Don't worry. I haven't gone all evangelical on you. But I have been thinking about forgiveness over the last little while. It came up in our SIX TelePresence session on City Innovation. And then again during a session last week with the federal "Social Trends, Policies and Institutions Committee". Basically, it boils down to the fact that there is no longer any room to make mistakes. There's no tolerance for uncertainty. This presents a pretty formidable barrier to creativity and innovation - if you can't make mistakes, you can't innovate.
I think we see it most in our political culture. We don't give politicians an inch. If a mistake is made, we pounce on it. We demand to know what went wrong, we ask for a resignation, or - in typical Canadian fashion - we call for an inquiry. We demand explicit promises and we won't tolerate a shift in planning when the facts on the ground change.
We also see it in the nonprofit sector. There has been an increasing trend toward project funding over the past 15 years. Nonprofits rarely get core support - instead, they are funded to deliver on prescribed projects. Putting aside a dozen other reasons why this is problematic and short-sighted, it's clear that this model provides no space for innovation. If organizations are exclusively funded to deliver a predetermined program, how do they innovate? How do they negotiate changing terrain? How do they respond to community needs as they emerge and shift? We need to leave space for creativity and innovation. (Instead, we're trapped in a fantasy land where outcomes are known in advance and our environments are static.)
Two recent news items give these thoughts additional oxygen. Last week, the Canadian and UK governments announced an intention to increasingly direct research funding toward projects with practical implications. Now I am totally in support of working to ensure public benefit from public funding. But here's the thing: You can't always predict the public benefit outcomes in advance. Sometimes you need to experiment. History is replete with examples of "accidental" innovation and development.
Last week also saw the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Willard S. Boyle. Boyle is a Canadian scientist who moved to the United States, where he conducted his research on fibre optics. He left Canada because he felt there was no space for experimentation. Our government didn't place any value on the work he was doing - work that didn't have a predetermined outcome or an associated business plan. Work that eventually led, in part, to the digital camera.
There is so little institutional support for experimentation, and even an explicit intention to clamp down on the experimentation that does exist. This is precisely the wrong approach as we wrestle with complex, dynamic and unknown challenges. We need space to try. And to fail. And to dust ourselves off and try again. We need to accept that some money will be 'wasted". We need to experiment. And we need to prepare our culture to accept and forgive the failures, so that we can get down to the business of solving the challenges facing us in all directions.
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