It wasn’t built in a day, but all roads lead to it, and when you’re there, you do as they do… we’ve all heard rather too much about the “R” word at LCRIG over recent weeks, due to explosive levels of excitement from a certain person, but Paula’s chariot has now whisked her away for a well-earned and thoroughly deserved break in the Eternal City. As a consequence, you have my view from the rolling foothills (or possibly just the marshy flood plain) this week.
The LCRIG Sector Insights team has been extremely busy on several fronts of late, not least in relation to setting up the LCRIG Artificial Intelligence Task Group. As you may well recall, AI was identified during last year’s LCRIG innovation survey as the primary emerging area of interest across the sector, and was also subsequently identified in our most recent member’s survey as the most critical area that our LCRIG members felt we should focus on. Well, we’ve listened and responded, and we are thrilled to announce that the expert panel that will be coordinating the AI Task Group over the next 2 years is now in place and that an onward programme of themes and activities has been developed.
We will be introducing our fantastic expert panel and esteemed Task Group chair in the very near future, as well as sharing details of the forthcoming Introduction to AI webinar with our member’s and providing more details around future Task Group activities, so do watch this space!
In order to keep your AI appetites sated in the meantime, please take 5 minutes to complete our fun quiz in order to avoid missing the opportunity to find out which famous robot you most closely resemble based on your attitudes towards AI related innovation.
The Importance of Failure
Finally, a short reflection. From our recent work on numerous LCRIG Sector Insights initiatives and, beyond that, through our engagement with colleagues at numerous industry events, the themes of risk aversion and risk avoidance keep coming back.
A sub-text to risk is failure as, ultimately, it is often the perceived possibility of failure which creates risk aversion and encourages risk avoidance in the first place. Indeed, “failure” is part of our universal experience – whilst never directly desirable as an end in itself, it nonetheless helps us to build resilience, teaches us to cope with setbacks and helps us learn to overcome adversity, all of which help us to obtain perspective, to persevere and to develop… At the risk of sounding trite, failure eventually makes us better at things.
And this is certainly no different in principle in the context of innovation. As a local authority respondent succinctly stated in our Innovation Survey last year, “we need to understand that failure is not failure – learning from unsuccessful innovations is equally as valid as learning from those that work”, and, as another survey respondent put it “we need to be prepared to take the risk and accept failures along the way for the benefit of the future end”.
However, in practice and aside from the barrier that risk aversion creates, we often come across a different barrier in our work – a general reticence to share experiences of “failure”, despite its importance for the benefit of innovation being universally acknowledged. So conversely, if we don’t share failure, how do we learn and improve? How can we change the perception that less successful applications are “bad” or negative? How can we remove the sensitivities and incentivise sharing the learning that the less successful applications of innovative solutions can bring?
It certainly isn’t a simple answer, but as we continue to explore some of the issues around innovation generally and AI specifically we will endeavour to consider how to remove the taboo around perceptions of failure so that, by better understanding what doesn’t work, and why, we can better learn to manage risk, rather than avoid it.
…Enough of the heavy stuff (for now!). Next week, Paula will be back, refreshed and no doubt bursting with stories from her travels, as well as her usual brilliant insights from the world of transport technology and innovation.
Daniel Cullern,
Head of Sector Insights