Harvesting Chaos to Create Opportunities and Drive Innovation
Ordo ab chao, out of chaos comes order. Most everyone thinks of chaos as something frightening and scary. This isn’t true, especially for innovation. When it comes to innovation, chaos is the best thing that could happen to the world.
Why should we embrace chaos rather than fear it? How can chaos be a time for you to create opportunities and drive innovation forward?
What is chaos and why are we in it?
In early 2020, many of us heard about a small virus outbreak in China. An outbreak that we all expected to be over quickly but were instead faced with long periods of worldwide lockdowns.
There’s no denying that the pandemic was a dark period in our recent history that created a lot of chaos in the world. However, many good things have since been developed and produced out of it.
As a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic, several industries have experienced enormous breakthroughs and transformations. Globalisation has taken leaps forward (in online meetings, the transport of goods, packaging services, etc.), businesses have restructured entire business models to continue operating in the new normal, and there have also been multiple breakthrough innovations in the vaccination field and for medical devices.
Chaos should not scare you – embrace it
When chaos enters our lives, it creates an opportune moment to take a good look and identify what is going well and what is doing badly. In other words, chaos causes reflection.
It reveals what is broken or worn out. It helps us to filter out unhealthy structures. It allows us to reinvent by bringing us back to our core so we can innovate upon what once was, keeping us all on the edge of innovation.
Here’s a tip to win you over: big corporations and heavy companies often won’t have the ability to move around freely in a time of chaos, which means there are tons of opportunities to be had.
How does chaos create the optimum environment for innovation?
Predictability is the killer of innovation, and everything is predictable in normal times. A predictable system innovates through optimisation, but as chaos throws everything into whack, it cuts through predictability and creates holes for innovation rather than optimisation.
Chaos also reveals the true opinion of consumers. In normal times, people consume out of habit. But as chaos upends normality and introduces problems (such as current inflation), consumers begin to rethink their choices and will select only what they really want. In this way, consumers are practically telling the market exactly what they truly want.
Big corporations won’t be able to follow the upheaval of chaos as they have to move their big and bulky bureaucracy. However, small companies and spin off ventures are more agile, allowing them to respond better and react fast.
How to harvest chaos
It's clear now that chaos creates the ideal environment for innovation. By understanding chaos, we can truly identify what needs to be worked on and improved. What methods can you use to harvest chaos?
- Analyse: Figure out what, why and when the user truly wants something. Explore the current world and analyse the ecosystem.
- Team up and act: Find potential partners in the ecosystem and (more importantly) teammates who you trust and want to act with. Start making assumptions and creating solutions to problems that the chaos has revealed to you.
- Test: Prototype and test what you have done. You won't spend a lot by acting quickly, but don't fall into confirmation bias about your own product. Prototype and test with users to ensure that your product or service will be able to diminish the chaos for them.
- Iterate: Take user comments into account and start the process all over again. Although you of course need to being your product or service to market at some point, be sure to keep on iterating afterwards.
This is exactly the kind of thing that TPA loves to do and excels at! Get in touch with us and let's do it together.
