The Burden of Knowing Better
How institutional certainty obscures solutions within reach.
“We’ve always done it that way.” This is possibly the most dangerous phrase to be spoken in an organisation today.
Followed closely by:
“We tried that before, and it didn’t work.”
“That’s not what we do. It’s for others - in different organisations, sectors, or geographies.”
Salim Ismail, author of Exponential Organizations, talks about the corporate immune system kicking into gear. It rejects what is new, unknown, or unfamiliar.
Many of us have experienced it first-hand. In organisations - and in people - who experience an immune response, and shut down what is unfamiliar, they default to their lived experience or areas of expertise. Effectively, in their minds, they have pages of historic notes to which they continually refer.
And then there is a group of people who work with a blank sheet of paper. There is little lived experience. There often is no expertise.
This is youth. Those young enough to start without the burden of knowing better.
The UN’s International Youth Day falls this week. And we should pause for a moment to see what those aged between 15 and 24 are up to. Because they are up to some impressive things.
Matteo Paz - California, USA
NASA had years of archived NEOWISE telescope data sitting on its servers when 18-year-old Matteo Paz built a machine-learning classifier that surfaced 1.5 million previously uncatalogued objects in six weeks. No team inside the system had a reason to revisit a legacy dataset for an outcome beyond its original mandate. Matteo did.
William Kamkwamba - Wimbe, Malawi
Famine forced William Kamkwamba out of school at 14 because his family could no longer afford the fees. He taught himself electrical engineering from a library textbook. Using bicycle parts, PVC pipe, and scrap wood, he built a windmill that powered lights and a radio at his family’s home, and later supported irrigation for the wider village. No development programme had solved the electrification problem in Wimbe. William worked with what was locally available.
Kiara Nirghin - Johannesburg, South Africa
During a drought in South Africa, 16-year-old Kiara Nirghin spent 45 days in her kitchen turning orange peels and avocado skins into a biodegradable material that helped soil retain water for crops. Testing found that it absorbed more than 76% of the water applied to it. She had no research budget, laboratory, or specialist chemistry training. She saw the local problem and had access to agricultural waste that most people regarded as worthless.
Fionn Ferreira - County Cork, Ireland
Tired of watching plastic wash up along his local coastline, 18-year-old Fionn Ferreira ran more than a thousand kitchen experiments before developing a ferrofluid-based method that removed roughly 87% of microplastics from water using a magnet. He took an approach associated with oil-spill cleanup and applied it to an environmental problem that had not been addressed in the same way.
David Gathu and Moses Kiuna - Kenya
David Gathu and Moses Kiuna built a brain-signal-controlled prosthetic arm from salvaged electronic waste. Their estimated price point - around US$500 - stood against prosthetics that can cost US$50,000 in wealthier markets. Western medical-device companies generally design for insurance-backed health systems and have little commercial incentive to solve for users outside them. With neither formal funding nor conventional engineering credentials, David and Moses began with the affordability gap.
Often, the starting point for these breakthroughs, innovations, and solutions was a curiosity to create with the data, materials, and insights at hand. In many cases, a close view of the problem motivated them to work on a solution - often where existing systems, whether globally leading organisations such as NASA or international development organisations such as the UN, had not yet found a way through.
These impressive young people teach us the value of not being led by:
The past: how we have always done things. This includes a bias for what success looks like, without pausing to update it. It means remaining focused on stakeholders without checking if the circle needs to be widened.
The precedent: how many organisations are operating today. This includes a focus on productivity gains and the use of enabling technologies to not be left behind.
But rather, being led by what is possible.
What is possible for us to achieve when we go beyond our lived experience, and further than the limitations of our immediate, daily environment?
My clients start with a blank sheet of paper. On this sheet, we map out where they are and where they want to go, noting when the immune system kicks in.
It’s hard to calm an immune response by ourselves. That’s why we have doctors, hospitals, yogis, and fancy day spas. In our busy workplaces, we often don’t have a treatment for the corporate immune system at hand.
Maybe we should.
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Yes… love the blank sheet of paper metaphor…
It is definately a burden of knowing better… about the past. Thanks for this great post Sophie