Lily Cole is no stranger to new ideas. In business as in art, experimentation is a component of success. Yet since 2013, Cole has been working on a larger mechanism of distilled experimentation; one which asks two potent questions. First, what if people coming together can bring meaningful change? And second, what if collective skill sets could help deliver experimental projects of global significance? In identifying the potential impact of the answers to these questions, Cole, along with Kwamcorp founder Kwame Ferreira, created Impossible.
Beginning life as a social network for altruism, Impossible attracted individuals wanting to offer time and expertise to others simply because they were able to. “The idea was to create a community of giving, based on our optimism in human nature,” says Cole.
Impossible has since evolved, offering its social network as free open source technology. It has also grown beyond the social network, and Cole describes it as “a group of creative, multidisciplinary people around the world, working on products that can guide change towards a future we want”.
A shift has occurred, though, and through her own openness to change, Cole has morphed the company into an agent of experimentation – one concerned with supporting clients’, not individuals’, desire for progress. “We have to be open-minded to alternative and myriad ways of achieving our wider goals – to be able to pivot,” she says.
This open-minded nature has enabled Cole to tap into the potential of others’ experimentation. She unearthed Wires, an eyewear retailer that employs workers in Harare, Zimbabwe. Its experimentation dates back to the 14th century, when people first turned strings of metal into a pair of glasses using their bare hands. This collaboration shows what is possible when great minds come together to push the boundaries. There is a willingness from Impossible to experiment, but also to acknowledge when the experimenting phase has been completed by another group of people.
Impossible helps to bring new ideas to fruition, with studios in San Francisco, London, Lisbon and Brisbane powering work on client projects with potentially far-reaching impacts. Its clients are concerned with promoting fair ownership, helping to align cancer treatment, fighting back against fake news and ensuring fair supply chains. What Impossible offers each is problem solving based on rapid iteration through “loops”, which allow projects to remain on track in achieving their goals.
While the clients each have an ambitious idea, Impossible uses collective skill and abundant energy in its approach. Cole’s succinct and naturalistic explanation of the process is refreshing. Loops are small experiments, she says. “Everything is an experiment until it is confronted with the reality of natural selection. That’s when we know if the experiment works.”
The loops, the experiments, clearly do work. For ethical and open smartphone enterprise Fairphone, Impossible’s loops provided design and engineering expertise to deliver an Android experience representative of Fairphone’s values. To help tackle fake news – in partnership with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales – Impossible launched crowdfunding for WikiTribune, the community-based news platform where professional journalists meet crowd-sourced fact-checks. For “kind insurance” app Kinsu, Impossible’s experimental loops provided early strategy, ongoing design, engineering and launch support.
That such support is being delivered to these ambitious projects speaks volumes about Impossible’s willingness to enable new ideas. It speaks to the power of the new, and of individual and collective experiments activated by a willingness for change. Yet perhaps primarily it speaks to the inspiration and experimental vision of Lily Cole herself. “Experimentation is at the core of what we do”, she says. “If we don’t experiment we aren’t able to explore possibilities, and that is what Impossible is about. You don’t know unless you try: life is arguably a series of experimentations.”
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