By now, everyone knows Banksy's patriot statue at Waterloo Place. The man marching into the abyss with a flag wrapped over his face. Genius.
The political reading is the obvious one. But that conversation is not for this platform, so I will leave it there.
What stays with me is the layering.
We all carry a flag. The extremists carry one thick enough to cover the world. Most of us carry something thinner. Bias, we call it. Thinner still, unconscious. But there is always one, somewhere, between us and what we are looking at.
In my industry, the flag is innovation itself. We get excited. We want to do good. And the excitement is exactly what stops the hard questions from getting asked.
What is the downside? Who carries it? What is this assuming that nobody has checked?
Innovation theatre. Individual drive, no structure.
The giveaway is the bookkeeping. The excitement lives in one process. The lessons learned, if they happen at all, land in a different file under a different name months later. The flag never came down between the two. And, let's not forget, the knowledge database somewhere.
ISO 56001 is the discipline of keeping the flag from blinding you. Not less innovation. Innovation that sees what is in front of it. So the learning happens before the step, not after the fall.