COMMENTARY
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION ASIA
When Innovation is Your Only Option: Lessons from an Octopus By Chris Schell
The 1859 Origin of the Species, written by English naturalist Charles Darwin is attributed with one of the world’s biggest misquotes: “It’s not the strongest species that survive nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”. Not that this matters to the humble octopus. An octopus doesn't care who did or didn't write it. As many of us would’ve seen in the Oscar Award winning documentary ‘My Octopus Teacher’, these creatures learn at an exponential rate, not only because they grow up solitary, but also because they don’t live very long, with most species living little more than a single year.
Immersed in a world of risk, octopuses don't survive by trying to turn sharks into vegetarians, instead innovation is their life-sustaining imperative.
The octopus is one vulnerable, soft underbelly ‒ but it is also one huge brain. It has cunning, wit and courage and an innate ability to innovate. It survives constant onslaughts and challenges by observing, adapting and mimicking ‒ changing colour, shape and texture as the situation demands.
Adapt or die Like all species on this planet, humans will continue to consume to survive, but it is how we consume and give back that matters. Every time we take up space to modify our environment, we impact the habitat of countless species that perish if they can't adapt, change or move.
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It should be ours too, if only we could recognise it. Innovation needs to run through our veins and become our natural way of being and doing, not something that is an optional extra. The perceived gap between creativity as a luxury versus immediate necessity is closing all the time. As the world population clock keeps ticking, we cannot afford not to innovate.
JUNE 2021
