The book on Circle of Innovation – by Tom Peters. I didn’t have a clue about Circle of Innovation (COI) and its possible relationship with COL till such time I picked up the book for reading on my own. I realized soon that he is bringing several new thought processes as check-points on the journey around the circle to hone in on the COI similar to my attempts to hone in on COL by taking you around the circle to visit the quadrants.
While Tom talks about circle within circles for each of those check-points, I call them quadrants. So my check-points on COL are as simple as saying ABCD and not as elaborate as the 15 check-points around COI.
The common thread or the philosophy that supports both COL and COI is supposing that “nothing is gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown” – a variation of the quote in the book by Kevin Kelly where ‘nothing’ is more specifically stated as ‘wealth’.
While a business survives from out-witting the competition, the education survives from embracing COL. COL categorically states that all knowledge is one, but is divided into million unknowns. The businesses doing well in competition does so by putting together some of these million broken knowledges into one that they can manage and support. However, when they do so to fill only half a cup (half of their full capacity), businesses fail. Whether the cup is half-full or half-empty becomes the discussion point or the subject of assessment rather than what the cup is filled with.
Whichever way you slice or dice, a business doing good or bad the sooner it realizes that it needs to manage and deal with a completely filled cup, better it becomes for the business to survive and also to contribute. The solution is very simple if looked at from a philosophical point of view. That view begs the question – why not the contents of half-filled cups be transferred to cups that stay full – does the cup size or shape matter then?
That philosophical point of view tells you and shows you that by grabbing a bigger cup to start with than that is needed, and, when the things you have is not able to fill it, you will either waste your time filling the rest with unwanted rather than focusing on what is wanted out of the business you started with. When, the production capacity reaches its full capacity, more often than the market is flooded with something that is not needed thus stifling the market for the innovative products. The organization would have grown too big by that time and even the decentralization may not yield the desired innovations.
This is a common issue not only in businesses, but also in families around the world. Just because they find a bigger cup less expensive to have, they end up having a bigger cup and then spend their life times filling that cup with junk(not immediately needed or not any more useful) to make it full or keep it full. Since the contents of the filled cup is never the same with which they started their life with, they spend the rest of their lives mulling over the question why even when they are leading a fuller life they still seem to be discontent with what they have filled their lives with.
This is where COI comes into spotlight for me with its 15 check-points around the circle that act like sanity checks to take care of such mishaps in businesses and in personal lives – if extrapolated.
In closing, when we hear such phrases like ‘publish or perish’ in research world, ‘innovate or die” in business world, I say, as an untiring optimist, “Benchmark and Begin” in the education world.
Am I echoing B-quadrant principles of COL here?!