IdeaFestival

Courage and discovery

While looking for something else I came across this December 2004 article by John McCain in Fast Company. It seemed plainly connected to the discussion here.

I create in part so that I might experience courage, without which the created thing is dull and tamed. Courage is one of the creative virtues as well as one measure of any worthwhile discovery.

Wayne
 

"Bisociation:" talent or strategy?

Arthur Koestler, a thinker about the process of thinking, suggested that "bisociation," an ability to "zoom in" and "zoom out" on a problem, is critical to discovery.

Richard Foster, whose paper "Who Designed Brunelleschi's Dome?" I recently read, suggested that elite chess players have this ability. They can expertly marry these two processes: "zooming in" on a large number of remembered chess moves from a storehouse of games in order to deduce the next logical move, while "zooming out" to pursue a strategic goal, which requires being able to recognize emerging patterns with very little data. I wonder how much of this is talent and how much can be incorporated as a deliberate and ongoing strategy.

Silent night and no returns

I'm on board with this sentiment from Seth Godin:

Never before in history have so many needed so little.

If good business is supplying what the customer wants, business must be awfully confused. Seth:

It seems as though we've marketed ourselves into a corner, where the only way to grow is to find increasingly narrow niches of decreasing utility. The consumer portion of our economy is now dependent on a four-week long debt-fueled race to buy the useless.

He says consumers can do better. I'm not sure, however, that marketers can show the way.

Wayne

Love and materials: fail gracefully

An interesting debate has broken out, touched on here and here, regarding the role of process in innovation. Monkeymagic has this take, which I found interesting for a couple of reasons. One, because Piers Young brings architecture into the discussion, and I love beautiful buildings and objects. Secondly, he's skeptical of process. Done badly it narrows choices without offering hope that what's left is better than what could have been.

Using the example of paper tube structures used by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, Young points out that good structures can be built with simple, modular materials and some perspective. These buildings can withstand earthquakes because they move with the earth. Moreover, a Guardian newspaper story on Shigeru Ban, referenced by Young, suggests we will use what we love:

The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.

This resonates with me because I love stone walling and stone walls. Central Kentucky, where I live, is blessed with stone walls lining many rural roads and pasture. Built without mortar, or "dry laid," they're resilient. And properly built, they fail gradually and gracefully. One stone moving might pull another stone out of place, but not entire sections. A mortared wall, by contrast, can fail in large sections.

Young wonders how simple and modular processes can build longstanding structures:

I'm not sure yet what I think about all this. I know that focusing solely on Process (capital P) is blinkered, and to be fair, I think many organisational architects understand this (see e.g. McKinsey's 7S model or Burke-Litwin). What is harder, perhaps, is finding the equivalent of those little paper tubes, the strong (but not necessarily rigid) structures or processes (small p) and the materials to support people in organisations. "Love and resilience" is a bizarrely hard sell on its own.

Without failure, sustained creative processes are impossible. So the question I'm left with is this: how will I fail?

Technorati Tags: stone+walls, Shigeru+Ban, Failure

Discovery is observing and seeing

As mentioned, I'm reading a fascinating book called Sparks of Genius, which describes a number of thinking tools employed by prominent creatives in history. One of the tools is observation.

Honestly, I almost didn't read the chapter since it seemed, well, so obvious. I'm glad I did. Here's what I learned:

• All five senses can be trained to observe and make incredibly fine distinctions.
• Of all the tools discussed in the book, observation is perhaps the most accessible. Hard work can make great observers of almost anyone.
• Mental expectations mediate perception. The mental picture of what we're seeking, for example, affects whether and how fast we find it. In other words, we can observe but not see. It's something I'll keep in mind the next time I lose my car keys.
• "Objective observation" is not possible since editing is always happening. Our preconceptions can be crippling or liberating.
• Observing is making sense of sensation.

Many outstanding writers had training in the visual arts. And many scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Mary Leakey had formal art training. I found this quote from biochemist Szent-Gyorgyi quite appealing because it summed up the value of great observational skill:

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Wayne

 

Books, living the full life

I just came across an interesting piece in Newsweek's My Turn column ( November 21). Alexis Deutsch-Adler writes of coming across the book collection of Mort, her father-in-law shortly after his death. She writes that by the time she met Mort he was 82, and was already succumbing to dementia. Consequently, she really was never able to really know him on a personal level. But his books opened up a window into his life and interests. She writes movingly about how books such as Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth or Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones" might have shaped his life and thinking. While many of the works in Mort's collection were biographies or history, much of it was fiction---which was also interesting.

We live in an age where a focus on the bottom line seems to crowd out time for reading anything, let alone fiction. Many busy people  go so far as to brag about the fact that they don't have time to read. How tragic and dangerous. Great books are timeless and as Deutsch-Adler writes "...deepen our understanding of each other" and the world. They provide us with knowledge, insight and wisdom beyond what can be learned just from experience, or reading P&L statements. Books are part of living a full and, in my mind "successful"  life. The passionate thinker Will Durant (in discussing great writers) said "When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding".

Kris

Thankful, thoughtful

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, thank is related to think. Both share the same root in a Proto-Indo-European language of roughly 5,500 years ago.

Have a happy Thanksgiving. Back on Friday.

"Innovation v. Design"

Here's a thoughtful comparison of "convergent" v. "divergent" thinking from a very interesting and new (to me) Danish web log on design and innovation called CPH127. The posting links to a paper, In Praise of Convergent Thinking.

While you're at CPH127, see the posting on Innovation v. Design, which makes a useful distinction between the two terms and features some brief thoughts from Larry Keeley, who is being referred to as the founder of the science of innovation. Go check it out.

Technorati Tags: Convergent, Design, Innovation, Larry+Keeley, ideaFestival

Innovation lacks idea infrastructure

Innovate on Purpose writes about the "innovation perception gap." Most businesses acknowledge that innovation and creativity are key to business success, yet idea infrastructures to support innovation have, so far, lagged.

As mentioned over the weekend there are two kinds of problems, presented and discovered, in a paper I read called "Who Designed Brunelleschi's Dome?" Presented problems have a clear problem statement, whereas discovered problems may not even have wide agreement that there is in fact a problem to be solved. It seems to me that the perception of the importance of innovation fits that description. The need for innovation is a "discovered problem" flowing from an intuition that more information is available to more people than ever before.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: idea+infrastructure, innovation

Make me perfect: Divine technology

Because any company worth $100 billion draws attention, one of the hottest games on the web is guessing what Google is up to.

So, for instance, Robert Cringley writes that Google's purchase of all that fiber is infrastructure for a nervous system with Google at its head. Fiber optic cable can transmit information at almost unlimited speeds.

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper.

Cringley calls it a Google-Mart strategy.

According to Nicholas Carr, Google is a wee bit more ambitious, seeking to create a mind with the help of a Google nervous system. A segment of technophiles, Carr points out, put a lot of faith in technology. Divine technology is a theme he's been spending a lot of time on lately. As for Carr, he's not quite ready to be debugged.

Technorati Tags: Nicholas+Carr, Google, Divine+technology