescue mission.

And as I describe this, I’m sure you can think of times in your childhood when you were equally able to fully invest in a fantasy, not actually believing that you were were going on an international rescue, but believing in it enough to really enjoy it as a dream.

And I don’t think we’ve lost the capacity to do that as adults, but I think we get distracted from it, by often the commercialization of our imagination.

So, an awful lot of advertising, relies on attaching itself to our dreams of a certain kind of life and then attaching it to the purchase of a car or an apartment or of a certain kind of food.

And I think we perhaps have been cut off from our imagination by the rush of modern life. And I think a lot of processes in organizations that are supposed to be about innovation, have also succumbed to that kind of rush. And that kind of instrumental spirit in which, well, the purpose of the hour we’re going to spend together is to generate some practical ideas.

Now, there’s a great deal to be said, about focusing on practicalities, but I think what those processes often squeeze out is our capacity and the pleasure of daydreaming and the power of daydreaming together.

I’d like to sort of reference a couple of things that each qualify as one of the major innovations of the 20th Century.

Manned flight would be the first. Now, what people miss from the narrative of the Wright brothers is that they spent their whole lives, growing up together as brothers, playing together, experimenting together. They had a very lively, imaginative world that they lived in.

I think that fed their capacity to come up with the solution to manned flight.

Or equally qualifying as a major innovation of the 20th Century: antibiotics. Well, that arose at least in part from Alexander Fleming’s rather serendipitous, playful, experimental way of being in the world.

Here was a chemist who decided that he could make art out of microbes. He found a way to make the colours out of microbes and make little paintings out of microbes, microbial art. And the story is told that he put on a display of this at one of the London hospitals between the wars and Queen Mary visited and dismissed this as absolutely pointless. And yet actually the art arose from this kind of tinkering capacity that Alexander Fleming had.

That meant that when something weird happened in a Petri dish, instead of just throwing it away he made note of it. And the thing of which he made note, was effectively penicillin and the discovery of antibiotics. So, I actually think really important innovations, can arise from serendipity and not from these rather industrialized, innovation processes.

And I think as a species, we are going to thrive better if we become less rushed, more able to really use the power of our imagination, to play together, to adventure together in imagination.

And we might just find as a byproduct of that inherently satisfying process, we also make some rather useful discoveries.

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash