Innovation with a Conscience

A simple declaration by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell provokes and illumines a HUGE decision-point for leaders today, as we seek innovative ways to address humanity’s multiple challenges here on “spaceship earth.”

By William Miller

 

Note: I was invited to give an 18-minute TEDx talk in Jacksonville, FL on “Innovation with a Conscience.” It was very warmly received, but alas, to my surprise, there had been numerous technical difficulties that interfered with the ability to produce a quality video. Fortunately, they were able to capture a high quality audio of the entire talk. You can read an edited version of the talk below, or listen to it with photos here: Tedx talk that never saw the light of day.

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I still remember the chair I was sitting in on July 21, 1969, as I watched astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. I was thrilled and enthralled. But little did I know how much that moment would change the way we see our lives and our work today.

Imagine having the opportunity to travel to the moon and seeing the earth floating in space… What impression does it make on you? What thoughts and feelings do you have?

In 1971, Edgar Mitchell was another astronaut to actually have that experience. Years later, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with him at length about his round-trip journey. The most poignant moment of that conversation was when Edgar shared the personal transformation he experienced as the astronauts were returning to earth:

“See­ing Earth and our whole solar system against the background of the cosmos had a very profound effect – an overwhelming sense of being connected to all things.”

“What came out of that experience was an enormous sense of responsibility that goes with the power of creativity. And that means letting go of fear. Automatically that brings this deeper sense of love and responsibility for one’s self, surroundings, environment, and planet.”

He summed up the conversation by saying:

“We went to the moon as technicians. We returned as humanitarians.”

I realized later that the “we” he was talking about was not just astronauts or the space agency, but also humanity as a whole. For the first time ever, a representative of humanity stepped far enough off the planet’s surface to see ourselves as fellow passengers floating in space on what Buckminster Fuller called “spaceship earth.”

The shift from technician to humanitarian is a powerful portrayal of what it looks like to innovate with a conscience – innovating not just as technicians, but more so as humanitarians who:

1. Are connected to all things
2. Accept the responsibility that goes with the power of our creativity
3. Are proactive rather than reactive… willing to let go of fear
4. Feel a sense of love and responsibility for one’s self, surroundings, environment, and planet

These “ways of being” are grounded in human values such as honesty, caring, doing no harm, being responsible, and respecting others. These values are found across all cultures and time; and as humanitarians, they guide and motivate our innovative initiatives.

Today we face a crucial choice point:

• As humanitarians, will we put our conscience and good character in charge of what we innovate, why we innovate and how we innovate?

If so, that will bring out our best as human beings and generate healthy sustainable life on this planet.

• Or as technicians, will we act without giving due consideration to the larger interests of humanity and the environment as major stakeholders?

If so, an innovative hell of unintended negative consequences can break loose. For example, the goal of trying to feed a fast growing population has also led to innovating new chemicals that are toxic to our groundwater and food chain.

Which way will we go?

This choice point involves every one of us! In a simple definition, to be innovative is to strive to do things new, better, easier, or different, and generate a positive benefit. In that framework, we all have the potential to be creative and innovative in our life and work. It’s in our nature. And that’s the good news as we seek innovative ways to address humanity’s social, environmental, political, technological, economic, and educational challenges!

What’s important is to focus our innovative potential on what really matters: innovation with a conscience.

To illustrate the poignancy of the choice point we face, I’d like to share a story of my father as he was on morphine when he was dying of lung cancer… One morning, as he was having a rough time with the cancer, he told me that he had been up all night looking at his life “as if watching a series of videos”, and repeatedly asking himself:

“If our lives are filled with the results of what we choose, why do we choose what we choose?”

That same morning he made perhaps the biggest decision of his life: he told his doctor that he didn’t want any more morphine unless the pain became too difficult to bear at the very end. I felt so proud of him.

You see, he was a lifelong alcoholic and he was choosing to face the end of his life fully conscious and sober, rather than choosing to hide from the reality of his condition. In my eyes, he had won the battle of his addiction.

We face a similar choice:

• Do we choose to innovate a future that feeds our addiction to unsustainable material consumption and self-centered gains?
• Or do we choose to innovate our future in a fully conscious, uplifting way for all of us?

This is not a trivial choice. Consider this story of a university professor in Bangladesh in the 1970s who wondered, “Could there be a new way to provide banking and credit to the rural poor?”

With that question, Muhammed Yunus and the Bangladesh government launched the Grameen Bank Project (“Grameen” means “rural” or “village”) with the triple aim to:

1. Extend banking facilities to poor men and women
2. Eliminate the exploitation of the poor by money lenders
3. Create opportunities for self-employment in rural areas

Yunus’ approach required many, many innovations in banking practices. With its micro-loans to poor people, the Grameen Bank does not require the normal credit check, contract, or collateral. Instead, it creates micro-communities, where each borrower joins with 4 or 5 others in a group that supports each person to behave responsibly and repay on time.

As of October 2011, the bank has had over 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women. The recovery rate on loans is almost 97%. You can compare that to the recent repayment rates on home mortgages in the USA and Europe to see how outstanding that is.

Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in recognition that: “Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Microcredit is one such means.”

On the other hand…

Over the past decades we have innovated many financial products designed to help people invest in their future. But instead, they often splurge on material goods and gamble with their investments, creating economic tsunamis such as the one in 2008-2009. At that time, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, told the US Congress that he was in “shocked disbelief”:

“I made a mistake in assuming that the self-interests of organizations made them best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity… The free market did break down.”

Willis Harman, former regent of the University of California and Senior Social scientists at SRI International, once estimated that less than 3% of all international monetary exchange goes for actual products and services rendered. The rest is all speculation – a global casino for societies addicted to more and more stuff.

So I’ve asked myself many times, “What is being taught by society, business schools, and others that has taken us off course towards innovation without a conscience? And what is the antidote?

My research has led me back to Adam Smith, the 18^th century grandfather of modern capitalism. He once famously wrote that as people pursue their own interests in business, they are “led by an invisible hand” to have a larger impact that was beyond the focus of their own “micro” intentions.

Adam Smith was firstly a Scottish moral philosopher. He had a stringent stipulation about what is needed to guide that invisible hand, to have positive rather than negative impacts: following our moral faculties! As he wrote…

“Our moral faculties were set up within us to control all our senses, passions, and appetites, and to judge how far each of them was either to be indulged or restrained.”

“By acting according to our moral faculties, we pursue the most effective means for promoting the happiness of mankind…”

“This disposition to admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise or neglect persons of poor condition…is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

“ ’All for ourselves’ and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the dominators of mankind.”

Adam Smith was saying that the “invisible hand” must be guided by our moral faculties – our conscience – and not by our self-centered “passions and appetites.” This is what we have overlooked, neglected, and ignored over the past decades and centuries.

How can we break out of this kind of ‘What’s in it for me?’ thinking… and innovate based on what Edgar Mitchell spoke of:

• Feeling connected to all
• Being proactive with the power of creativity
• Letting go of fear
• Feeling a deep sense of love and responsibility for ourselves, our organizations, our society, and the planet

It starts with having the courage and confidence to take a stand and ask the questions that convert “What’s in it for me?” into “What can benefit us all?”

For example, I was talking with the head of an IT company in India that was developing a new online portal initially for young women ages 18-24. They called the project something like “The Girls of Gujarat.” I asked the executive what kind of impact they wanted to have on the young people who would come to that portal…

• Would the young women get more encouragement to buy the latest fashions, to find a new boyfriend, or to “fit in” to somehow be more popular? Or would they get encouragement to discover their purpose in life, to see their beauty from the inside out, to gain self-esteem?
• Would the company seek advertisers who are out to manipulate young ladies into buying more and more “stuff”? Or would they seek advertisers who provide positive messages about the inherent goodness and self-worth of each person?

These are the kinds of challenging but affirming questions that support “innovation with a conscience.”

There is evidence that this shift in consciousness is slowly sinking in with business executives. In 2019, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs from over 180 major USA corporations –  declared that “stakeholder primacy” had taken over from “shareholder primacy” as the core, fundamental purpose of business. In essence, shared benefit rose ahead of self-centered profit.

While it takes time for this kind of shift in principles to form into policies and practices, the evidence is emerging. We not only have “triple bottom line” reporting for financial, social, and environmental performance, but also a new interest in “purpose-driven” corporate paradigms.

For example, when Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia in 1973 to make outdoor sports wear and gear, he set a single purpose in motion:

“Patagonia is in business to save our home planet.”

Mary Barra, Chairperson and CEO of General Motors, has stated GM’s mega-purpose this way:

“To create a world with zero crashes, to save lives; zero emissions, so future generations can inherit a healthier planet; and zero congestion, so customers get back a precious commodity, time.”

Neither of these purpose statements can be achieved by a single enterprise. And that’s the point! They’re having to work with other partners – businesses, government agencies, NGOs, etc. – towards a higher social good that intrinsically motivates people to give their innovative best.

From decades of conversations we’ve had with business leaders around the world, we can confidently say that executives like Yvon Chouinard and Mary Barra are becoming more and more common. And that transformational moment of seeing ourselves as passengers on spaceship earth is becoming more and more a part of our daily consciousness.

In the same way that we cannot stop the momentum of globalization and social networking, innovation with a conscience (i.e., innovating as humanitarians, not technicians) is becoming an unstoppable force in the evolution of humanity.

So the call now is to follow our conscience in what we innovate, why we innovate, and how we innovate.

I leave you with a question that you can ask yourself daily as you face opportunities and challenges for bettering your life, work, organization, and society:

Where am I coming from as I seek to make things new, better, easier, or different?

• Is it scarcity, fear, and self-interest?
• Or is it responsibility, love, and feeling connected to all?