Results tagged “creativity” from Eccentric Eclectica

I shuffled off to an early morning Citizens League meeting on Thursday to hear Alex Cirillo Jr., vice president of community relations at 3M, talk about the Principles of Innovation. I went because I’ve been interested in this topic for at least ten years. I was also interested in seeing what the Citizens League would be like.

Cirillo began the session with a short 15 minute presentation, a time limit he admirably fulfilled. In that 15 minutes he gave us a good bit of information to think about. He defined innovation as “the use of knowledge to achieve an output that is new or novel, a pragmatic result.” To have an impact it must be transformational - large in scale and important in depth.

The key to innovation in an organization is mindset. “It is driven by a system of principles and practices which support and encourage the coupling of systems and creativity to solve a problem.” 3M accomplishes this through corporate values and social connection. Networks and the interfaces between groups are important roots for innovation.

His seven principles for innovation are:

1. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should! The world doesn’t need a swiss army couch, even if it is possible. Timing and the need for an outlet are as important to successful innovation as raw creativity.
2. Resign yourself to the fact that there is no such thing as an LTQF (Long Term Quick Fix). This is where non-linearity and lack of control come in. See Glenda Eoyang on complexity
3. Be multilingual. Need to be diverse and bring a lot of people into the conversation. More perspectives means more success.
4. Be clear about the context in which you are working. Keep perspective. Situational awareness is needed to see what kind of innovations are needed.
5. Know when to think in black and white and when to think in color. More diversity.
6. The thing you should work hardest at is building confidence in your people. Be a teacher. Education and culture are important.
7. Be personally committed to making yourself and those around you excited about innovating. Be excited.

After the presentation we took twenty minutes to talk about the most important transformation needed in Minnesota and the people that should be at the table to talk about it?

My group talked about two major themes: productivity and sustainability. Who will be the workers of the future? How are they going to support us and the economy? Which naturally led to a discussion on education. I cautioned that focusing on education as a young person’s activity is foolish. We need to keep our eye on productivity for everyone, for all ages. Education is important but part of the problem is that education is built for a business world built on hierarchy. If we don’t change the expectations of the business world while we change education then our efforts in education may be moot.

Some of the people we wanted to invite to the table were young people, scientists, poets, grandmothers, engineers, designers, futurists, single mothers.

I asked where we should convene these meetings and we mostly agreed that all organizations need to open up, go out, and get diversity?

We reconvened as a large group and shared our ideas from the table conversations. I thought the whole event was quite well-done. They stuck to the schedule and accomplished a lot.

The question is what impact this will have. Most of the people at the event were self-selected because they were already members of the Citizens League. Going forward will require more and different people.

Finally Cirillo reminded us that “innovation is a contact sport.” We need to get out there and talk to people in order for it to work.

Cross-posted at TES Consulting, here.

1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet and they’re not going to start now.
2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.
3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. Plus, you’re panicking too soon. If the dancers don’t walk out on you, chances are the audience won’t either.
4. I will upset someone I love? … The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord. See the curtain call. See the people standing up. Hear the crowd roaring.
5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.” But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

From

"The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life" (Twyla Tharp)

Watch this:

I found this video at Presentation Zen. It’s one of the 34,000 60-second video applications that people all over the world submitted to the Queensland Tourism Board for the “best job in the world”, working as an island caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Here’s another video, one of 50 that has been put on the short list:

After watching these videos I realized something about the paradox of talent in the contemporary world. All of the finalists are talented, any one of them could do the job of island caretaker very well. But only one of them can get a job and that’s the heart of the problem in today’s winner-take-all world.

Back in 1995 Robert Frank and Philip Cook wrote a book called The winner-take-all society : how more and more Americans compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes, encouraging economic waste, income inequality, and an impoverished cultural life. They convincingly argued that a society with huge winners and a mass of middle-of-the-road losers is destined for conflict and inequality.

In 1997 Pierre Levy wrote Collective intelligence : mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. He argued that we have a severe talent problem in the modern world; there are an incredible number of people who could contribute to the productive future of humanity but they are held back because of politics, access, or other circumstances.

There is really no significant difference in talent between the 50 people on the short list. The Queensland Tourism Board is faced with the same choice that faces any manager making a hiring decision or an admissions committee choosing who to accept for college — at a certain point a choice must be made and it will be made based on inexpressible qualities, the first impressions and other ineffable qualities that human resource professionals base their careers on. Once someone has met the minimum requirements for a job there is not much more to make a hiring choice on except for gut instinct.

Trying to eliminate this instinct is a fool’s errand. Working together is always about getting along with other people and often the fluffy qualities of personality are much more important than the skills list shown on a resume.

But for every job that opens there are always some people who are rejected. Some are rejected for good reasons, such as missing skills. But among the finalists there are always people who could do the job but just don’t make it. How do we deal with these people — the people who are still talented but didn’t have the right connections, the right network, the right clothes, the right accent, the right skin color, the right family?

This is the justice problem that faces our world today. And the continuing development of social technologies on the internet and elsewhere are going to make the problem worse. In the past we might have been able to ignore all of the others who are shut out. Today that ignorance will kill us.

And the ignorance will grow before it begins to shrink. Our multiple mediums of information exchange will make it easier than ever for the have-nots to see the lives of the haves and vice versa.

If talent is equally distributed throughout the world, and there seems little reason not to suppose that it is, then the world will need to change. We can’t just give access to the talented. We need to grow the total number of opportunities available to all. The current economic system isn’t up to the job. So we will need to build something better.

Yesterday I went to the fifth session of a class I'm taking at the Loft. The class is called "The Writing Habit," it's taught by Rosanne Bane, who works as a coach and creativity instructor. So far I've really enjoyed the course. Last weeks discussion about priority setting and Getting Things Done by David Allen spurred me to orgainize a significant portion of the crap that had accumulated in my 'inbox.'

This most recent class was focused on the stages of the creative process. Riffing on ideas I've seen elsewhere and which Bane borrowed from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Bane laid out six stages for creativity: first insight, immersion, incubation, illumination, verification, and hibernation. The most interesting discovery I made was a preference for first insight. I love finding new and novel ideas, whether they be books, music, or weblogs. This is probably why I've added hundreds of feeds to my news aggregator even if I only regularly read 50 or so. I also use a bookmark manager program that contains a couple of hundred addresses. On the web I have accounts at del.icio.us and Furl. On my personal computer I have four or five different text editors, because the frisson of discovery was so enjoyable.

It's also relatively easy for me to fall into the immersion phase, where the focus is on gathering information or books about a particular subject. I went through this stage with chess earlier this year, now my interest has fallen off a bit, as my magpie tendencies look out for the next discovery.

The challenge and difficulty is moving beyond these early stages of the creative process to the drudgery of the actual production phase. I think this may be part of the reason why I've let my weblog lie fallow for the past year or so.

We also discussed the link between the stages of creativity and preferred thinking modes, especially the right/left brain division. Twenty years ago I would probably have identified myself as a L-mode thinker, logicial, rational. Now I think the R-mode has come to the fore. I've always been an intuitive thinker. But now that intuition has become an end in itself. It's time to find some structure that will send the thoughts out into the world.

I've been trying to think of ways to test or experiment on creative networks in order to discover the optimum network topology to enhance creativity. So far I've borrowed two metaphors from technology to describe creative networks: the network topology model (star, mesh, ring) and the internet business model (many to many, few to many, etc)

Is it possible to use the conclusions of computer networking studies to help answer this question?

Share your thoughts in the Future of Creativity project area.

Update - 2009/04/14 : the FOC project is no longer online.

Technology Review has two interesting articles about the recent activities of Nathan Myhrvold, the former director of Microsoft Research. Myhrvold left MS two years ago to begin his own company basically to research whatever Nathan was interested in looking at. Ah, the pleasures being a multimillionaire with curiosity. The results/goals of this venture are described as the creation of an 'an invention factory.'

The second article is an interview transcript with Myhrvold Myhrvold's Exponential Economy where he mentions some very interesting topics on innovation.

Myhrvold says the following about symbolic science:

TR: What is a symbolic science?

NM: Something with deep abstractions described by lots of data. Vast amounts of data--and analyzing abstract data is one of the most important frontiers in biology and medicine. So understanding which of your genes have this, that and the other thing, or which things are being expressed in your body right now. What proteins are in over- or undersupply. Where is there a feedback control system that's screwed up. We're on the verge of figuring out that or a million other very complicated systems. A key tool in that's computing. So bioinformatics, bioinformatics algorithms. Most of that stuff is at its complete infancy. One thing that's amusing to me is that when I visited proteomics companies, you get people, although they use computers, they use them in completely boneheaded ways. So everybody has big SQL databases, big Oracle databases, under the faith that that's a good thing to do, when it's completely ill suited. The relational database was designed for tasks such as tracking stock room inventory or managing employee information; it was not designed for manipulating genomic base pairs and genetic information. So somebody needs to invent a bunch of stuff there. But more than that, biology and medicine are about reverse-engineering a very complicated machine. The detailed understanding of all the mechanisms and pathways by which things are regulated and controlled, the ways in which disease disrupts those regulations and how we can put them right, that's all incredibly complicated. Well, that suggests all kinds of opportunity. What tools are missing? What are the analysis techniques that you need to do? There are a million things.

I particularly latched onto the idea of abstraction. One of my goals for my future of creativity project is to descibe the abstractions between the different levels on which creativity occurs. What will be the abstractions developed betweed communities and nations, between teams and communities? The transforming power of technology has been making these abstractions possible.

Myhrvold continues with a defense of basic science and research, both commercial and government sponsored.

TR: We have all this growth in technology, but you have been quite vocal in also pressing for more basic science. NM: Basic science is the fundamental well from which all this stuff is watered. Ironically, basic science is being given increasingly short shrift. DARPA [the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] funding for computer science is probably the single most successful government program in the history of governments--it led to this entire revolution in computing. Yet most Silicon Valley companies that are the beneficiary of that don't invest in fundamental research. Then you get the ludicrous thing of people in Congress saying they want more relevant research. No, you should have less relevant research.

I've done extensive modeling of all of this. If you're a company that lives hand to mouth, don't do research, okay. You don't need me to tell you that. If you're a company that has steady cash flows, then you should work at whatever level you can afford. So if you're a company that intends to be around 20 years from now, like a Microsoft, you are losing money if you don't do research. It is an incredibly profitable investment only open to a limited club--the people who can afford to take a long-term view. And that's an industrial research context. At the government level, you really should swing for the fences.

You could make a case that research funding really won the Cold War, because it was those economic things that stoked the economy. As soon as the Soviets went from being our enemies to being potentially our friends, [people said,] now let's stop giving lots of money to science. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Fundamental science has been the best investment the government's ever made.

TR: A big mark against basic research in industry is that the firms who support it don't always capture the benefit of it--Bell Labs with the transistor, Xerox with so much of modern computing.

NM: Whether you're expanding overseas or you're doing any business decision, you can find someone who screwed it up and caused lots of hurt to their company. It hasn't stopped people from doing it.

So take Xerox as an example. The same era that they started PARC [the Palo Alto Research Center, birthplace of the graphical user interface, Ethernet and other elements of digital computing], they bought a company called Scientific Data Systems. They lost a billion dollars in 1970 dollars on that. More money than they've spent on PARC the entire time they've had PARC. Nobody gives them any shit for that anymore. Everyone says, oh, Xerox screwed up PARC. They didn't screw up PARC. PARC invented the laser printer. That one invention alone paid for PARC many times over. Yet people give Xerox a black eye for this. Why? Because they think, "But they should have done more." Well, if you do shoulda, woulda, coulda, you're going to drive yourself crazy. The problem that Xerox had--the fundamental problem--is that Xerox didn't understand computers. That's why they lost the billion dollars in that other merger. That's also why they couldn't commercialize any of the other computer inventions.

So you add it up, investing in basic research makes huge sense for companies. But it makes even more sense for the government. By the way, I'd love to have the rest of the world join us, because research is the kind of thing that feeds on other research. The fundamental researcher in China that isn't being funded today might be the one who if he was funded would find the cure to the disease I'll get in 20 years.

Myhrvold's defense of PARC is particularly useful and highlights the point that innovation benefits everyone even, perhaps especially, when it does not have an immediate commercial application.