Obvious Innovation
Since the last month I decided to pick one social problem and see how far I can get to solving it in 6 months. I decided on air pollution for a variety of reasons, but one being that the goal is unambiguous.
Since then I’ve made more progress than I thought possible in terms of sliding right into the whole community. There were numerous points that I thought I’d get stuck, but I didn’t. Now I’m at the exact right company that is at the nexus of solving the issue. It’s all about driving this company forward. The thing that surprised is me, is that all my seemingly novel insights are blatantly obvious to them too. My schooling hasn’t helped that much either. Even my ‘awesome’ tool of scenario’s analysis (a relatively unknown tool I learnt in class) didn’t really have a big impact. It was useful, but also not fundamentally shifting.
I’m left with new questions/confusions on what the world actually needs more of. I thought that getting into this there would be a lot of ‘obvious’ things to fix. Or that there would be some solve or get some group together or something. But all that stuff is already happening. I imagined it as a puzzle but its not.
As an analogy- say we want to get water from A to B. So, before you enter the space you think alright I need to build a pipe, have a water source, dig a trench yada yada yada. And then you enter the space and you see a stream or small river running water from A to B. Flexible and agile, it just goes over the rocks and carves its own path- what an elegant solution!
Then you think alright, so we clearly need more water, need to make the stream wider, make it flow faster. Maybe we can help carve the path, or whatever you think. Yet the people in charge have already considered all this. And they are not even slow-movers but they anticipate the speed with which the river will naturally increase, or that actually location b is not yet primed to accept more water. But their planned and active expansion of the river will coincide with the rate that location b will be able to accept more water.
And this is the state of the core problem solvers of the issue. Not something on the periphery.
Then you look at your initial plan of the pipes, the path, and honestly too your entire chain of reasoning and all of it, and most (devastatingly? Surprisingly? Confoundingly?) your reasoning is not useful. It’s been disorientating (in a very good way) that nothing ‘I know’ is actually useful. My studies in Innovation did not prepare me for this whatsoever.
I must add that one reason I am considering these questions is because my natural inclination has been to try to find some kind of process that can be applied to many social problems. Some kind of getting ‘unstuck’ for humanity. In the grandest sense we ideally ‘solve everything’. Yes, yes I see the issue. But instinctively it’s still what I gravitate towards.
Conversations about ‘to what extent’ or ‘more good than harm’ or whatever seem like an academic excuse for not being able to achieve something.
My current experience has started to smash board my conception of the world in many ways. I’m reminded of something Elon Musk said “life cannot be about simply solving problems, there has to be something that makes you get up in the morning, there’s got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living.” I’m asking myself what do I want to see more of, what’s vibrant and wonderful? What’s the vision. I always seem to come back to art too. And maintaining meaning in a world of AI. I don’t know its weird.
I’m sure there is still something to creating a process for social problems, but it’s that same great feeling when you realize that in order to truly understand physics you need to know math, which (math) is a whole ‘nother thing entirely.
Also btw, in terms of air pollution. Apparently, I’m useful as a storyteller and I’m going to be working on spreading the correct scientific information about Indoor Air Quality because there is a lot of misinformation on all levels of Indian Society and Government. Let’s see what happens. But really, I’ve made progress much faster than I thought I could. One thing that helps in social work is that the incentives of all people in the space (even if they are running for-profit companies) are basically aligned and people want all the help they can get!