Fast Company’s Innovation Festival: Embrace the Right Questions
by Christian Torres
Last month I had the opportunity to attend Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York City. Over three days, I attended various panels, events, and interviews all focused on a specific dimension of business innovation. While it is fun to imagine tomorrow’s great advancements, I left the festival focused more on today since that is – after all – where it all begins!
Every speaker, from CEOs to former politicians, was keenly aware of the need to address climate risk, social issues, and the workforce paradigm shift forcing every employee and employer to question what work should look like, feel like, and accomplish.
Befitting of the festival’s name, the conversations always tied back to innovation. Still, an unspoken concern permeated every discussion: How can we harness innovation as a power for tackling the most pressing issues of our time, and how can we do it in a way that doesn’t add to the very problems we are trying to solve? In other words, how can we achieve sustainable innovation?
People-Centric Solutions
To solve global problems, we must start with people-centric solutions. It is the saddest irony that in an effort to save the planet, our community, or our companies, we may ignore the needs of the very people who live on this planet, reside in our communities, and work in our companies. Sustainable innovation will require much more than savvy technology, better software, or ergonomic designs. We must discard the notion that technology solves problems; people solve problems, and technology is simply one of the tools they use to do it.
If our problem-solving abilities are rooted in people, then innovation is only sustained if we shift from finding answers to asking the right questions. Instead of building solutions, we need to rethink the problems we assume need to be solved.
BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink said that “climate risk is investment risk.” In that same spirit, innovation cannot address sustainability challenges if it rapidly depletes and exploits the greatest resource we have - people. In this way, it would be inherently unsustainable. Everything you see around you, from the computers and phones to the streets you walk on, was designed and built by people; people with ideas, dreams, passions, friends, families, fears, regrets, and the need for purpose, belonging, and fulfillment. Every great leader sees this. They recognize the innovation potential in those they lead and embrace it, working to create an environment where a collection of perfectly flawed humans can build something great together.
Unlocking Our Greatest Asset
So how do we do it? How do we build businesses and innovate to solve the big, messy, and inescapable problems of today and the future? How do we push without harming, win without defeating, and flourish without devouring the things we need to preserve? Every speaker and attendee at the Innovation Festival grappled with these questions. Business leaders worldwide are discovering that focusing on speed, efficiency, quality, and profits is too narrow. The future of innovation is unlocking the potential of their greatest asset, their people.
I would love to say that the culmination of the festival was a revolutionary plan to face the challenges head-on, but that would have missed the entire point. No one was there to solve the problems but rather to communicate ideas and unite behind a shared desire and need to say, “something’s just not right.”
Let’s Ask the Right Questions
I left the festival feeling both burdened by the work to be done and relieved that there are great people all around the world who are either already working on it or ready to get started. I looked inwardly at my role at the intersection of innovation and operations and pondered how I could rethink and reframe the very purpose of innovative efforts. The best I could muster are these three questions which I hope will help me find a more sustainable and people-focused approach to building the next big thing.
1. Are we trying to extract more from people or empower people to create more?
2. How easy is it for people to do meaningful and impactful work?
3. Is the goal to increase productivity or the capacity to solve problems?
These three questions alone won’t change the world but imagine if more and more leaders were asking them. The very act of thinking through questions like this may be enough to get more people moving in a direction that makes us proud.