Innovation of Meaning
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About this ebook
In his second book after the international longseller 'Creative Personal Branding', Jürgen Salenbacher shares his personal desire to design a new culture for teams, organisations and society with the aim of innovating meaning for all participants. He reflects on how economic, social and organisational anomalies and the traditional mechanistic mental world view, combined with the rise of algorithms and tech, is feeding our monkey mind.
Stressing the importance of a new culture which must act as the essential bridge between strategy and implementation in any interdependent biological network, he offers a way forward towards a more globally connected society. He looks at the concept of 'optimal play', describing it as a spiritual journey towards learning and enculturation for any team or organisation. Furthermore, he looks at how decentralisation enables equal relationships between peers, and how facilitation accompanies collaborations, both intellectually and emotionally, which let the individual genuinely contribute to a sustainable way of living and working.
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Innovation of Meaning - Jürgen Salenbacher
PREFACE:
What’s on your mind,
monkey mind?
It’s been a decade since I published my first book ‘Creative Personal Branding’ which provides the tools needed to cultivate creative thinking, personal development and branding in order to position yourself and answer what’s next. It offers a structured method to explore what you have to offer the world and how you could position yourself in it through ‘knowledge and imagination’, as well as communicating your personal ‘substance, style, conviction and grace’ to better connect with and contribute to the wider world.
Since then, my journey through life has been blessed with wonderful encounters with many people from diverse backgrounds all over the world. I have had the opportunity to travel, teach and contribute to the workings of companies and governmental organisations, as well as academic institutions. The process of researching and writing this book allowed me to personally observe and experience how groups and communities search for new ways to connect, collaborate and contribute in order to develop meaningful projects. Yet, it has been the exponential rise of information (e.g. fake news) and innovation (e.g. technologies changing the way we work) combined with social (e.g. people falling off the grid), political (e.g. immigration flow), economic (e.g. wealth distribution) and environmental (e.g. climate change) challenges, as well as unexpected events (e.g. Covid-19) over the second decade of the twenty-first century which have shaken not only the limits of capitalism and democracy, but especially our human capacity to deal with them, rationally and emotionally.
Our minds are under constant attack from a wide range of influences from ‘Trump tweets’ to ‘man vs machine’, all of which affect our physical and mental wellbeing. Moreover, the way we contribute and add value professionally is not only questioned; machine culture might also logarithmically multiply inequality. It reminds me of a cartoon that I saw recently with the title ‘The company of the future’. There was a man, a machine and a dog. Beneath the cartoon was the explanation: ‘The company of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to make sure the man doesn’t touch the machine.’ It was French philosopher René Descartes who first defined humans as ‘divine machines’. As a prominent figure in the rationalism movement which provided a method of understanding the world using reason to obtain knowledge, he developed the first concept of ‘androids’. This concept saw the merging of humans and machines, a notion which fascinates many of us today. However, this idea often results in the creation of overwhelming expectations on human performance. Humans are made to feel the technological competition and start questioning their purpose, soul and meaning.
The common understanding is that we are not machines, neither robots — though we sometimes feel like ‘robots’, not even androids — at least not yet. The beginnings of the ‘robot’ started harmlessly. ‘Robot’ comes from the Czech word ‘robota’, which translates into ‘forced labour’ and refers to the two or three days a week when serfs were made to work for their feudal lord for free. The current term robot was used for the first time in a play called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920 by Czech writer Karel Capek. It means a ‘humanoid machine’ or ‘automated gadget’ and, thanks to literature, comics and film, robots gained popularity. Although initially perceived as a threat, they were later portrayed as an invaluable aid to humans, representing modernity and progress.
Ultimately, we want to work with robots, but not for robots.We certainly don’t want to be replaced by robots. The ‘CTO - Chief Technology Officer’ of a ‘unicorn’ company introduced himself at the Mobile World Conference here in Barcelona by asking the audience in the crowded room if they knew anything about tech. I found this a daring question since I assumed you only spend that much money on the entrance fee if you are professionally interested in tech. Well, 80% of the people in the room were confident enough to raise their hands. The rest were advised that it was okay to stay but were warned that they might get lost after a few minutes. People laughed but were still feeling confident when the speaker showed a statistic about how many truck drivers will be replaced by autonomous trucks in the next decade. Three minutes later, when he began explaining the technical backbone of digital efficiency across different industries, the confident ones started turning pale, as if he was speaking another language. So that’s the case: ‘digital’ is a different language, and it explains by definition the ‘digital divide’¹. This is the divide between people who have access to information and communication technology and people who don’t; people who speak the new language and people who don’t. I would go one step further and call it the ‘digital consciousness divide’, the divide between people who know how to use, curate and apply digital information and communication and people who don’t. Our synapses — the part of our nervous system that passes signals from one neuron to another have a tough time developing the information metabolism required not to fall into the divide. There is a constant flux in processes shifting from data to information, knowledge and wisdom. Usually, we have around 60,000 thoughts per day, but nowadays a large number of knowledge workers reach more than 100,000 thoughts per day.² This is the point where we start to call our mind the ‘monkey mind’³, a Buddhist term meaning ‘unsettled, restless, confused or indecisive’.
Sound familiar? It’s also the reason for our ‘cognitive backlog’, or emotional resistance when the mind decides to shut down when full. In times of constant learning at the centre of our work, we need to consider this. We humans need silence between all the noise. We need better ways of connecting, collaborating and contributing. We need better ways of growing as people and focusing on our human needs. We need direction and purpose for the soul as much as we need sufficient sleep and healthy food for the body. We need other people to share what we have inside, as well as what we experience outside. We humans need more time to grow than machines, and we relish in the pleasure of a good chat, a little fiesta, an extended family meal and a healthy siesta. It gives meaning to our lives.
WE LOVE THE PLEASURE
OF A GOOD CHAT, A LITTLE FIESTA,
AN EXTENDED FAMILY MEAL
AND A HEALTHY SIESTA. IT GIVES
MEANING TO OUR LIVES.
For someone like me who lives at the junction between art and business studies, designing and facilitating new ways of ‘connecting, collaborating and contributing’ will be a life-long journey. For me, the holistic combination of creative and critical thinking, through my personal education and travelling, has allowed me to see the world differently, as well as gain insights into the sociological and political implications of our current ways of thinking and doing.Through travelling I have been able to look deeper into a range of societies, social initiatives and alternative businesses around the world. Through this, I have seen many social, political and economic anomalies. Despite this, I have also witnessed a sometimes overwhelming cause for optimism. There are, in this world, incredibly humble and inspirational people giving us little glimmers of hope for a bright future full of unconventional places and businesses. I think we are all searching for unforgettable, mind-altering moments that do more than carry us out of our everyday lives, but which also leave us with a profound and lasting impact. After two centuries of blind trust in scientific and economic models, without recognising our finite resources, many of us are now turning back to older sources of wisdom. A significant evolution of this kind is happening — quite in contrast to the chaotic state the world is currently experiencing. As I write this, I hope to inspire you to connect, collaborate and contribute.
Enjoy!
‘Equality of opportunity
is not enough.Unless we create an environment
where everyone is guaranteed some minimum
capabilities through some guarantee of
minimum income, education, and healthcare,
we cannot say that we have fair competition.
When some people have to run a 100 metre race with
sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed
to have a head start does not make the race fair.
Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary
but not sufficient in building a genuinely
fair and efficient society.’
HA-JOON CHANG
Institutional economist and author
images/img-20-1.jpg①
IT’S
NOT ABOUT
PIXELS
Where has equilibrium gone?
Growth hacking in digital economies
To innovation: a masquerade ball
Pareto: a new norm?
Search for solutions: decentralisation and privacy
Nudgings and behaviour economies
Barcelona is the place I made home through an elemental decision-making process used in most cultures and societies. I was torn between moving to Italy or Spain. To settle it, I flipped a coin. Barcelona it was. This life-changing decision came after the loss of one of my best friends in a fatal accident. This event forced me to stop and rethink everything in my life. It provided me with an opportunity to pause and search for meaning.¹ I had already journeyed to more than fifty countries at that time and had dreamed for more than a decade of one day moving to Sydney or Cape Town. However, the loss and grief I felt made it clear that I wanted to stay close to my friends and family here in Europe. Their love and connection gave life meaning for me. Living in Barcelona with my beloved wife over the last two decades, has allowed us to grow and blossom, personally as well as professionally. It is a cosmopolitan and economically active place with incredibly creative and diverse people from all walks of life. Hints of the future creep up at every turn, the zeitgeist of social and economic anomalies embedded in the long cultural history of the city.
While visiting the Björk Digital Exhibition at CCCB in Barcelona, I learned that the Icelandic singer uses data to find who’s in the audience at her concerts and so defines her playlist according to their preferences. I admire her playful quest for experimenting and learning to use digital methods to achieve intimacy between the artist and the user, to design a personal reality between both. Artists are always helpful guides for showing society what might be possible. The problem is that the quest for businesses to gain insights into big and small data is different, the psychology behind it more brutal. The desire to use tech to double growth and earnings with half the assets — people included — is what motivates many board managers. It is their ultimate desire, the epitome of how their companies should look when they reach ‘digital super condition’. Here is a phrase to help you understand this dynamic a little better: ‘your profit margin is my opportunity’.This statement from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos changed the whole game, underlining the race to eliminate inefficiency in almost all industries. I studied Amazon’s case