Translator: Claudia Di Lorenzo Reviewer: Muriel de Meo
When we know a secret,
we generally amaze children by telling them,
"A little birdie told me".
But actually whoever is only able to repeat such things
gets to be considered some sort of parrot.
According to farming tradition,
swallows are sacred animals,
the owl, however, is the bearer of bad news.
In Mozambique,
some tribes have learned to speak to sparrows
and they help them find honey.
People such as Icarus, and Leonardo da Vinci
were inspired by the flight of birds
and dreamed of eventually flying.
Crows from New Caledonia
have incredible abstraction capacities.
Using branches and trees, they can build the tools
they need to search for food.
Now, this implies enormous cognitive capacities.
Because actually, they know how to build them
just by having seen other crows use these working tools.
In othr words, they can build their working tools
without ever seeing the process that's needed to create them.
This phenomenon is extremely interesting,
because it allowed the evolution of such tools
as well as the evolution of the crows themselves.
This phenomenon was considered possible only for the human race.
Based on this,
please look inside your TED bag,
look inside, there is a little bag.
"Wait to open" is written on it.
Inside this bag you'll find six coloured bricks.
As I've just said,
crows know how to build their tools
without ever seeing the instructions to do so,
the experiment we'll do now is to try and do the same thing.
Think of a duck.
Have you ever seen a duck in real life?
If you haven't,
then surely you've seen one in some documentary,
in a cartoon, in a comic book, ok?
What does a duck look like?
What do their feet look like? What do their breast and neck look like?
Does a duck fly?
Imagine it, build it in your minds.
Now I want you,
with the six bricks in your hands,
to build a duck.
I'll give you about a minute, don't copy those next to you.
Please use your six bricks to build your duck.
When you've finished building it, hold it up,
so I can see who has won.
Now, please pay attention, because this part is extremely fun.
So, look.
Look at your ducks, look at those of the people next to you.
Hold them up, hold them up.
Are there any ducks that are the same?
Has anyone next to you built a duck like yours?
(Bustle)
What I've just had you do is an extremely interesting exercise,
I had you build a duck,
without giving you the instructions to do so.
I asked you to observe ducks,
I never said that there was a right and a wrong duck,
and it's most likely that when we look,
most of the ducks inside this theatre are different from one another.
But what I actually asked you to do is something more.
I asked you to use your mental model of duck.
You all have a mental model of what a duck is in your minds:
in other words, you've observed ducks in life.
There are lots of different ducks in the world, right?
There are many types of ducks,
but you synthesized them in your heads and simplified them into a model.
Now, your model does not have all the details of a duck.
You don't know how many feathers a duck has, I don't know,
but your model is enough detailed
to understand it is a duck and not a heron or a rooster.
Now, there are people who innovate just as you've done,
in other words, they are good at observing reality,
they know that there are multiple realities
and they manage to synthesise models in their minds
that allow them to produce products or services to people,
whether they are new, never seen before,
and most importantly, able to improve human lives.
This is what your creativity does,
it pushed us to create a wide variety of different ducks.
Now I'll throw at you one more exercise.
This is one of Picasso's many studies
where he tried to study and simplify the way reality can be depicted,
and he was able to produce, with one simple stroke, a simple line,
what essentially can be easily identified as a rooster.
So what process is this?
It's a further simplification process.
Mental models are very convenient because they really allow us,
with just a simple stroke, a simple detail,
to decipher reality.
There are people who innovate like this,
in other words they know how to look deep into things,
or rather, they know how to look deep into people's souls.
They know how to understand the essence of your dreams,
the essence of what you like most,
the essence of happiness.
And they are able to synthesize it
into something that we commonly call an icon,
a product, a service, something that you commonly use
and recognise by a simple trait.
Let's turn our little exercise into something a bit more complicated and fun.
If I had asked you to build a "non-duck",
what would you have built?
Would you have started with a plan,
or would you have started by moving your hands?
Now I'm going to make it harder:
what if I had asked you to describe to the person next to you
what an aeroplane is.
and she had never even seen one?
You might have told them: "An aeroplane is quite similar to a duck".
It can be the same colour as a duck, it more or less flies like a duck,
but it doesn't lay eggs.
(Laughter)
Therefore sometimes we try and use mental models
to explain to others something they have never seen before.
Let's make it even harder:
what if I had asked you to describe to the person next to you
something that in reality doesn't yet exist,
but it's something you want to create, like your innovative product,
What would you have told them?
Well, now it gets very difficult. It's difficult to conceive in your head,
elaborate what you are thinking,
and it's even more difficult to describe it to others
or let others help you.
There are people who innovate this way:
in other words, their minds are able to come up
with products, services, that are so innovative
that not only they're hard to think of, they're also hard to explain to others.
Now, how do these people do it?
How do they manage to bring other people on board?
How do they describe said things?,
Well, they are people who fully understand how things work in this day and age.
They know how to tackle things.
They have understood that change is today's zeitgeist.
Why?
Because this day and age is characterised by speed.
What do I mean by "fast times"?
Fast times are times where you always feel like you're late,
Or those times when those who have to create products and services
arrive on the market just a little too late.
While our times are fast,
they have also allowed us to realize something else:
the times we live in are "not linear".
What do I mean by "not linear"?
I'll explain it to you with an example.
Think of your grandparents,
and all the epic changes they must have lived in their lives.
I'm sure some of the changes our grandparents lived
were of really epic proportions and revolutionary for all humanity.
Of great impact.
But how many changes? Five maybe? Maybe ten in their entire lives?
How many changes did their grandparents experience?
Less perhaps.
Now think of yourselves, think of your children.
Analists say, over the next 20 years
the human race will change more than we did in the past 300 years.
So what do I mean when I say, our times are not linear?
It means that it doesn't necessarily follow a straight line.
A straight line makes you think,
tomorrow will be more or less like today or yesterday.
But everyone knows,
some lines aren't straight, but rather exponential,
if not totally unpredictable and unexpected.
Furthermore, our times are complex.
What does complex mean?
Complex system means, there are so many relationships among its parts
there's no room for simplification.
Nature is complex:
think of the forest, think of nature's ecosystems.
The human body is complex, our brain is complex.
It's not so easy, it's not even possible to isolate one part and simplify it.
Now, what is important within this complexity
is that the networks and connections
are their most important, interesting metrics.
Lastly, our times are marked by unpredictability.
Unpredictability has always been deemed, or has often been deemed by our companies,
a negative thing.
We tried to plan everything,
we have always been afraid to think that the future is unpredictable.
But in fact, unpredictability is a great driving force for innovation.
We learn this from Darwin,
he says that unpredictability allowed our species to evolve
and adapt to the world we live in.
So what should we do now?
Over the years, I have met hundreds of entrepreneurs
that are asking themselves this very question.
Some have understood what to do, others haven't yet:
some made it, some don't.
Everybody recognizes it is extremely difficult,
but there is something else that I see in every one of them,
two characteristics shared by all people who try and innovate today.
They have a deliberate, immense,
an extremely strong desire to be able to experiment;
and once again, a deliberate, immense and extremely strong desire to "unlearn".
What do these two things mean?
Now, we have said:
our times are marked by uncertainty;
and in our times, uncertainty is a positive metrics.
If you're unsure, what can you do? How can you react?
What can you do, if you can't always foresee everything?
A good idea is to start betting, instead of promising;
and to bet well,
a good idea is to start by taking one step at a time.
In other words, I'll take a small step
towards the direction I think I want to go in,
and then I'll ask myself how it's going.
If I ask myself how it's going, I'll ask others too.
You see this would imply being extremely kind
towards ourselves and towards others,
that is, I'd really have to accept asking myself how it's going.
Now I'm not saying everything should lack direction,
I'm really not saying
that winging it is more or less like having an objective;
I am actually saying, objectives should be reached one step at a time,
and at each step we continue to learn.
This need to learn is a second key term:
in other words, for years we have turned our companies
into learning organisations,
that is, we've started to think that learning is a good measure
that allows us to move with the times, and it's true.
Luckily this was the case,
luckily we realised that learning is important.
But at a certain point it also happened,
and some companies I work with do that,
that everything that they learned, be it ordinary data or big data,
everything that they learned
made them sometimes think they could predict the future.
Man has always hoped to predict the future,
but we all know you can't really predict the future.
We are not even able to predict tomorrow's weather forecast.
Therefore, probably,
instead of focusing on how to become learning organisations,
what I'd like to suggest
is to concentrate on how to become unlearning organisations,
in other words, sometimes it's harder to unlearn than to learn.
Unlearning implies moving into a slightly uncomfortable state.
Looking at the world, looking at the things you are doing
and realizing that, maybe,
what you learned for yesterday or for today,
will no longer be relevant today for tomorrow.
In other words, you can't apply old rules to new worlds,
and unlearning makes way for learning something new.
It takes a lot of courage to do it.
It really is an exciting challenge,
both for the entrepreneuring world and for the outer world.
Perhaps what you normally do in your life should be brought into the working world,
Why keep it out of your working life?
Now, the important question for us all
is the one we've asked ourselves at the very beginning:
what type of innovator are you?
Are you innovators that look at the world, acknowledge its diversity
and know how to add new products that will create even more happiness?
Or are you innovators who know how to look deep into human being's souls
and recognise the fundamental traits that all people have in common
and produce what we call icons?
Are you innovators who know how to experiment?
Do you know how to experiment and be kind
towards the results of your experiments?
Or are you innovators who know how to unlearn
and therefore sometimes realise
that you need to let go of some old traditions
to make way for new ideas and new methods?
Whatever type of innovator you are, the reason why you do it is important.
I mean, from my experience
I see innovators who generally don't innovate only for themselves
and they don't even innovate for innovation's sake.
You don't innovate only to change processes
and you don't only innovate to make more money either.
The main reason why you innovate is the life and soul of innovation,
it is the amount of connections you've known how to create around you.
It is the life line that drives you to innovate
as well as the measure of how well you were at doing it.
The more connections you have, the more you will, and did, innovate.
Never before has there been a better time to innovate,
and if you don't believe me,
pick up the ducks you created.
Listen to this thing, your smile while building them,
the smile that people next to you had on their faces while building.
Here, this is the measure
of how today is the day to innovate and create new connections.
Thank you.
(Applause)