Innovation by walking through mud

Over the Melbourne Cup long weekend (yes, I know it wasn’t a real long weekend), I took my family and another family over to Lakes Entrance for four days of fun and frivolity. One of the activities we organised was a bush walk/navigation exercise through the Lake Tyers area.

Although I had planned the route to be a track because the average age of the kids was seven, it turned out that the track didn’t actually exist (nor did the bridge shown on the map!) and we spent the majority of our time walking along a slightly swampy shoreline.

The highlight of my day was watching the surprise, then horror, cross the face of nine-year-old Riley, when his shortcut across a particularly muddy patch sucked the shoes right off his feet.

You can tell kids not to walk though mud a million times, but really, they have to learn it for themselves. Or you could say it requires experiential learning, not academic.

In a world of universities extorting us to “dream large” and “go boldly” experiential learning is generally overlooked.

But learning by doing, is the source of most innovation in the world. For designers like Charles and Ray Eames, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and inventors such as James Dyson it was and is their competitive advantage.

It’s not all bad for academic learning though. Clearly it’s a much more efficient way of disseminating knowledge and accelerates understanding.

You couldn’t (nor would you want to) learn medicine experimentally rather than six years at university. Contrast that to experiential learning which is slow and expensive, fraught with failure, unstructured and difficult to share.

But time and time again inventors have proven that the ROI is there for experimenters.

So how do you take advantage of this in your business? In my experience:

Conversation
Conversation is a great way of sharing learnings. It pools together the bits and pieces on a topic that everyone has learnt, as experiential learning tends to be contained in stories rather than reports. I’ve found that formal and informal round table discussions are fabulous tools in the workplaces for gaining insight.

Unstructured Information Tools
Wiki‘s and blogs are fantastic tools for trapping learnings. Blogs give a timeline of discovery and Wiki’s allow you to evolve an understanding.

Networking
So experiential learning by yourself or just with your team is no fun. Open innovation truly means sharing, so get out and network. In almost every environment there are people ready to share their learnings. Consider the Hackerspace movement that gets together and explores manufacturing, electronics, software and chemistry. It now has groups all over the world, getting together and figuring things out.

Tinkering
There is no point conversing, recording or sharing learnings if you don’t have something to share. So let your people explore and tinker with your products and systems. Play is just tinkering with a smile on your face, and in case you didn’t know it, there is plenty of resources to help you gain understanding in emerging areas or traditional areas being deconstructed, such as Make magazine.

So try walking through the mud, it may be stupid, stinky and cost you a shoe – but you may also learn something that nobody has ever known before.

To read more Brendan Lewis blogs, click here.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club, Flinders Pacific and L2i Technology Advisory. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia and Vietnam. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.