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The Challenge

The challenge we face in deliberately orchestrating – both evoking and transferring – ingenuity, is the fundamental problem we face as human beings: unconscious incognizance.

Unconscious incognizance is the inescapable reality that we don't know what we don't know. More pertinently, we don't know what we need to know to get the results we want to get in an increasingly complex and challenging world.

This puts us in a constant state of facing challenges that exceed our capabilities. It’s hard to come up with new ingenious solutions. It’s hard to convey new ingenious solutions. It’s hard to understand new ingenious solutions. It’s hard to implement new ingenious solutions.

On top of this human condition challenge, we are the victim of two compounding factors:

1. New Zealand’s challenge – marginal gearing: we’re marginally geared (even outside of recession conditions) by economies of scale, remoteness, natural resources and the lack of cheap labour. Natural Kiwi ingenuity has enabled us to punch way above our weight in spite of this problem, but that natural ingenuity is insufficient to address the compounding impact of the recession challenge we currently face.
2. The recession challenge – negative gearing: negatively geared confidence and investments, driven by macro factors beyond any single entity’s ability to control or predict. This challenge has a massively compounding impact on New Zealand’s already marginally geared situation.

We have to solve the problem of unconscious incognizance – not knowing what we need to know – if we want to secure the dramatic improvement in productivity we need in order to weather the recession relatively unscathed – or better still, to fully capitalise on the opportunity it offers. We have to have a way of deliberately orchestrating ingenuity in the face of unconscious incognizance.