Innovate to survive
You hear it all the time, life is tough, we have a food, health, climate, housing, migration, poverty or some other crisis. We are all doomed unless we do x, y or z.
There is no doubt we need to innovate to survive, but how do we get the right innovation?
Now I am not a builder so cannot help with the housing crisis but I have been involved in growing food for most of my eighty six years so I do know a bit about how to grow food.
Victory gardens
As a toddler I was used as child labour in one of the great innovations of the time, Victory gardens which are sadly one of the great forgotten triumphs of innovation and change.
It was crisis time and sadly sometimes it needs a crisis to sweep away the old thinking and allow a change to occur. People, almost exclusively women who had no experience in growing food were given crash courses in growing food and were let loose in groups to dig up any available land where grass was growing, verges, lawns and Donald Trump please note, even golf courses.
And it worked and soon much of the fresh food was being produced by these female land armies.
It was a time of crisis and people responded, changed the way they operated and were victorious.
Today’s food crisis
We are now in another food crisis, we may not see it as the shops are full of food, but look at the people in the shops, count the number of people who are overweight, the number with a diabetic amputation, there are actually eight million diabetic amputations a year and each amputations costs about $40,000.
Multiply 8 million by $40,000 and you get a big number with lots of zeros. Now you and me are paying for this through our Government taxes and this is due to food. Now tell me there is no food crisis and there is no need for change.
Human beings are a highly successful creature for two reasons, we are intelligent and naturally cooperative. All our great creations are because we work together as united teams and we no one like to upset the apple cart by saying we are doing this wrong.
So let me stick my neck out by saying we are food system is wrong and we need to change it before we are in an even deeper crisis.
Innovation is a process
Now I have been in the innovations business for a long time and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators but sadly innovation is seen as some act of extreme brilliance but it is not. It is a process and a skill that has to be learned, just like playing a violin.
The rules of innovation were laid down over a hundred years ago by one of the great innovators Thomas Edison.
First stage is to study everything that is known about the topic, then put the books down and define what the problem actually is.
Almost certainly there are some preconceived ideas or paradigms which are widely accepted, but are wrong.
These old paradigms, or way of thinking, need to be replaced by new paradigm that work.
Innovation is not about some brilliant idea that comes by magic but by changing paradigms, the way we think and getting people to change the way they think is the biggest challenge any innovator faces.
The calorie paradigm
Let me give you one example of a paradigm that is firmly entrenched but it just plain wrong.
Virtually every book on diet we say people get fat because they consume more calories then they consume. It sounds so obviously true so how can it be wrong?
It sounds convincing because eating more than we consume is the mechanism that people get fat, but it is not the cause.
The cause is failure of the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies and decides how much fat we should store. It sends out signals so we feel hungry and then eat more than we consume.
Are you looking for evidence? Look at the number of people who go on a diet, loose weight then a few months later they are as fat or even fatter than before. A total failure.
GLP-1 and out intelligent control system
I am not a proponent of GLP-1 but looks what happens when the start using GLP-1 which is a hormone, which our bodies naturally produce, and stops us feeling hungry, it is part of the natural intelligent control system which regulated our bodies.
But take this as a synthetic hormone and people stop feeling hungry and eating and turn into broomsticks.
Why people should want to be broomsticks and whether it is healthy to be a broomstick is another question but it shows that people get fat and sick because of instructions from our intelligent control system and not simply because we eat more than we burn.
