The book has been available on online platforms and in bookstores for a few days now. new book by Gianni Previdi, with an openly provocative but also stimulating title: Innovation is a disobedience that generates value. Where the future meets the present, published by goWare (ebook 6,99 euros; paperback 20,00 euros).
The work represents the latest effort of an author who, with a holistic view of the present and the future, combines different disciplines to offer a profound reflection. The book resumes the themes treated in the previous essay, which is also full of stimuli: The Homo Sapiens 3.0 Dilemma. Exponential Technologies: End or Means? goWare 2023 (ebook 9,99 euros; paperback 22,00 euros).
This new work also seems to draw inspiration from a fundamental intuition of Martin Heidegger who wrote in a 1960 essay: “The consequences of technology are anything but technological”. This principle, according to the author, applies to both people and organizations, such as the companies with which he collaborates closely in his role as advisor.
We asked Gianni Previdi to tell us about his book, which certainly presents challenges, but can also stimulate fundamental reflections for any activity. Below, the text of the interview.
Where do you intend to lead the reader with this decidedly provocative title that recalls the pirate flag that Steve Jobs had raised on the building where the Macintosh was conceived and created?
“My main aim is to accompany the reader (entrepreneur, manager, startupper, student) with methodological examples (foresight and business design), suggestions such as that of designing an ambidextrous company”.
Wait a minute, what do you mean ambidextrous?
“I am referring to a company capable of orchestrating the dual activity of exploration and exploitation. A project that leads to a “divorce” between research oriented towards tomorrow’s customers and development that is instead oriented towards today’s customers, to arrive at a new “marriage”: between foresight and research – exploration – on one side and between development and marketing on the other – exploitation”.
Are there any practical cases in your speech?
“Of course I am. I am within a path that will see how from an idea born from the exploration of possible futures, the idea of innovation takes shape, becomes convincing, close to its introduction into the market, therefore able to generate value for the company, but also for society, including awareness of the impacts that doing business inevitably has on the planet”.
I see that the theme of innovation is central throughout your speech.
"Of course, the discriminating condition is to have full awareness of the urgency of change and innovation. To innovate, you also have to be willing to disobey the rules."
Tell us a little about the meaning of this “disobedience” which is one of the leitmotifs of your work.
“Disobeying the rules is not for an indeterminate pleasure in itself, but simply because they are no longer useful, they chain our imagination and creativity, they lock us inside the self-referential thought of the already known and of “it has always been done this way”, they take away our sight of possible horizons”.
So what should we do? It's not a simple thing.
“We must then implement positive-sum innovations (for business, for society, for the planet), capable, ultimately, on the one hand of not destroying what exists and works (that is, not stupidly stubbornly insisting on the mood of the moment: “disrupt or die”), of unlocking what exists but no one yet sees or does not yet know how to enhance because it is anchored to the old rules of the game, and on the other of throwing open the windows by observing the horizons to see and create what does not yet exist”.
Do you mean that sticking to the present is like putting yourself in a straitjacket?
“We must move away from the present that often condemns us to see things with a gloomy vision based on the scarcity of opportunities, and instead we must become aware that possible futures are pregnant with potential. But we must have the courage to disobey!”
This idea of airing out by opening windows is suggestive.
"Yes, we must open the windows, unlearn the old pre-digital era and acquire new skills in reading social and market dynamics. Le Goff said in this regard that a prerogative of man is to invent new things and then use them with the mentality of previous eras".
And this has its own application for companies, with which you have been working for many years.
“Of course, business management is required to see what happens in other business sectors, to read people's social minds, that is, to go beyond the moment of purchase: what happens before and after is a potential source of meaning and value, on which to identify ideas for innovation”.
How do we understand that we have somehow disconnected from the future?
"For example, when you can't provide customers with what they need, that's when the spark of the next innovation appears, without following competitors and always running the risk of being late. But to understand it, the only way is to go into the trenches of the markets: in companies, on construction sites, in points of sale, on social media, in restaurants, in hotels, in airports, on the street. In other words, don't just rest on the "data", the statistics, but get your shoes dirty".
“Going into the trenches…” is a suggestive image, but how is it possible to take this step in the difficult situation of everyday life?
“It is important to institutionalize foresight (imagination) and business design (creativity) sessions in organizations, to establish innovation teams (connect and stimulate the intelligences that are in the company) as an investment in the future, so as not to suffer it when it crosses the present. The abilities of imagination and creativity are innate faculties in people that are expressed mainly in the first years of life. Unfortunately, as we become adults, for various reasons that are explained in the book, these abilities have atrophied”.
That's what you try to do in your professional activity too.
“My job is to facilitate these training sessions for imagination and creativity, to generate insights on which to develop innovative ideas (of products or services, new approaches to the customer, business models that generate value) with the methodologies of foresight and business design that in many years of experience I have simplified to make them practicable immediately, after a short workshop”.
Now explain to me and our readers how you developed this idea that “disobedience” can become an act of creativity and innovation. It is not generally seen as a positive response to a need.
“In ancient cultures, it was firmly believed that genius, imagination and creativity were not the prerogatives of human beings, but were only available to the gods. In Greek mythology, the discovery of fire was due to Prometheus who, as a titan defender of humanity, had stolen it from the sky to give it to men, so that they could begin the path of progress. Unfortunately, Prometheus' transgression was punished by Zeus, who condemned him to eternal suffering. Greek mythology is populated by many other innovative geniuses, such as Daedalus (which in Greek means "skilled worker"), creator of the Minotaur's labyrinth, and his son Icarus, who, flying too close to the sun with magical wings woven of wax built by his father, fell mercilessly following the melting of the wax in contact with the heat of the star. The Romans, who were also far from emancipating themselves from this dependence on the divinities, considered the “genius” to be someone who was protected and inspired by a Being of a divine nature”.
By this you mean that there is a virtuous connection between disobedience and change that you also find in other moments of human development.
“As history teaches us, the power of imagination and creativity have allowed homo sapiens to survive and prosper since the dawn of time, starting with the cognitive revolution (70.000 years ago), then with the agricultural revolution (12.000 years ago), the scientific revolution (500 years ago), the industrial revolution (200 years ago), up to what we can call the digital revolution. Several authoritative studies have shown how the capacity for imagination and the “rate” of creativity decrease rapidly as a person gets older. Is it due to inevitable biological factors? Or rather to environmental, cultural, social factors that suffocate and atrophy these capacities? They took something away from us when as children they taught us to draw and color within imposed boundaries, the exact logical-deductive sciences (Descartes) taught us to divide and not to join the dots”.
Connecting the dots was also an obsession of Steve Jobs, a great innovator.
“Yes, we must train ourselves to think in a way that knows how to play in dividing and uniting, a tension between opposites that Calvino described in The Cloven Viscount. Educate ourselves to the critical capacity to look beyond, to focus not on the ball but on the game, to imagine possible trajectories or bold game plans. Henri Poincaré said, creativity is uniting existing elements with new connections, which are useful”.
“Imagination au pouvoir” is also the refrain of the 60 movement and of the counterculture of the XNUMXs, the culture from which the personal computer revolution was born.
“Aristotle already said that imagination (or fantasy) was a type of bridge between sensations and thought, offering images without which thought would have nothing to nourish itself. Kant also maintained that imagination is fundamental to the human mind, not so much or not only as an interrelation of our sensations with the faculties of the intellect, but as a generator of creative ways of thinking, a concept that was later taken up by Romanticism. Leonardo da Vinci already imagined human flight; the Wright brothers, in December 1903, moved from imagination to feasibility by showing the entire world a man flying on a vehicle with wings: from that moment on, humanity would no longer look at the world horizontally, but as eagles do”.
Eagles, precisely. Can imagination also be the antidote to the power of computing machines that many see as a threat?
“In fact, the lost capacity for imagination and creativity – which also requires mental effort – passively delivers us to the computational capacity of “machines”, delegating to them the effort of imagining the future (prolepsis, anticipation), of combining elements (in a field of helpless data), of giving us results without “effort”, finally obeying algorithmic prescriptions, resigning ourselves to being peripheral terminals of machines, as in Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight (the last novel in Our Ancestors), whose protagonist remains a prisoner of his heavy armour to the point of being emptied of it”.
A sort of mechanical Turk in reverse?
“More or less. I have the impression that, by following this trend, man is starting to metabolize the “machinic” logic, settling into convergent thinking. It seems that contemporary man has instead resigned himself to an unreflective attitude (increasingly waiting for the answers vomited by machines, rather than on the effort of generating unconventional questions), far from the construction of meaning”.
How would you conclude this speech which has decisive implications for humanity?
“As I have already argued in my previous work “The dilemma of homo sapiens 3.0” published in 2023 again with goWare, we have two types of intelligence: exploratory and combinatorial intelligence that actually works on a given field. We are exactly in the capacity that we have delegated to “machines”, which, thanks to the algorithms of the so-called artificial intelligence and computational power, are able to quickly explore and combine tsunamis of data according to deterministic and syntactic procedures, where however only human intervention is able to assign them a meaning. Then we have creative and transformative intelligence that is able to create new fields, new hypotheses, new scenarios. And this faculty is the prerogative of humans, including the ability to disobey the status quo”.
Thanks Gianni and we look forward to your next work.
. . .
Gianni Previdi He founded and directed consulting companies since the 1980s. Today he capitalizes on his experience as a trainer, advisor and coach on value innovation processes, inspiration and training of internal teams, strategic design of corporate cultures.
