Hope or Fear?

What are you buying? What are we selling? Hope or fear?

Innovation is about trying to change things for the better, and open innovation means doing so in public which really adds to the pressure.

The need to try to innovate openly can be driven by some very positive emotions – hope, optimism, joy, fulfilment. But it can also be driven by some very negative emotions too – fear, anxiety, jealousy, greed.

At 100%Open we fully subscribe to taking a human centred approach and striving to understand the customer needs and emotions in the work that we do. And that applies as much to the people we are working with as to with the projects we do for them.

We always see a mixture of motivations that encourage people to choose to innovate and inevitably it combines both positive and negative emotions, which is as it should be. But what we love about the work that we do is that it has to be driven more by hope than by fear, so long as you can overcome the cynicism that sometimes comes at the start of what seems like yet another initiative.

Carlos Queiroz, the manager of the Iranian football team who are currently exceeding expectations at the World Cup said to his team that we can either win or learn. In other words through the experience of playing in the tournament they cannot lose because playing the game on this stage is already a huge achievement in and of itself.

“We had only two possible results; we win or learn and learned a lot.” Carlos Queiroz

The same goes for open innovation. You can either win or learn. Not all experiments succeed. In fact most should fail otherwise you are not taking enough risk. But at the same time you have to believe that it is possible to make a positive difference and for your work to be grounded in a positive optimism otherwise it will never get very far. And it is that hope, grounded in process and tools and systems of course, that drives you through and can make open innovation a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So we salute you the dreamers, the pioneers, the risk takers, the change makers, and the educators. Thank you for sharing your ideas and for caring for each other. Choose hope!

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Photo credit: Naser Jafari

 

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