I am on a peak-hour, return leg flight from Sydney to Melbourne following a full

day of meetings with clients where I shared the findings from our latest workplace

design research. The conversations were fruitful, with a particular focus on innovation

- a popular topic among organisations. We discussed the ways a workplace

could help unearth ideas that organisations intuitively know exist in the ranks of

their employees but can be awfully hard to uncover.

All around me, passengers mirrored my fatigue, they were talked out, idea-empty

and looking forward to getting home; the hallmarks of a homeward-bound work

commute. Settling into the hour-long journey ahead, I pulled out my iPad and

resumed reading Richard Dawkins’ book, The Magic of Reality [2]. Struggling to

concentrate, I caught myself re-reading the same paragraph over and over until I

eventually became immersed in chapter three: ＂Why are there so many different

kinds of animals?＂

Dawkins explains Darwin’s proposition about how the iguanas of the Galapagos

Islands came to be. In a nutshell, the geographical barriers between the islands

resulted in the evolution of three distinct species of iguanas who were cut off by the

sea. In perfect isolation on their own islands these populations never met, so their

genes had the opportunity to drift apart as they evolved in different ways to adapt to

their environments.