« Your Glass Ceiling May Look Like Comfy Job || Stop Interviewing – Start Auditioning! »
January 18th, 2010 by Leadership Catalyst

The Otter & The Oil Spill
Sleepiness & possibly alcohol-induced lack of attention by a captain led to one of the most catastrophic oil spills in history: the Exxon Valdez supertanker was sliced open and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the ocean.

For weeks the world was treated to the spectacle of oil soaked creatures dying tortuous deaths and thousands of volunteers desperately trying to clean up the gooey mess while highly trained experts & engineers struggled to contain the spill with the best high tech tools at their disposal.

Enter the outsider: Philip McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama. While watching the TV coverage of the oil spill he noticed that otter fur acted like an oil-magnet. The otters where dying by the score laden with large clumps of oil. The reason for this is simple: otter fur is engineered to retain oil easily, keeping the animal dry and comfy in the cold Pacific surf under normal circumstances.

Enter Curiosity
Piqued by curiosity McCrory swept human hair from his shop floor and stuffed it into a bag and threw it into a water basin filled with water and a gallon of motor oil. After 2 minutes the water had been cleansed of the oil which had been sucked up by the human hair in the bag!

Radically New Results
Further tests by NASA revealed that this new natural method of capturing spilled oil could have soaked up the whole Exxon Valdez oil mess in one week, saving a large chunk of the $2 billion Exxon shelled out to remove only 12% of all the oil spilled!

‘New Eyes’ Are The Name Of The Game
The biggest challenge of today’s companies and employees is the trust and belief in ’specialist know-how’. If I have not been educated to do X then I am not a certified specialist in this field, which does not allow me to have an opinion about it or even be curious about this field, that is why we have hired specialists to do X in the first place, isn’t it?

While it seems logical to rely on the services and opinion on a highly specialized group of individuals to deliver X, it is also dangerous:

The highly focused X specialists will eventually suffer from over-focusing & group think as much as from a lack of fresh perspective.

This is exactly what happened in the case study above, a total outsider, a ‘naive’ hairdresser who may not have been ’smart’ enough to make it through top engineering universities had the elegant simplicity of looking at the problem with ‘New Eyes’ and come up with a totally new approach.

P&G: Where Outsiders Are The New Insiders
P&G has caught on to a simple truth: the geometric increase of ideas, technologies and the resulting endless convergence of these into a myriad new products and possibilities are too much to be handled by a single company’s R&D team hired for the purpose of understanding it all and developing new solutions.

On the contrary: the company-hired R&D team will sooner or later fall prey to it’s own group-think and become blind to many of the new ideas and trends.

The solution: P&G has given out a simple directive->50% of all innovations introduced by P&G must have their origins outside P&G! This directive forces the company to stay open, to constantly see the world and themselves with New Eyes and to avoid the ‘we are so smart’ trap.

Celebrate Your New Eyes->They May Just See The Truth
Give yourself permission, go back to your company, look around you, notice all the things that can be improved, from small to big and become a consultant in your own right: write an opportunity cost study on what it would mean to change it and have the guts to present it to top management.

This is the way of the world to be: the heroes of today are not the eternally loyal who patiently wait for their hard earned pension to roll in, the heroes of today are the people who are outsiders and dare to creatively re-invent the world!