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I’II Fly For You. I’II Fly For Ingenuity.One hundred and seventeen years. Four months. Two days. That’s how long it’s been since that windy, freezing morning on the beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Freezing puddles, lashing gusts.
That was not, really, the best time to fly.
It wasn’t good or exciting to be honest. Only five people, including three who happened to pass by, were on that beach observing a mysterious object that looked like a glider. A strange glider, with an engine that unveiled a certain craftsmanship and improvisation in its assembly. Not even they, Willbur and Orville, believed in that engine. It was another failure, they thought, but there it was. “Flyer” deserved another chance.
Half past ten in the morning, give or take a minute. That’s when the Wright brothers decided to start the experiment. The story goes that Orville was at the controls of the wooden plane with canvas wings, lying on his stomach. Flyer was placed on a kind of sled and held by a cable. Engine on, brought up to speed, cable released, aircraft forward. Then twelve seconds in which the history of aeronautics was written. For the first time Flyer decided that it was time to stop tiptoeing and get up in the air. A twelve-second flight at a speed of 48 km/h – 12 considering the effect of the headwind – covering 36 meters at an average height of three meters above the ground.
One hundred and seventeen years later Flyer strikes again. It does it quietly, like that morning in the Carolinas, but once again it is able to write history. A piece of Flyer landed right there, today on Mars, in the Ingenuity drone in which there is a small canvas fragment of the Wright Brothers’ plane wing.
Symbol, omen, technicality. It matters little. It matters instead that this is “just the first big flight” of the first extraterrestrial aircraft, as defined by Ingenuity’s mission manager, MiMi Aung, a Burmese-American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Additional data and new images from Ingenuity’s first flight are expected over the next three Martian days, each of which lasts about forty minutes longer than the Earth day. Based on this material, Nasa notes, a second experimental flight is planned no earlier than April 22. If the drone-helicopter will also pass this second test, the working group responsible for the mission will develop the optimal characteristics for further flights. When this article will be published, we will probably already know the results of Ingenuity’s first steps. But the first attempt on April 19 was considered a “rocket launch” by Aung and his team. Used in its figurative meaning, in that “rocket” there is all the sense of the mission and, in general, of innovation driven by ingenuity and impossible missions. “Rocket science” is everything that at first seems like science fiction to us but through perseverance and ingenuity it can be achieved. It is no coincidence that the release of the drone-helicopter Ingenuity came from the “belly” of the rover that Nasa has called Perseverance.
Ingenuity and Perseverance. Here is the first lesson of skill mix directly from Mars.
Aung emphasizes again in statements in recent hours that for the April 19 launch, the team prepared as best they could to success, knowing that the flight could have been canceled and rescheduled. “In engineering there is always uncertainty but that is what makes working on advanced technologies thrilling and rewarding.”
Working on developing “solutions that others have only dreamt about” through an approach of continuous innovation in contexts of uncertainty combined with the right transformative mindset. Here’s the second lesson.
The cultural tensions underlying the reading of phenomena are important. So are the words that describe them. I remember that my English teacher constantly kept us away from the category of false friend, or those words that were falsely friends and that managed to mislead you in translation because they were very similar to others with a completely different meaning.
I admit that I also fell into that trap for a moment. The first time I came across the word “ingenuity” I thought for a while that it meant “naivety”.
I later found out it was anything but that.
What is the difference between people outside or inside organizations who look at a problem with many limitations and see unusual and new possibilities and those who look at it without seeing any way out? The difference is in one word, two at most if you prefer the Italian version. Ingenuity, AKA organizational ingenuity. Which has nothing to do with naivety.
The theme of “ingenuity” within organizations goes back a long way, as early as the 1960s, with an initial reflection by Thomas Kuhn, an American physicist, historian and philosopher, then refined by many subsequent studies that have approached the theme at the crossroads between individual capability and the distinctive traits of organizations.
Ingenuity can therefore be defined as a capacity, a way of thinking and acting that arises from the tension between needs and constraints that provoke the reconsideration of existing methods and resources, stimulating new connections and solutions previously thought impossible.
More recent definitions belong to the management disciplines in which Joseph Lampel, Professor of Innovation Management at the University of Manchester, is the leading scholar. In this perspective, the focus is once again on the ability to create innovative solutions using “limited and imaginative resources”. For Lampel, organizational ingenuity in fact denotes a change in the way people, teams and organizations think and act when standard processes and solutions fail or are no longer able to solve problems or meet market needs. Other economists and scholars of the phenomenon have juxtaposed organizational ingenuity with the term “frugal innovation” as a way of conceptualizing the skills, values, and processes for creative problem solving in scarcity and adversity. In this sense, frugal innovation is to be seen as “the gritty art of improvising ingenious solutions.” The concepts overlap, but scholars in both areas of emerging research agree that in our interconnected, complex, and changing world, where yesterday’s solutions have given rise to today’s problems and today’s standard practices and assumptions stand between tomorrow’s best solutions, a resilient, transdisciplinary mindset of propensity for continuous updating along with the skill set that distinguishes ingenuity from linear innovation is urgently needed if bloody scarce.
After all, even the Ingenuity drone-helicopter needed an update of its software before it took off. This fact, if at first it could have been considered as a slowing down agent with respect to the project roadmap, then turned out to be a critical success factor that made the first flight a success.
Reflect, update your maps and your thinking to be able to face unprecedented situations, challenges and projects. Here’s the third transformational lesson from Mars.
Understanding the role of ingenuity in organizational culture and reserving a prime place for it is the best thing organizations can do in contexts of uncertainty. In all contexts. We have often addressed the issue of returning to a deep reflection on culture as the first investment to foster innovation, and there is a framework that originated from Lampel’s studies and then evolved over time to develop the culture of ingenuity in companies as a basic skill essential to order, reimagine and reinvent the context in which they operate. The underlying assumption is that ingenuity is born in individuals and organizations through values and principles that support the “mental orientations, social tactics and skills necessary to undertake creative problem solving within institutional constraints”.
In an exercise of adaptation and updating of the model, possible thanks to the work on innovation and change that daily engages and fascinates us with companies, we tried to give our interpretation of ingenuity declined on the concept and practices of transformability.
Resilience. Allow yourself to be, rise to the challenge, persevere. The Wright Brothers know a thing or two about that
Passion. If you’re not working for a better future that is worth pursuing, what are you working for?
Empathy. Appreciate and listen. If you do this consistently, your ingenuity and that of the team will thank you
Intrapreneurship. It doesn’t mean not considering limits but working within them. The joy of finding new solutions is ultimately in having constraints.
Improvisation. It’s good to feel like an amateur. Try it every now and then, it’s an exercise you should indulge in.
Amazement. The “a-ha” moment are rare and precious assets in nature. Exploit them by devoting the right amount of systemic thought to them.
Adaptability. It’s not a bad word. Change can be liberating
Frugality. Developing ingenuity doesn’t require a lot of resources. Do zero-based budget projects ring a bell?
Failure. It’s pure value when it comes early, often, and cheaply
Simplicity. Doing more with less, doing enough to start experimentation, even small. “If you want to succeed in life make your bed in the morning.” If Admiral McRaven says it, we can at least allow ourselves to try.
Diversity. Of people, knowledge, relationships. It is to ingenuity as yeast is to bread. If there is no diversity, ingenuity will not grow either.
When I first came across the word “ingenuity” I thought for a while it meant “naivety”. I later found out it was anything but it. But to be honest, I’m not so convinced now. Because being ingenious means having the luxury of being a bit naive too. Keeping it simple, taking yourself as seriously as you need to, working in paradox and constraint as project allies.
Maybe false friends aren’t so false, then. When in doubt, I’m off to make my bed.