Most innovators desire impact — to make a lasting difference . There are ways to leverage our ability to be change agents. A most obvious one, is having enough money to hire a lot of people to work on your projects programs, companies and inventions. Another one, is having enough influence and charm to convince other stakeholders to participate in various ways. In all cases we are assuming the innovation initiative to be designed around valid and valuable insights which will be beneficial. Of course wealth and influence are not always applied in such a noble manner, but for our purposes SVII is presuming positive outcomes for the greater good.
What if there was a way to have 10 to 100 times the impact? For you to be 10 or100 times more effective than you currently are? Would you be interested? It has been often stated that we each have more potential than we exercise, that almost everyone is an underachiever in terms of potential. This brings up the issue of human potential which to my mind is the greatest existing resource. We have a very large number of other resource issues that consume our attention including but not limited to energy, air, water, money, overpopulation, food, species extinction but the single dominant resource that impacts all of them is the human resource. This is why much of the SVII community is focused upon human potential as a most impactful resource.
A long time member, friend of SVII, and Thought Leader – Bill Veltrop, has been a proponent of a concept he calls “Infinite Games” which are in turn played by “Infinite Players”. More information here: TheInfiniteGames | What Are Infinite Games. Bill has been busy developing and articulating systems and approaches that permit individuals and organizations to explore working toward being10 to 100 times more effective. GlobalGEA Manifesto – GlobalGEA.
I am not going to try to paraphrase Bill, as his words are available in other places (linked to above) but do feel the need to point out to individuals possessed of significant degrees of personal freedom including resources and flexibility, the possibility of radically amplifying their impact in part through first shifting their internal models to open to this possibility. Life is not linear. Our nervous systems which include our sensory apparatus and brains, are generally characterized in exponential terms. When our thoughts appear to progress linearly they are simply straight line approximations to the curved, nonlinear dimensionally vast universe we occupy. We sometimes express powerful innovations as being disruptive, but they are only disruptive to our linear models, not to reality. Breakthroughs often act as delimiters as they occur at the edges of linear hierarchical and categorical thinking. The act of attempting to reconcile what “we know” with “what we experience” frequently requires adapting or improvisation — also sometime called innovation.
In order to experience infinite multipliers where we change by a factor of 10 or 100, we have to first consider the possibility that we are in some way transcendent. This does not require a suspension of logic and adherence to mystical belief systems. Innovators are always transcending circumstances to achieve breakthroughs. This is perfectly natural, normal and reasonable when we remember that we are nonlinear and exponential, and let go of some of our constraining mental models about who we are and what we are capable of. If you have any doubt -just watch small children for an hour and see just how “linear” they are. If they can go 100X so can adults – it is inherent in being human. We are all natural innovators with infinite degrees of freedom until we start thinking that we are not.