When uncertainty eats innovation for lunch
Looking for signs of change, from the Nordic House at South by Southwest to the alligator-filled wetlands of suburban Houston.
I’m back from a few days in Katy for my second food styling gig in the past month.
A friend of mine is a full-time food stylist, and she needed someone to fill in for a last-minute job at the beginning of March and another one on Monday. The first first was at a few locations in Austin, but this one required a couple of nights in this western suburb of Houston.
We spent two days at the corporate headquarters, which had a nice, well-used studio filled with very nice people who love their jobs.
But within seconds of being there, I realized that I’d parachuted into the paradigm of Corporate America.
This company, like many companies, is trying to figure out how to keep people who are working in cubicles, on this campus, all day every day, happy enough to not only stick around but to do good work.
I’ve been out of the corporate office environment for a couple of years now, but it’s an unmistakable world. Fake plants to remind us of the greenery outside; trinkets and photos on desks to remind us of good memories and who we’re really working for.
And then there’s the signs about not washing dishes in the sink. Signs about not leaving food in the fridge. Signs about taking personal calls outside.
We had a lot of down time on this shoot, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the conversations I’d just been part of at South by Southwest a week earlier.
I don’t participate in this giant conference of ideas, which takes place every March in downtown Austin, nearly as much as I used to, but I try to pick at least one event where there’s a conversation taking place that I want to be part of.
This year, it was at the Nordic House, an annual gathering of tech-focused companies and organizations from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. I was hoping to make some connections with some folks from Sweden but also learn more about the conversation happening there around design, urban development, and how people in a post-pandemic world are using technology in new ways.
I attended a Nordic House workshop that morning with the future-thinkers behind Signs of Change, a Stockholm-based project from Vinnova, the state-funded Swedish agency for innovation.
For a few years now, this team has been thinking about how the design of something as simple as a sign — like the kind that tells you where to park or what time the city park closes — will help people navigate a climate-impacted world. So, a sign that says climate refugees can camp in one area during certain months but that they’ll get washed away if they stay there during other months. Or, instead of setting up an unemployment office in a physical building, people could scan a sign with a code to get connected virtually with people who help them find jobs.
When introducing herself, facilitator Bettina Schwalm shared a quote I hadn’t heard in a while: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a quip often attributed to business management consultant Peter Drucker.
“We want to add: And uncertainty eats innovation for lunch,” she said.
She shared a graphic that shows we are more uncertain than we’ve ever been. “Our lowest points of uncertainty today are still higher than the highest levels from a decade ago and earlier,” she added.
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How are we supposed to innovate in a culture like that? Signs, she suggested, might be able to give people a sense of what they could be certain about, which might help them when they can’t?
As participants in the workshop, we talked about the needs that these signs met and the ones that they didn’t. My small group included two men, one from Germany and another from Italy. We didn’t come up with anything particularly groundbreaking, but the exercise got us talking and thinking about what role signs play in shaping a community. Who are the signs for? How do they make people feel? Do they motivate people into action or trigger them into reaction? What are the power structures in place that give certain people the assumed (or explicit) power to tell other people how they should behave?
Fast forward a week, and these questions are rolling through my head as I quietly walking through a room full of hushed cubicles to get to a sink where I could rinse some of the food styling tools.
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