Shifting the Sled

Curiosity and a Nudge in the Start-point

Imagine being at the top of a hill, the snow is pure and virgin, and you have a sled. You get on the sled and away you go down to the bottom, up you go again to the same starting place and the sled more than likely takes the same track it carved the first time. Every time you go up the hill to the same place to begin, the sled will pretty much use the pre-carved tracks, it is most efficient to do so, it is just the nature of things. We can think about the sled as an analogy for the oft times that innovation gets caught up and bogged down: same start point, same conditions.

To alter the route downhill in order to get to a different place, we will do well to change our “starting out place”, because attempting to alter the track as we go down will be hard work, since the pace and the route are really pre-determined from the previous rides.
Ourselves and much about the systems that operate in our enterprises function with habituated thinking tracks and we will all most likely have experienced the difficulties associated with alterations to them.

If we use the idea of the sled for thinking about innovation, we would begin by a shift in the sled so altering the start point. This is far from proposing a radically different approach since this would be like doing away with the sled. There is no challenge either to the operating environment since this would be to think about either altering the hill or waiting for a different type of snow. But shifting the sled over and carving out an alternative track is to think about familiar themes from a less than familiar set of perspectives. Not radically different and this too is important, for we still will be able to see sufficient of the well used track to talk about both tracks together and compare. 

Curiosity might be one reason shifting the sled over. Curiosity is one of our vital and innate capacities and an element that sits at the very core of the activities that lead us to invention and innovation. It is curiosity that leads individuals to ask questions and observe things and see value in odd assortments of things. Knowledge and things can always be co-opted to serve in a slightly different guise, most of us began to practice this as kids, using what is to hand and altering the context is a capacity that we practice as we grow up.
Using what is to hand to serve differing ends from the original purpose, can be referred to by the word “bricoleur”. Curious and always on the look- out to see value in less than likely combinations, a bricoleur makes use of what there is and puts pre-existing things and elements together in new or novel ways. Innovations often come about this way.

But I first encountered the formal use of the notion of the bricoleur in architecture. It was used to refer to those architects who were challenging the almost stranglehold demands of purist modernism from those such as Le Corbusier. An architecture movement known as Post-Modernism encouraged architects to include ornament and decorative elements within buildings and to value both classicism and the High Street simultaneously. Much later and through the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss,  I came to think about the relevance of the bricoleur notion in primitive tribes and our ancestors and that led rather more directly in regard to innovation.

The challenge to the bricoleur comes in the success of the putting together. The collecting is one activity but it is the juxtaposition, the inter-weaving, of all the elements that is the make or break point. Have you made a coherent order or just junk? Have you been dishonest and declared an order which you don’t really as yet have? The business of honesty is vital to the bricoleur since without it he cannot ask for assistance from others. And all this is vital to innovation too.