The Creativity Suite. Episode 165: NewWinnings
Interview with Erling Moen Synnes, Chief Information Officer at DNO.
One of the things I love about exploring human creativity across the globe is how slight differences in how different languages describe the creative process can gift you with new insights into how creativity works.
A few days ago I was in Norway and learnt about the Norwegian word “Nyvinning”.
It is the Norwegian word that covers the intersection between innovation, novelty, breakthrough, advance, and new development.
The Norwegian word has a profound meaning that these English words lack.
“Nyvinning” is made up of the word “ny” meaning “new”, and the word “vinning” meaning “winning”.
So, in Norwegian, when you innovate something you are “winning something new”!
A poetic interpretation of the word “Nyvinning” could be: “When the future wins over the past.”
NewWinning – which really should be the English word for “innovation” – is a better word for what innovation is, since it highlights that by doing something new we benefit and we win by doing that.
Nyvinning shows that an idea has beaten the old ways of doing something.
I learnt about this positive word in a discussion with Erling Moen Synnes, Chief Information Officer at DNO, one of Norway’s oldest and most internationally active oil and gas companies.
Erling is passionate about human growth, both for himself and for the people who work with him. At DNO he has worked in extreme situations – like oil fields in Northern Iraq or the rough seas of the North Atlantic. Regardless where he has worked, his mission has been to make other people reach their potential.
He said to me: “If you (as a leader) are responsible for other people, then it is your responsibility to move them to a new place. A better place. If someone who works for me says ‘I now dare to do things I did not dare to do before’, then I am happy”.
Erling is worried that we are losing our potential as people are too focused on just following procedures and processes. Not that procedures and processes are not important – they are, perhaps especially in the oil and gas industry – but we need people to think beyond that.
We need people to look for new ways to do things. Better ways of doing things.
We need the future to beat the present.
We need NewWinnings.
28
May