PeopleToo - a Dream for Humanvation

At InspireChilli, we have one simple but powerful belief: that innovation really works when it works for people  - by people - with people.  It’s a vision for innovation that resists the cults of personality guru and process fad for a democracy of talent in which everyone has their place together.

Imagine the best dance party in the world, and note how the space and sound enables the people within it to create the unique rhythm and colour and connection of the moment.  The identity of the party, how the experience is designed, how its energy is influenced, represents a different type of innovation.  The DJs, the bar tenders, the party host, the personalities, the mix of styles and passions integrating in the moment, all represent how innovation should be carefully shaped through and  around the architecture of the people.  An innovation in which everyone seems to play an active role.

The future is shaped into positive energy when we build machines that people can not only drive but learn how to re-engineer into possibilities from which they and society can benefit.  This is not the innovation of monolithic, one dimensional products for mass consumption.  This is not the creation of shiny goods built by people who can’t afford to own them.   The future we want is a talent machine for all that creates a sustainable world.

How do we craft this grand design?  Innovation.2 – ‘humanvation’.  Put the lab within a lab and turn the disruptive, hot, amazing building power of innovation onto its own identity. The dream team for the talent machine should not be an array of modern business terms from ideation to process management.  The specialist competencies and tools within these areas are critical to learn from, but their current positioning as roles and types is part of an organisational logic-scape that has reduced the art of human innovation into the cogs of an engine driving us down roads that run people over.    The language needs breaking and remoulding into something closer to our hearts - the innovation we are all born with: our self.  How ‘humanvation’ works and does not work holds within it the secrets of the talent machine code.  The processes of how we learn to identify, develop and express who we are, with each other, through the complexities of the human ecosphere, holds within it the magic code for innovation to copy.  Life, as well as work, are the joint mirrors to harness and hone the development process until we become the Picasso of projects and programmes.

I’ve spent the last 20 years thinking through how to do ‘humanvation’ in various forms, trialing out approaches to build the talent machine, working with different skills types and resources to degrees of success and failure.  The secret I have discovered is not the next Prince2, but the new PeopleToo: how individuals can find within themselves and between themselves the ingredients to make innovation work for both people and the social/organisational structures they are part of.  The success equation is that the way we innovate must be held in equal relationship of purpose to what we innovate.  Nothing is in isolation. The challenge that social good needs to embrace is taking greater responsibility over the quality of space and music that entrepreneurs can create for people to dance their magic through.   Innovation is the opportunity to heat up our lives to 'humanvate'. 

At Inspirechilli, the dream is a future where everyone can control the talent machine.