Unintended consequences
Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.
Expect the unexpected.
When we are working with new technologies and emerging conditions, unexpected consequences are ever-present, and sometimes a little frustrating! However, these moments also unlock the potential of human behaviour and can be leveraged to generate new business ideas.
Think about an unintended consequence you’ve encountered recently, as a result of a new technology.
Write it down.
Consider: how could this be a starting point for generating a new business idea?
Practice: brainstorming the new technologies your team uses that have unintended consequences
Decide to: invent a new business model for the new technology, working with rather than against innate human behaviour
Consequence or sequence?
Instagram was created as a virtual photo album for smartphones, but through the human desire to connect with others, it has the potential to affect something as deep as our longing for connection, our grieving for injustice, and our desire to belong. We may be dismayed by Google’s unintended consequences, like search bias, but we no doubt relish the ability to access the world’s information at our fingertips.
Who owns unintended consequences? The very word “unintended” suggests consequences we simply can’t envision, hard as we may try. However, the entrepreneurial mindset is built to harness unforeseen opportunities. Leaders today are considering a new ethos of innovation, one in which unintended consequences are rigorously considered at the outset and monitored over time to celebrate or mitigate them depending on their ethical impact.
Wishing you the most empowering unintended consequences this week!