I like rumba classes. Which is odd, because I don’t enjoy crowds, and for me a crowd starts at four people. But at rumba the opposite happens: the more people, the better. Not because I like the crowd, but because it lowers the odds of anyone noticing my two left feet and my frantic attempts to stamp on imaginary cockroaches in time to something that, being generous, we might call music.
The trouble is I’m not the only one. Ten minutes in, the class is a show: some people are dancing salsa, others are performing a sort of rain dance (I count myself among them), someone is three beats ahead and a lady at the back is executing, with total conviction, the choreography of a different song. Everyone sweating. Everyone utterly convinced we’re having the time of our lives.
Until the teacher switches off the music.
“Spectacular! I love it. Where did you lot come from?” he says, with a smile that starts to worry me. “Just one tiny thing: how about we all do the same routine now?”
Some people laugh. Others look around for the culprit. And there’s always someone whose face says their artistic expression has been deeply offended. I avoid eye contact; I have enough on my plate with my feet. But meanwhile I’m thinking something I really shouldn’t be thinking in a rumba class: this is exactly what happens to us when we try to innovate.
Everybody wants to innovate. It’s one of the few words that gets a whole room to agree. People talk about ecosystems, synergies, the quadruple helix: academia, business, government and society dancing together to turn knowledge into solutions. Lovely. The trouble starts when the music comes on.
The business owner has a brilliant idea, but this week there’s a client who might walk, and next week the quarter has to close. Innovation, absolutely, but ideally once the cash flow stops behaving like a patient in intensive care.
Academia’s doors are open to everyone. It says so on the sign. Inside, things are a little different. I have been in more rooms than I’d like where everything came down to listening to the Doctor, capital D, lecturing on the heterogeneous environments of pedagogical synaptic speculation, while I wondered whether the rebellious tuft of hair sticking up from the crown of his head was a hidden declaration of anarchy, a secret invitation to defy the system, or simply a sign that he was running out of hair gel. At the end of the semester we would all rush to write a report on pedagogical innovation that, at best, is now gathering dust on a shelf.
Government is delighted with innovation too. It gives it speeches, calls for proposals and committees. The difficulty is that innovation involves uncertainty, and uncertainty has the bad habit of not delivering results right before an election. More than once I invited people who were supposed to be able to pull the strings for some interesting partnerships. I discovered that the only strings they cared to pull led to a bank account or a few more weeks of pension contributions.
And society, that guest everyone claims to represent, often finds out about the project once it has been designed, funded and approved. So we invite it to a participatory workshop to give its opinion on what we’ve already decided to do to it.
There are exceptions, of course. I know them and I admire them. But in most of the rooms I’ve seen, we are all dancing out of time, each to a different song, utterly convinced we’re doing it spectacularly. The results don’t say the same.
Years ago I watched an interview with a young man who had started a Colombian video game company. I don’t remember his name or the company’s, and I’d genuinely like to know what became of him. What I do remember is the question. The interviewer asked what he expected from the government to help his business. He answered without blinking:
“Just don’t get in the way.”
I can picture some very serious gentlemen shouting at the television that the youth of today are lost. The answer, though, stayed with me. Not because it was cheeky, but because of what it didn’t ask for. No money, no offices, no training, no tax breaks. He was asking to be left to work. In a handful of words he said what takes many of us consultants eighty pages and three workshops.
And he left me with a question that still bothers me: what has to happen for someone trying to build something new to see the institutions that claim to support him as obstacles to dodge? And worse: how many people decided not to try at all?
Ideas, mine at least, don’t arrive in solemn places. They arrive in the shower, in the steam, with water drumming on my head and a battery radio somewhere in the distance letting slip Miguel Bosé promising to be my bandit lover. And there it is. An idea. Not necessarily good, not necessarily original, but interesting enough to make me want to find out what would happen if I tried it.
Then I make the mistake of telling someone.
“Why would you do that? It’s really complicated.”
Or its finest variant:
“That already exists. And they do it better.”
On the outside I answer with all due diplomacy: thank you for showing me reality, I’ll be more careful next time, dear professor, you are the light that guides our way. On the inside, the thought is of a different calibre: this man couldn’t touch his nose with his index finger and he’s telling me what’s hard and what’s easy?
Now, to be fair, sometimes the idea is bad. Sometimes something better really does exist. Sometimes the person pointing out a difficulty is saving me months of work. There is a huge difference between someone who says “this won’t work for these reasons, let’s see how we solve them” and someone who says “that’s too hard, don’t bother”. The first one climbs into the problem with you. The second one closes the door and goes off for a coffee.
So far it all sounds very comfortable: the misunderstood young man against the institutions that won’t let him dance. But I have to tell another story, because in that one I wasn’t the victim.
Many years ago, the manager I worked for asked me to come with him to a meeting with other managers. High-level business, an important client and a problem I didn’t even know how to begin to understand. The ride in his car was dead silent. I imagined I was there by some quirk of fate, as filler. But in the lift, on the way up to the client’s office, my curiosity exploded and I asked, a little embarrassed:
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“Relax, kid,” he said. “I’m going to tell the guy not to even look at me, because I came with the master, the one who’s going to sort out his life, this one and the next.”
My nerves, already frayed, reached levels some seismograph must have picked up. In the meeting, the client asked for everything: GPS tracking, a real-time monitoring platform for their operations, a security system for their executives’ homes. Basically, for me to put a knife between my teeth, swing in on a vine and save the day. I didn’t know how to do any of it. I wasn’t ready.
And most importantly: I didn’t say no. I nodded. I sat up straight, in a sturdy posture, as if the matter could be settled by physical strength; to give you an idea, back then Fido Dido and I could have been mistaken for each other in the street. I said of course, it was obvious, there was no other way.
I walked out convinced my boss would say “don’t worry, we’ll put team so-and-so on it and sort it out”, that back at the office he would open a hidden door and out would come Rambo, saved all those years for an occasion just like this. In the lift, going down to the car park, he said:
“Right, so you’ll bring me a proposal to deliver for this client. I want the plan on Monday. You’re responsible for making this work.”
My soul is still in that lift. If anyone gets in today and hears an inner wailing that keeps repeating “but why me?”, that’s me.
Those projects, very innovative, very technological, very high-profile, didn’t happen, or at least not as they were pitched. My ability back then wasn’t zero, but it was very limited. They overestimated me, yes. But it’s also true that I let myself be overestimated, because saying “I don’t know” in that room seemed more dangerous than promising the impossible. That’s when I understood something I don’t like admitting: innovation doesn’t only die because others block it. It also dies because someone, to save face, says they know the routine.
Back to the rumba class. At first I thought the solution was simple: we all learn the same routine. But then a doubt crept in. Do we really want everyone dancing exactly alike? Twenty people perfectly repeating the teacher’s steps can make a beautiful show. But if nobody dares a different step, nothing new is going to appear.
Innovation needs coordination and it needs disagreement. It needs the Doctor’s accumulated knowledge, tuft of hair and all, and it needs the young man who hasn’t read the right authors. It needs rules, and people willing to change some of them. It needs the business owner to accept losing a little in search of something more, academia to step out of the bubble of its publications, government to stop seeing science as a black hole that swallows budgets without producing votes. And it needs each of us, starting with me, to say “I don’t know this step” before treading on everyone else’s feet.
The hard part is knowing when to lead and when to follow. Because inviting someone to dance is one thing, and letting them change the song is quite another.
These days I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were put back in that lift. And, above all, which challenges of that size I’ve already taken on without noticing. I don’t have a grand theory to fix the quadruple helix, or five steps to build ecosystems. I know people who would do that far better than me. What I have is curiosity, an appetite for learning and a habit of getting things wrong: I cling to ideas I should let go of sooner, and every now and then I still mistake enthusiasm for feasibility.
In my rumba class, after correcting us, the teacher puts the song back on. For a few seconds something wonderful happens: we all keep the same rhythm. Even me. Then someone rushes ahead, someone else turns the wrong way and I’m surrounded by imaginary cockroaches again. But now, when I get lost, I can look at someone who knows the step. Sometimes they help me. Sometimes we both get it wrong and laugh. And every so often, in the middle of the mess, something appears that nobody had rehearsed.
So if you’re doing something interesting, or you have an idea you don’t yet know how to pull off, I’d like to hear from you. I don’t promise to keep the rhythm. Much less to know all the steps.
I only ask one favour: if you see me stamping on cockroaches, don’t switch off the music. I’m still learning.