Page 130 - The Resilient Organization

Sisu: Resilience as Inner Strength 117

EXTREME INNOVATION

A way to exercise sisu during more peaceful times is to practice extreme
innovation—that is, a way to escape the incremental and go to the
extreme of what is possible. Extreme innovation is also innovation in
extreme conditions. Such a (return) visit to the frontier edge can help
people understand the ultimate consequences of particular actions and
help them come to terms with perhaps unlikely but still possible out-
comes. Beyond a real trip to a place like Afghanistan to test one’s sur-
vival capacity, extreme innovation means exploring what is absolutely
the best and/or worst case or simply the most-out-there possibility or
occurrence of the phenomenon of interest.
Extreme innovation means breaking away from incrementalism—
going far beyond the linear increment or improvement. Strategies for
extreme innovation include following a particular path to its logical end
to see its extreme or final consequences, exploring the phenomenon
3
through its possible grotesque manifestation (like caricatures in car-
toons), and finding the outlier—the person or event that is as far from
the average as possible.
Try to find an innovative solution to the problem in extremely
resource scarce conditions. These extreme examples can be good ways
of finding out one’s tolerance limits and hence test one’s sisu. Sometimes
a jester, a person whose function is to poke fun or make comments that
are so true no one else could state them, is needed, as explained in the
section “Corporate Jesters.”
Some strategies for practicing extreme innovation:

• Visit either a place where people live on virtually nothing or other-
wise a place that has very tough conditions.
• Consider the grotesque (cartoons do this in the form of a caricature).
• Determine what is (logically) the final case if the path suggested is
followed.
• Find the outlier—the case that is as far out there as possible.
• Study the problem in extremely resource scarce conditions—how
would you solve it there?
• Employ a jester (see the section “Corporate Jesters”).