2-3-4 Friday: Innovation... ?

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

1 thought

Some direct interlocutions have been paraphrased as my memory fails me. It tries its best to preserve the meaning, without changing the substance. Please pardon me for those.

I was recently told a story of how innovation happened in the Singapore Police Force.

There was once a story of a policeman who went into a house with reasonable suspicions of the teenager inside. He went in, and the teen got aggressive. In the melee, the teen ended up sinking his teeth into the policeman’s forearm, and pulling out a chunk of flesh out.

This story, made its way around the police force, and the police spent much money reinforcing control measures, whether they be through CCTVs. This story also inevitably led policemen to go into home visits, extremely anxious, which would spark greater anxiety in the family, and result in both sides not achieving a pleasant conclusion. This went on for five years.

One evening, a young, new police officer who had yet to hear of these stories, was patrolling. He saw a young boy sitting by the stairs, crying. He put aside his professional guard.

He went beside him, sat down, and then started talking. A few evenings later, as he patrolled, he saw the boy play soccer at the futsal court.

He went there, took off his uniformed shirt, and started kicking about with them.

After that, these youths pointed at him and said,

“Tomorrow you come. No shirt.”

The police officer laughed.

He began to play regularly, until one day, his superiors called him in. He was told that it was not professional to mix one’s personal friendship, and the professional policing he was doing. He was told to stop, and issued a disciplinary review.

A few months later, a new police commissioner came in. He reviewed the disciplinary cases, and chanced upon this young police officer, caught for playing street soccer. He called him in, understood the story, and said,

what you did wasn’t acceptable within the force, but it was a good initiative.

Let’s try again.

The next few months, he took other police officers with him to play.

Those months spent playing with them built an intangible trust between him and the boys. One evening, the boys said to him, “hey, I don’t think our friend is doing so well.”

When the police officers investigated, they realised that boy was self-radicalizing, and potentially going to commit some acts of terrorism.

They later went onto start community street soccer tournaments, jointly organized with the police and the neighborhood kids. Relations improved. 

They heard more stories of these self-radicalized youths, together with other worrying incidents such as drugs.

The costs of policing dropped. The community outcomes improved. What happened here?

For 5 years, the police officers had not managed to get into the community. 

They policed it well, putting cameras, arresting people, but they were always reactive, and never proactive.

What helped them to be more proactive, in allowing this healthy mixing between punk kid, and police?

I would argue that all it took was a person’s willingness to allow light, and dark, to mix.

You might argue that this has little to do with innovation. But if you look at where some of the most innovative ideas come from, they often evolve because

1. There’s some resource constraints.
2. Someone takes a chance to do something unconceivable to allow for a mixing of two disparate entities (like sitting with a street kid, and asking how he was, and playing street soccer with them).
3. The organizational head, and institutional power, takes a risk to run a bigger risk with this innovative idea.

Magic appears.

1 talk

Innovation is the willingness to allow light and dark to mix when faced with resource constraints.

1 tip

Before I started this business journey, I was known for being a black or white person. Things were either done my way, or they could take the high way.

But when I had to scrap around for business, I started to learn the art of seeing, and operating within the shades of grey.

Black or white in operating a business might have been:

1. succeed, or exit your entrepreneurship journey;
2. Focus on one segment, or diversify your business.

I’ve tried both ends. Initially I went all in on doing a training business, having no other segments, until I realised people were not going to hire a 25 year old with no white hair, moustache, and PHD.

Then I went all out to do training, writing, websites, Google Ad marketing, and that too resulted in us simply not being great enough at one thing to be paid alot. We had random hundreds flowing through, but not enough to sustain us.

The team broke apart.

In this iteration, I’ve learnt to think of it as flying a plane (I don’t know how to fly one, but I’m guessing these are the mechanics, and as always, don’t try this on the plane).

I’ve learnt to throttle up on certain segments when business demand goes up, whilst continually building the runway for the other segments so that it succeeds.

We actively mix the ideas - so that what makes one work, also is used in other aspects.

For example, because we do a publishing business, our experience with paper (yes, we know the exact gram of the paper you’d like to use), has helped us to advise clients doing annual reports with us on how they should probably use coated glossy paper, and stop using book paper.

When life makes resources scarce, it’s tempting to either go all in, or stop doing it. But over the last year, we’ve seen the wisdom of effectively hedging our bets. When demand is strong in the publishing segment, we devote time.

If not, we do the other segments, whilst actively wearing smooth a runway (hat tip Jonathan Haidt, from The Anxious Generation) where leads can still come in.

Want some innovation? Don’t think either/or, nor should you think about Jim Collins’ both/and framework, but rather, think about how you could throttle up certain actions, whilst smoothening the pathways for future strategies.