Innovation is the life-blood of business and seems to be an intrinsic part of the human psyche: the history of humans is the history of new knowledge, new things and new ways of doing things.
The strange thing about innovation, though, is how incredibly difficult to is to do successfully.
For every story of success there are hundreds, maybe thousands of failures.
Thomas Edison, the prolific US inventor of the light bulb among other things is reported as viewing his failures thus: "I have not failed.
I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
" Not all of us manage to be so sanguine when contemplating a project that hasn't worked out as we had expected.
Should we try again or should we give up? It is one of the most difficult decisions anyone has to make and I find it helpful to mull on the words of two great humans; Einstein and Mandela.
One of the oft-used quotes attributed to Einstein is "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
" If what you have been doing hasn't been successful to date, wouldn't you just be insane to keep on trying? On the other hand Mandela is quoted as saying "The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall".
Climate change is currently one of the greatest problems facing humanity and it is proving to be very difficult to get the world to make headway with the changes that are necessary.
Should those who are campaigning for change simply give up or should they pick themselves up after each piece of bad news about continued rises in emissions, shrinking ice levels, loss of plant, animal and other species? Let's see if Einstein vs Mandela can be used as a decision making tool.
Einstein was a very clever guy: he transformed humankind's understanding of nature on every scale, from the smallest to that of the cosmos as a whole.
His most famous equation E=mc2 became the basis on which the atomic bomb was developed and other parts of his work underpin the development of quantum physics, which is an area that is still to be fully understood.
Mandela is also a clever guy.
A trained lawyer and possibly the most famous prisoner the world has ever known.
He became the 1st President of a fully democratic South Africa on his release and worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation.
He is a staunch supporter of the values of democracy, freedom, equality, diversity, reconciliation, and respect.
He is also a firm believer in people's ability to have a positive effect on others around them.
So, which to follow? Given that climate change is a particularly human problem and challenges us all in ways we have never had to contend with before, in the end it is Mandela's words that must resonated.
Climate change may be an 'everything' problem but it is simply is too important a problem to give up on.
Change comes through action and individual action is important to influence others.
The urgency is to engage ordinary members of the public to bring pressure on the political classes to find a solution that connects our economy and ecology in a positive cycle.
The underlying story that humans tell themselves is that what is taken from nature is just there: it is free to use.
This might have worked with a human population of a few hundred million but is not workable now.
Many species in the past have grown their populations, over burdened their environment and suffered the inevitable collapse.
Humans may we become the first species to do so consciously unless the campaigners can pick themselves up each time they fall.
But they need to take note of Einstein's advice too.
In what ways should the campaign be changed so that it is not simply to repeat itself? How can insanity be avoided? For me, we need to be more prepared to work with people as they are, rather than how we would like them to be.
Much of the climate message has been centered around the notion of 'fairness'.
This is a little unfortunate as different people have different ideas of what is 'fair'.
Some think even division is 'fair' others that division in proportion to effort is what constitutes 'fairness'.
(There is also a whole can of worms about what constitutes 'effort' but that is for another day.
) Being human, we want to compete and we want to collaborate even if that collaboration is just a way to compete more effectively with other groups.
But if we cannot find a way to collaborate on solving the climate problem there will be nothing left to compete for.
Many of the people I talk to are very down on the possibility of us finding a way to change the habits that have brought us to this situation.
I remain of the view that we need to look at innovation in our incentive system (i.
e.
how we account for money).
Earth's natural assets (soil, air, water, flora and fauna), and the ecosystem services resulting from them, make human life possible.
However they their daily use remains virtually igmnored within our economic system, the incentive system that has brought us to the current predicament.
If we consider these Ecosystem goods and services as Natural Capital, we would recognize that they are worth trillions of US dollars per year.
This Natural Capital consists of the foods, plants, water, health, energy, climate security and other essential services that everyone uses.
By understanding and accounting for our use of Natural Capital, we would recognize the true cost of economic growth and sustaining human wellbeing today and into the future.
We then have a strong opportunity to incentivize the change to the 'business as usual' outcome, which is currently on course for disaster.
Think it is impossible to overturn how we think about our relationship between economic activity and the planet? Maybe it is.
But as Mandela has also observed.
"It always seems impossible until it is done".