How to Succeed in Your First Job

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.