The Science of Solutions and Solving the Innovators Dilemma
The secret’s in the nervous system
Seeing the world, it’s a funny term. We all know what it means to jump on a plane, go off on an adventure, see new lands and experience new things, to travel far and wide, but what of the world inside of us. How do we begin to navigate that? How do we begin to see more?
In the words of the French novelist:
“The true voyage would be to not travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.”
― Marcel Proust
It’s the way one person see’s the world, the way they learn to survive. Our minds create a limited world for us so we can safely move through it and can understand what we see and make sense of it all. At an emotional level believing we can see the world and its entirety means there nothing left on the table, nothing that we might have missed. Our mind will hide the possibility we could have taken a different direction in the past and our world played out differently. It’s this hidden part, the things we can’t see where other’s look. This is where we find the dilemma. Other’s build from here and take that journey.
What Can’t We See
Our nervous system, the part of us that carries messages to and from the brain and spinal cord. Part of this system is for social engagement, it helps us navigate relationships. Interpersonal neurobiology holds that we are ultimately who we are because of our relationships. Our own identity, is not contained in an individual, but between individuals. This is something that as we grown and our relationships change, so do our internals maps of this identity and the world around us. Our maps of ourselves expand. What was once an entire earth view, we’re now able to zoom in, see the mountains, lakes and rivers.
Inside Out Innovation
The collective self, the aspects of the self that belong to the same social group of category. This is the bond of a shared identification with a social group based on impersonal bonds to others. This could mean a family, a business, even a sports team. An invisible force we can refer to as team spirit, how people are and governs how an organisation moves and performs over time. To changing this overarching being is internal world first. It’s tackling the part of our own identity that’s between individuals. The extended sense of who we are. It’s the polyvagal theory, the theory of the relationship part of our nervous system. It regulates what’s happening in front of us, keeping any danger in check and allows us to settle or be unsettled in our interactions. Thousands of years of evolution has taught us to be wary and fear the unknown not embrace it. For some, seeing the earth at a distance is just fine.
The Internal World
The internal world is where we can find our own answers, we climb a mountain to seek the wise old man who helps us explore. It’s the answers that exist below we most seek. It’s the 85% of our own being that is below the surface (Freud). It’s in this invisible world. If that 85% was operations per second, that’s 85% of 10^14 (10 to the power 14) That’s ten million billion operations per second that’s get’s processed without us knowing. And it’s this not knowing, this space between individuals where we find the things we truly can’t see. With time the space can become a very different world view.
