When is the Time to Innovate?
I have listened with interest to the discussions surrounding how to respond to the global financial crisis. Amidst the clamouring noise I heard one message which, whilst unsurprising, is still, nevertheless disappointing. Many suggest that we now just tighten our belts, and just keep things ticking over "until conditions improve". We should stop all spending on research and just do what we already know.
To this I ask the question framed above - when is the time to innovate? We have just come through a period of great wealth in Australia. As a country we became very comfortable, but the economic rationalists suggested that we should save that wealth for harder times. An admirable concept - but we were told that we should not spend money on research. Yet the paths to future wealth all go through the road of innovation and research. Australia has built it's current wealth on the sale of primary goods. Our industry has been demolished and sold off over time. We are left with a country that is primarily dominated by primary industry and tertiary services industries - many of which repatriate their profits to other countries.
The key to our children's future is to innovate. Can someone tell me when the best time to do that might be?
Of Accountants, Project Managers and Long Term Thinking
During the past week I was asked to sit in a value management workshop for the design of a new facility for emergency management. While sitting in the workshop I was struck by the short term viewpoints which seem to dominate our thinking as a society. As discussed elsewhere in this website, the design of new working environments needs to incorporate human considerations in its design. There is a fine balance between form and function and the need to provide work environments in which humans can act and work effectively for sustained periods of time. This is no more evident than in the context of emergency management centres where high information workloads are combined with long hours and high impact decision to create difficult working environments.
During the workshop I was struck, however, by the dominance of short term thinking which seems to dominate our present modes of thinking.
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