Summary
In Chapter 6 Woodhouse discusses the idea of risk in innovations. He presents the two forms of dealing with risk: the Precautionary Principle and Intelligent Trial and Error. The Precautionary Principle allows us to decrease the harm done by a product even if the inventors do not know the likelihood of it, whereas Intelligent Trial and Error allows innovators to pinpoint potential problems and their probability and stop them before it enters the market. He argues the key to success is maintaining flexibility in innovation. The general process for products starts at a high flexibility in the design state and slowly decreases through testing, etc. By the time the product is sent out it has little or no flexibility to change or account for any problems. By implementing strategies like phase-ins and tackling multiple approaches to one problem at once, as innovators we can intentionally add flexibility, decrease risk, and cope with problems that occur gracefully. He concludes by discussing the potential problems we already have in place that prevent us from seeking this approaches, mainly our Legacy Thinking and stubbornness.
Analysis & Synthesis
Woodhouse began by stating that good versus bad innovation "depends in part on how those with greatest influence approach their tasks" (69). I was convinced the chapter was going to highlight the poor decisions of leaders of corporations. However, throughout this chapter Woodhouse focused on examples of how inflexible our society is. In terms of the Precautionary Principle, which he explained as based on how we do not need to know the likelihood of something to know if it is a fatal risk, he described our insurance systems. Homeowners know that there's a possibility that the house may burn down or flood, which is enough to put the safety of insurance in place (70). This is an inflexible process in that "precautions will not prevent problems, but can make them less costly" (71). The Precautionary Principle does not decrease risk in any way, it just lessens its harsh effects. A similar case extends to manufacturing. Originally, government officials would have to go
to court to prove pesticides unsafe. The government instead employed a law so "manufacturers are now required
to demonstrate prior to marketing that their products do not pose 'an
unreasonable risk'" (71). Once again, the pesticides themselves have not been made any more flexible during their process so as to eliminate more risks. Instead, they are merely required to show they are not catastrophic. Here, as Woodhouse provided in the beginning, the bad innovation is in the hands of the head honchos who decide what "unreasonable risk" is.
Once an innovation is out in the world the consumers ingest it to a point that screeches any available flexibility to a halt. This is a time sensitive matter. Woodhouse's main example was cell phones. This really drove the point of our society's inflexibility in for me. What if cell phones were found to cause brain cancer? (72) I know many people who would just keep using them. After all, how can the thousands of people and systems that rely on cell phones be expected to magically disintegrate this technology from our daily lives? It's simply impossible to even fathom how the world's technological systems could make that change. I truly believe that as consumers we have been brainwashed into this mindset by an inflexible society. Consumers take successful or popular innovations and drive them into the background, the framework, of our daily lives. What if vacuums were suddenly deadly risks to us? Or refrigerators? I have a strong feeling that the people effected would do what this system has trained us to: sit and wait for a new innovation to come and save us.
