Please take a minute to watch this amazing video. It’s a very moving story about how a poor community of 2,500 people living on a landfill in Paraguay spotted an opportunity to create instruments from trash. Aside from being an incredibly inspiring story, there are some powerful lessons here about innovation and the ability to “see” opportunity as a result of shifting your mindset. After all, since the community doesn’t have access to the proper materials, they had to shift their thinking in order to “see” the possibility of creating instruments from seemingly unrelated items.
Through my consulting work, I have done dozens of workshops with CEO’s of small and mid-sized organizations in which we’ve worked hard to shift their mindsets so they could see their businesses in new ways.
The first step in this process is coming to a deep understanding of what they currently have. To do this, we delve into what value they bring to the job the customer has hired them to do, the specific ways they are connected to their customers, the essential people, tools and methods they have to create that value and the partners who help them. In step two, we arrange all these elements visually on the business model canvas, and begin a process of developing a vision of what their organization is working to become.
This second step is always a challenge for CEO’s. These individuals have become so accustomed to the “as is” view of their businesses, that when we begin to talk about what the possibilities are, and what they can do to capture them, resistance begins to build. In many cases these are people who have envisioned their businesses and built each piece, hired each person and developed the processes that hold them together. Much as we lose our ability to see new things on our daily commute, these owners and leaders have lost their ability to see the resources and opportunities available to them.
4 Important Lessons in Innovation
The Landfill Harmonic presents a powerful example of making something good out of what many of us would regard as trash. What lessons can we take from this Orchestra in regards to the innovation in our own organizations and businesses?
1) Human creativity and hope are powerful
Favio Chavez, the group’s music teacher, along with symphony conductor Luis Szaran, wanted to start the group to keep the children of Cateura, Paraguay away from the drug use, addiction, abuse and child labor that has long plagued the community. But, in a region where the value of a violin exceeds that of a house, Chavez needed to be creative if he was to provide each child with an instrument of his or her own.
The positive changes that resulted from the orchestra were not only present in the lives of the orchestra members, but in those of their relatives, as well. Above all, the story of the Recycled Orchestra is one of the transcendence of the human spirit above its circumstances – that present difficulty does not need to prescribe future outcome.
What are the hard problems you are facing right now? If you knew that the human spirit and creative energy present would create a solution, how might you behave differently? How can you take what on the surface looks like a situation of hopelessness and find a way to frame it as a path forward? Who might be able to help in unique ways?
2) Leadership and context matter
Change takes leadership; someone to see, guide, encourage and empower. Leadership is present before tangible outcomes begin to emerge. Leadership is contextual as well; the right leader, at the right time, in the right place.
In this case, Chavez, an Argentinean who plays the clarinet and the guitar, opened a music school in Cateura in 2006. “One day it occurred to me to teach music to the children of the recyclers and use my personal instruments,” he explains. “But it got to the point that there were too many students and not enough supply. So that’s when I decided to experiment and try to actually create a few.” Chavez talked to Nicholas Gomez, one of the people who worked at the landfill, who found a ravaged violin under a box. And so Gomez’s new career as a luthier was born.
What act of leadership are you being called to right where you are today? What specific and unique background do you possess that could move you and your group forward? What vision can you bring forward that will allow others to unlock their potential?
3) Resources become available to us when we look through a new lens at life
Once the vision shift was made for our Orchestra, they saw things differently – the landfill became a source of raw material for the instruments. The days of boredom became time to practice and hone musical knowledge and skill. The talents of teachers and craftsman became tools to fill young lives with hope and direction.
Do you know the latent talents and ambitions of members of your organization? What are the parts of yourself that are persistently present, but don’t get expressed? How can you create a venue for you and your team members to take a low cost risk on something new?
What is it that your organization holds in low regard or discards? How might that material be utilized to become the resource for another individual or group?
4) Constraints lead to amazing breakthroughs
Finally, you need to admit that the shift from living on a trash pile to giving voice to the great musical works of history is made even more powerful by the fact that it was done without a budget or some enormous bureaucracy. It is a story of how constrained, organic, creative change that was unconstrained by the need for perfection, can take us to completely new and unexpected places.
What constraints are you currently chafing against that might actually be the key to your breakthrough? What conventional thinking (e.g., instruments are made of wood) is holding you and your team back?
Please take some time this week and rewatch the video and think through some of these questions. If you found this post helpful, please drop me a line or leave a comment below.
