Week 20 in text, waking up people pretending to be asleep

The highlight of this week was being at the IOT Tribe demo day at the Science Gallery in London. 8 startups pitched to a room full of investors, VCs, and Corporate Venturing folks.

There were 8 early stage startups at revenue and pre-revenue stage. A quick line on them:

One particular startup in this cohort is very interesting, Missing-Link. Founded by Vihtori Lehtonen.

Missing-Link’s product is a set of sensors that can detect and pinpoint radio interference sources in real-time. Its service platform will give access to real-time and historical ether data and its mobile app will give visual location information on where the interference is happening.

Missing-Link is early stage, but one to watch-out as Vihtori is an experienced individual in the field of IOT and the problem is real. As IOT 4.0 industry grows, and cyber warfare becomes a real possibility, a solution like that of Missing-Link would be extremely useful.

IOT tribe partners
(c) Faizan Patankar

Story of the week –

On waking people up who are pretending to be asleep

I met the Director of an Arab bank in London and the discussion was on the topic of innovation. And he said something, which my wife tells me, could be from a movie. I don’t know. but it resonated with me.

Faizan, how do you wake up someone pretending to be asleep?

It was eye-opening.

You can wake someone up from sleep in different ways. Using an alarm, or nudging them, or in extreme cases in India, throwing a bucket of cold water on them.

But what if the person is awake, but only pretending to be asleep. Nothing will ‘shake them’ enough to ‘wake’ them up. They know what’s happening and actively chose to ignore it.

Now imagine doing that when trying to make a change. If the people who you want to accept innovation and change certain practices, pretend to be asleep, then you can run a number of exercises of proven programmes of change. But you won’t make the change happen, because the people are only pretending.

I certainly have learnt a huge lesson from that one line.

What do you think about it?

How do you wake someone up pretending to be asleep?