According to Fernando Pessoa, the dream is to see the invisible shapes

When we are confronted with the future of an organization, it may occur that we are virtually possessed by a contradictory drive. Legitimately, we wish to improve, but doesn’t improve mean conserve only, having more of the same? Involved in the obsession for improvement, we run the risk of diving in details. Owning a zoom machine, what we have is the prisoner decision to fine tune the details. Immersed in the jungle, we cease to understand what is beyond it. We feel the need to fly, our universe closes in itself continuously, we know less and less every time.

When this happens, the future of the organization is set: to stagnate, to fall behind in time, to waste away. Managements talk to their own buttons, pleased with themselves, but the signs are there, and the first ones can always be summed in a classical expression: the saturation of the model. The phenomenon may not be immediately apparent, but it will creep up silently until it is suddenly recognized and that is when it will evidence a severe crisis. If it is not subject to a painful surgery, it will never be fixed.

So, improvement must mean change, transformation, innovation. Instead of conserving by changing the detail, it must create rupture, cause tension rather than oil the machine. Instead of protecting the border of contact with the outside, it should embrace new borders. Instead of going by one design, it should dream of new ones.

Only tensions cause re-adaptation and only in re-adaptations are we able to progress for competition between alternatives.

Well, the good news is: INESC Porto is going to change.

The virtuously monolithic institution (that has already achieved so much!) will be replaced by a plural one. It will cease to be just INESC Porto and it will become INESC Porto Network. It will associate with other groups, from other schools, from other geographical places, with another history, with other paths of corporative culture. It will no longer be just its historical nucleus. The INESC Porto – Associated Laboratory network will be something different than what we are today, but we won’t give up being what we are.

INESC Porto will grow, but not into more of the same. It will turn into something new and that will be the secret to its strength, the ability to evolve, to transform, which is the best way to be faithful to itself.

The dream is to see the invisible shapes
Of the distance still imprecise, and with sensitive
Movements born of hope and a strong will,
Search out over yon horizon's icy rim
the tree, the beach, the flower, the bird, the fountain (…) *

Pessoa guessed what goes through our soul. We see the indistinct line of a new horizon and it is like the realities that we haven’t accomplished yet are already ours. What matters is we navigate.

* Translation by Prof. Mike Harland (1997)