Roy Amara coined the phrase “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”[1] Sweeping changes, transformations that fundamentally alter the way the world works, are easily discounted...
Humanitarian Innovation Jam, January 15-16, Washington DC How can we create healthy ecosystems for managing humanitarian innovation? We’re once again looking for humanitarian pracitioners, students, scholars, and private sector partners to converse and...
Managing innovation is terrifying. It’s terrifying for many different reasons, but here I’ll just outline four: 1) Expectations are huge; 2) Resistance to change is not insignificant; 3) The need for innovation in our sector is not small; 4) You have to manage...
In his book, The World After Midnight, Eddie Obeng talks about how ‘today, the current pace, scale and interconnectedness of change exceed our ability to learn.’ This means that failure – caused by uncertainty and complexity, as opposed to incompetence – is becoming...
As a reader, you will notice that I will use the term ¨Harmony” a lot of times during this blog. Like in music, the harmony (how each instrument interact with other in a certain time line) and the timing (when and how each instrument enters) are key elements to make...
