In 1920, the Band-Aid was invented by Earle Dickson, an employee of the fledgling Johnson & Johnson company, whose wife was constantly cutting herself in the kitchen. The accidents occurred frequently enough that he finally decided to make a ready-to-use bandage that she could apply to herself. Laying out a long strip of surgical tape, he placed small pieces of gauze on it at intervals, and to keep the adhesive from sticking, he covered it with a piece of cotton crinoline. Dickinson mentioned his invention to colleagues at work, and thus sparked one of the most successful commercial products in history.
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Indeed, many innovations have as their root source some form of just doing it âgiving something a try, experimenting, just to see if it will work. Returning to the example of the 3M Post-it Notes, Spencer Silver described the original genesis of the adhesive:
The key to the Post-it adhesive was doing the experiment. If I had sat down and thought about it, I wouldnât have done the experiment. If I had really seriously cracked the books and gone through the literature, I would have stopped. The literature was full of examples that said you canât do this.
People like myself get excited about looking for new properties in materials. I find that very satisfying, to perturb the structure slightly and just see what happens. I have a hard time talking people into doing that. Itâs been my experience that people are reluctant to just try, to experiment âjust to see what will happen.
Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, youâll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and thatâs what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if itâs lucky.
To aim for zero harm in complex systems such as hospitals is not the same as aiming to erase human error. To err is human. Error will always be with us. But we can design social systems that make everyone aware of the inevitability of error and poised to catch and correct it before it causes harm. That means understanding that Swiss cheese holes sometimes line upâdespite being separated by time or distanceâto create a tunnel through which complex failure flows unimpeded.
A system for innovation
How do you increase the chances that a failed adhesive turns into a brilliant product? With a system designed to bring curious risk-takers together. Encourage and celebrate boundary spanning. Provide resources and slack time. Normalize intelligent failure and celebrate pivots. Declare that you want a significant portion of your companyâs revenues (or schoolâs curricula or familyâs activities) to come from new and different products, courses, or experiences. Successful innovation does not come from the lone genius. Importantly, each of these familiar elements of innovation is reinforced by each of the others. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Hereâs a story about past strategic decision: Nokia once made rubber out of dandelions. They were actually very good at it; a Finnish Air Force plane which crashed into a lake in Karelia during the war in 1942 was recovered in 1998 with its tyres still inflated. Because they made rubber, they made insulation for electric cables. Because of that, they got into the telecoms industry;* for a while they were the worldâs biggest manufacturer of mobile phones and today they make complicated switching equipment.
*I confess â this is an oversimplification. Nokia did dozens of other things and itâs very hard to trace the timing and logic of its entry into various different industries. Basically the only principle I could extract from its corporate history is that if Finns need something, Nokia would usually have a go at making it.