As much as “innovation” has been put on a pedestal, enshrined in corporate vision statements and funded by private, state and transnational investors, most companies still do the thing they have always done, in the way they have always done it. We keep hanging on to the coattails of the status quo, for good psychological reasons – fear of failure, various biases – but also because most people, most of the time, do not really understand the direct connection between business innovation, imagination and creativity.
We applaud the achievements of star artists, musicians, designers, architects but that is as far as our appreciation, and our understanding of creativity usually go. The process is reduced to admiration of talent and awards for spectacular success. Creativity is for the chosen few. With talent. And special abilities. It’s just not a thing for average people. Right? Wrong.
In the meantime, instead of trying the untried, dreaming up the new, we continue to attend fabulous events and reading blog posts by thought leaders, who continue to tell us that innovation is a good thing, and we must all do it. Yay! It really is like putting lipstick on a pig.
It’s a wonderful idiom “putting lipstick on a pig.” Trying to make something that is too difficult and too ugly seem better by pretending that if you put gloss on it, you’ve done the hard work. Lots of effort, lots of shine, but practically no real effect.
If a business is to survive the next five years and then thrive for the subsequent decade, assuming it is in an industry that has a future and that it is run by competent professionals, it has to draw on the collective creativity of all of its people, and all of its customers. It has to see fishing in this collective pool of ideas as a strategic asset, not a thing you do on team building weekends. Can you remember the last time when you spent a week working on something completely new, doing things in ways which were different from the usual ways of doing things, connecting with people outside of your normal circle of colleagues?
What is required are ways to release the inherent creativity of your people and a system which builds on people’s natural strengths by centering on the psychology of individuals and groups. It needs to be simple in its fundamentals, and a “natural” thing to run. The point of innovation thinking is to allow people in your organisation to have insights about what can be done better, with a system in place to inspire them to do so, collect those insights when they come, and work with them.
The value which creative professionals can bring to the table, in addition to providing their specialised services, is in assisting executives in being able to look into the future and to train their people to work in this quickened, confusing, rapidly changing digitally transformed context that surrounds us. Creative professionals can answer the call when someone asks “take me, where I haven’t been.”
This is the reason why I do what I do – or rather a number or reasons, all pulling in the same direction.
This text is an edited version of a talk I have given several times at conferences large and small, including gatherings of hundreds of bankers, and a dozen or so telecommunication executives. The message is always the same – to innovate you need new ideas, to get new ideas you need people and places you do not necessarily meet or see every day, and the best people here are artists and creatives of all kinds.
It has been my pleasure and privilege to talk to some remarkable people in my regular Fireside chats, be it as part of the Boma Global Studio series, The Creative Farm (making sense of life through conversations with artists) and other programmes. The live recordings, warts and all, are listed HERE.
There is an interesting, and growing, body of research which supports new ways of looking at recruitment. Generation X and Generation Y will select their place of employment according to how a given company ranks in terms of its social values, and whether or not the potential employer is interested in providing people with real opportunities for personal development and meaningful work. Suddenly, dance, music, visual arts and writing have taken on a meaning deeper than “merely” artistic expression. They must be part of an HR Director’s bag of tools.
Towards the end of 2016, the software maker Adobe carried out a broad survey of over 5000 adults of various ages in the US, UK, France, Japan and Germany, to measure the sentiment people had towards broadly understood creativity, especially in relation to broadly understood success. The survey, titled State of Create 2016 and released under the headline “Creativity Pays” found that investing in creativity bears measurable benefits.
Let’s take a closer look since the survey addressed the young, and the not so young, coming from many professions, not just the creatives.
In the US, 85% of all respondents reported that creativity was a substantial factor in attaining whatever they termed as success, both in the work sense and in personal life. Mala Sharma, Adobe’s VP of Creative Cloud (their cloud software division, which ran the survey) was quoted in Inc. Magazine as saying “This survey provides a big wake-up call to business that they need to think differently and give employees the tools and freedom to be creative. […] An investment in creativity and design is simply good business.” Of course she would say that, I hear you say. Yes, Adobe are the makers of PhotoShop and much other software used by the creative industries so of course they will push creativity as a strategic value. But while we might say that such a result would not constitute a particularly stunning discovery for people working in the creative industries, there is a lot more to this unequivocal statement.
Creativity is no longer considered “something they do in the art department.” It has been a growing part of the larger vocabulary, and toolkit, of business in general. The Adobe survey listed a number of tangible benefits to be derived from investing in creativity, including higher individual incomes, greater national competitiveness and increased productivity.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it found that younger generations value creativity more highly, with a half or more of Gen Z and Millennials describing themselves as “creative,” and two thirds of both groups wanting others to see them as creative. Even allowing for very individual definitions of creativity, these are clear lessons for employers there, and we will be revising them in the Employer Branding section.
New ideas need to be captured and pinned up for examination and discussion, or else they flame out and disappear as soon as they are formed. New ideas are fragile, delicate beings. Barely hatched ideas need help and encouragement, no matter how strange and incongruous they may seem. They may grow into larger versions of themselves, get combined with other ideas to form something entirely new, or contribute to existing ideas to improve them. They may be discarded, in time, but the initial response to a new idea needs to be one of open-minded curiosity. Managers, at any level, whose automatic response to new ideas is scepticism, make it impossible to explore the potential reach and usefulness of those ideas. They need training to get out of that habit, as toxic scepticism in reply to budding creative effort is an effective way to ensure that person never does it again.
The first thing to realise about working in a VUCA world is that it is not possible to “deal” with a VUCA reality and continue business as usual.
That course of action will only lead to the world becoming increasingly more VUCA, and given the exponential nature of the pace of change, further attempts to “get back to normal” will only result in exponentially greater change. “Formulating strategies” and “developing tactics” to “deal with” these qualities will bring about precisely the opposite result to what is desired. The one way to create a reality which goes beyond VUCA is to work towards reducing the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
The world is VUCA because our systems of economics, our labour structure, environmental laws (such as they are), investment priorities and political practices have made it so – and to even begin to get a fix on a possible course of action means having to understand that all of those vectors are intimately connected. We have been living under the mistaken impression that we could compartmentalise them – management over here, politics there, healthcare around the corner and income disparity way over the horizon. It has been possible to live under that impression because all of those pots had been on a slow simmer, and appeared unrelated. As a whole, the world may be getting richer but over the last decade income disparity has exploded leading to both stunning misery and resulting social unrest. Climate change has finally pierced the comfortable veil of the world’s middle classes (such as they remain) when deadly storms and floods have become recognised as parts of a pattern and not isolated “natural disasters.” Hundreds of thousands of people have been escaping regions of the planet where it is no longer possible to make a living and soon it will be hard to even stay alive. Environmental degradation and the immediate influence of man’s encroachment into wilderness are now playing themselves out with COVID-19.
READ MORE on the Boma Poland blog
“Thou shalt edit thyself” was the eleventh commandment. Maybe Moses found only ten of them because Yahweh had a wry sense of humour. Or maybe it was a case of following one’s own advice. (“Needs a bit of trimming here…”)
Perhaps the hope was that we’d learn by example, eventually. But we haven’t learned as well as we may have. Loose words everywhere fly through the air like pieces of shrapnel, or lie around the corner like rotting banana peels, just waiting for someone to slip. Sometimes they swarm like that annoyance of mosquitoes I have in my garden right now.
Quantity and loudness over quality at the right volume. Too much, too loud.
Would verbosity be one of the many ways in which we hope to drown out that persistent internal voice which whispers “memento mori”? Or is it just vanity? But I stand—we all stand—waist-deep, in a rising tide of a spew of barrage-stream-of-consciousness (consciousness if we’re lucky, that is).
Especially now, when people are desperate, at all costs, to prove their existence in a world where everyone has suddenly become a broadcaster. “Everybody’s talkin’ at me, can’t hear a word they’re sayin’…” Thank you Harry Nilsson…
In the meantime, the tide keeps rising. It’s up to my belly button now. An undisciplined discharge, full of sound and fury, signifying not exactly a whole lot (apologies to William) but certainly carrying an emotional payload: existential dread, mixed with a confused sense of one’s own importance and an urgent need to transcend the limits of one’s condition.
The tide keeps rising. It’s now up to my throat and the risk of drowning is real. I do so wish people would treat their words with some more respect, and restraint. A wild flow of verbiage will not drown out the dread. It won’t even dilute it. Instead, you won’t hear yourself think for long enough to discern a way forward.
Can writers and editors help, I wonder? Writers think in words like architects think in wire and balsa wood. (This is, in part, a natural progression from thinking in mud, plasticine, spaghetti and our own poo when we were toddlers. Writers just take it further.) We hope to have progressed from being children to being grown-ups, and to have learned some discipline along the way. A little more structure; a little less poo.
How can writers and editors pass on that learning to the rest of humanity? Any ideas?
Editing is about discipline, and discipline is conscious application of what we learn, over and over. Editing is practice. It is a relationship where truth is subjected to scrutiny and made conscious. Then a little less subjective and a bit more universal, if you’re lucky. Editing is about paying attention.
Ah. Attention. Here is the rub. A rare and precious thing… All this reminds me of the story of a successful writer giving advice to a rookie:
“I have learned that there are two rules to success.”
“Yes, yes, please, tell me!”
…
“Rule number one is, never tell them everything you know.”
…
READ THIS in the Journal of Beautiful Business on Medium.
Our culture mythologises creativity while, simultaneously, putting up barriers which prevent people from reaching their creative potential. Now is the time when business urgently needs a new conversation with the arts – a conversation centered not on sponsorship or ownership but on partnership.
I submit that without such a partnership, without accessing artists’ and creatives’ brains and not just their output, business leaders will from now on keep going around in ever decreasing self-referrential circles, in the misguided conviction that they are actively innovating. The need for new ideas is pressing, and business has to look for those further afield than the next “brainstorming offsite.”
Artists and creatives can, and should, be the sources of “the creative juice” required to shift our companies and our economies into World 2.0, if that world is to be anything like a place worth living in. How? Engage artists and creatives not just to do stuff but also to show you, teach you, how they think so as to get that stuff done. Yes, that means getting them into your boardroom, paying them a decent fee, listening to what they have to say and then giving it serious consideration. (I will get into the mechanics of how this ought to work in another article.)
You see, people readily applaud the achievements of star artists, musicians, designers and architects but that is usually the limit of their understanding of creativity, and appreciation of it. The great writer James Baldwin put it most succinctly, describing artists as “a breed of men and women historically despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead.”
The process is reduced to admiration of talent, and awards for spectacular success. There is an assumed barrier between “those people” and you. Creativity is for the chosen few. With talent, and special abilities. It’s just not a thing for average people. Right? Wrong. But you do need to learn how to shift your thinking into a more expansive, curious, searching mode, because creativity is a process, not a talent. It is a way of working and looking at things. Is consists of endless polishing of your craft, and not waiting for the Muses to Grace you with Inspiration. And lots of spade work, actually committing to getting good at functioning creatively. The painter and photographer Chuck Close summed this up: “inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
In business, which urgently needs new thinking, most companies still do the thing they have always done, in the way they have always done it. Even now, in our weird new reality, they hope to get back to “normal” as soon as possible. Even if “innovation” has been put on a pedestal, enshrined in corporate vision statements and funded by private, state and transnational investors, most companies sing praises to innovation while hanging on to the coattails of the status quo. For good psychological reasons, of course — fear of failure, various biases — but also because most people, most of the time, do not really understand the direct connection between imagination, creativity and business innovation. We celebrate creativity and applaud the achievements of those star artists, designers and entrepreneurs, but when it comes down to it we accept the new and exciting only once it has been well tested by others.
“Education systems” everywhere have done an excellent job of beating all but the safest and blandest ‘creativity” out of pupils. That’s where the stupid, destructive conviction that creativity=being able to draw comes from. Worse, that is also where understanding of creativity also ends for most people. “Accepted creativity” is limited by fear. Which is rather unfortunate, because actual creativity comes from courage. If you arere able to draw a perfect apple, that does not make you creative, merely skilled at drawing apples. If you’re able to draw an apple that says “fuckya” to the established way of drawing apples, that is what drives creative progress. It comes from a place of curiosity and a desire to find out “what happens, if…?” Curiosity opens the door to creativity and creativity drives engagement, commitment and, of course, real innovation.
Right now is when we have needed extreme innovative thinking the most. There is no going back to normal. Perish that pathetic excuse of a thought. Given how crucial new ideas are to our ability to build World 2.0 — and how important it is that those ideas be drawn rom the widest possible pool of personal perspectives and cultural insights, we need to consciously work to remove that barrier between creativity and “normal people”, and broaden the definition of what we see as creativity in the first place. We need to get into the real work of true innovation thinking, across industries and verticals, with all the hard work and complications this entails.
Can you remember the last time when you spent a week working on something completely new, doing things in ways which were different from the usual ways of doing things, connecting with people outside of your normal circle of colleagues? Because if you haven’t, you weren’t actualy doing innovation.
Don’t feel bad. You are not alone in this. Science tells us, this is a universal problem. There is a ton of research which confirms what we all know deep down: everyone wants innovation, but only after someone else has taken the risk and the trouble to make sure it works first. We want innovation, but not the possibility of having to try a number of times before we get anything decent.
What often ends up happening is a sort of a complicated innovation theatre — which may look interesting, but does not get us any closer to actual innovation taking place.
Case in point: a couple of years ago, after twelve months of correspondence aiming to arrange a time to meet, I finally made a presentation to many of the decision makers of a large, well-known construction company. They wanted to look at ways they could become more, you know, innovative. “Too many of them in this room” I though, but proceeded to give my talk which was, ostensibly, well received. Head nodded, lips smiled. Another month went by, then another… I was eventually told that they were “not going to pursue innovation this year.” An interesting statement, I thought, since it opened up a whole raft of possibilities when trying to deconstruct its full significance.
So where to start? Allow me to draw a three-dimensional map of your business. Actually, it is a map of every business, and it resembles a severely squashed down traffic cone.
The peak, the highest area right in the centre is where you are busy building up a pile of knowledge, expertise, maybe even success and wealth. It is where the most brain power of your organisation is focused.
Around it is the “slope of progressive execution” — where methods are worked out, products tested, procedures developed so as to keep building up that central peak. It covers a lot of ground and is the supporting piece of landscape as far as the peak is concerned. Out towards the edges, where the circumference of the squashed cone is the largest, that is where your organisation interfaces with other pieces of the landscape — other companies, the world at large — that area which you might describe as “not us.”
Around that circumference is where new ideas are formed. You become progressively more familiar with those ideas as they move towards the centre, but at the edges, where your ideas clash against the ideas of others, that is where the “necessary new” comes into being. You may capture the new and carry it towards the centre in time, but to begin with you are out along the boundary line, where new ideas hatch, listening hard to discover which ones might be interesting, and placing your bets accordingly. This process needs to be supported. If possible, it needs to be formalised, given a framework to hang on and, yes, you can learn different ways of accessing all that “new goodness” from artists and creatives. (More on that coming up in another article, promise.)
Creativity is in part about connecting what is in our heads with ideas from “the edge” and seeing patterns and linkages which may not be apparent to anybody else at the time. Which results in innovation. To get more creativity, you need to extend the size of this flattened out area, and speed up the rate at which ideas from the edge get carried towards the centre, up that slope of progressive execution. That is where those conversations and partnerships with artists and creatives really bear fruit. You are aiming at a space where innovating is as much a natural part of your business operations as planning and execution.
To innovate, we need to imagine, as imagination means not sticking to what we know. To imagine means to let go of boundaries, and to face the fear of the unknown. To do that properly, you need teachers and role models. Role models of imagination.
Imagination is perhaps not a concept which immediately springs to mind when we are asked to list strategic values but I would argue that it actually ought to be at the very top of that list today. A severe lack of imagination has got us into many of the tight spots in which we find ourselves today.
Executives need to find ways to strengthen their own imagination, and grow the imaginative faculties in their people. And to learn about imagination in a time of change, you need to go to the only class of people who see change as fuel and imagination as the daily practice of their craft. Over time, creative professionals have been defined as providers of specified services (writing, photography, music, visual art) which are sometimes seen as somewhat opaque and magical. Apparently, we reach for starlight and mix it with mud and breath of unicorns, to make something the World has not seen before. Which is a lovely image, though not quite an accurate one.
What we do is think differently, and we do it as a matter of course. Because of this we are able to handle change better than many other people, and to work with this change as raw material, and as fuel for creating.
Creative professionals can answer the call when someone asks “take me, where I haven’t been.”
In this little request to look just beyond that boundary line where art and commerce ordinarily meet, lies very real value to the business world. Business people do not usually venture there, but now really, urgently, must.
The mental processes artists and creatives employ can help in the context of looking for ways to tap creative potential, and creating conditions conducive to innovation thinking. Where most business thinking centres around delivery of optimised, repeatable result, creative professionals eat and breathe change, variety and exploration. To imagine situations, run scenarios and quickly assess options is entirely familiar territory to the majority of creative professionals, regardless of their specialisation. This is not necessarily because every creative professional is a natural born genius. Many are, but most are professionals who have focused on making this kind of thinking into daily practice.
The mutual exchange of value between business and creative professionals can, therefore, take place on planes other than just what we have been used to. The value which creative professionals can bring to the table, in addition to providing their specialised services, is in assisting executives in being able to look into the future and to train their people to work in this quickened, confusing, rapidly changing digitally transformed context that surrounds us.
These are my notes from two conversations about the future of education. A follow up to this article, a June 2021 Boma Global Studio conversation with Aape Pohjavirta, is here on Fireside.
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Throughout the Boma Global Education Week, Boma teams in Poland, Brazil, China, New Zealand and Germany conducted interviews with education thought leaders in their own countries and elsewhere. This is the Boma Poland perspective, presented mostly as quotes from our guests.
Zuzanna Lewandowska spoke to two trailblazers of Poland’s education landscape, while yours truly invited two people who had been thinking for quite some time about education and learning from different perspectives, including the difference between the two terms and how to reconcile it.
We spoke to:
Paula Bruszewska, who runs the foundation Zwolnieni z Teorii (Released from Theory, site in Polish) — the largest educational NGO in Poland, founded as a response to a rapidly widening gap between the needs of the job market and the inadequate graduate competencies in team work and communication.
Jakub Bochiński, who is an astronomer and science communicator, and leads Rzecznicy Nauki (The Spokesmen of Science) a multidisciplinary team of science communicators.
Marcel Kampmann, a Dutch designer and strategic creative advisor who has been interested in the question of what makes places conducive to human happiness. Out of that desire for building places that bring about happiness, came the Dream School (site in Dutch) in his hometown in the Netherlands.
Aape Pohjavirta — the founder of Funzi.fi, a mobile learning system which over the last few years has been gaining a lot of traction in East Africa and and other places.
In order to be able to lead a sustainable life on this planet we have to radically change the way we behave, and we have two decades to do it in. If we are to, for example, achieve anything like the Paris Accord regarding limiting of our greenhouse gas emissions, our very idea of education needs to change since right now we are not teaching the right things in the right way.
That process of change is now well underway, though its pace is still far too slow. There is, however, an emerging sense of optimism in the human ability to adapt. If there is one lesson to take out of the current crisis is that we have entered a period of transformation more rapid than we could have ever imagined, and this transformation is going to affect our educational systems in dramatic ways, up to and including rendering them irrelevant.
“To ask, ‘What is going to happen to the education system?’ is to ask the wrong question. The education system per se will not contribute to this change, because of how slow it is to change. That’s kind of blunt, but I think it’s the truth. I started working with mobile learning in 2009 because I understood that the speed of change of the educational system was too slow to cope with the changes that were required. In 2011 I lost my optimism. I did not believe that using the current mechanisms we could, or would, survive. But the pandemic has proven to me that we are able to adapt when faced with a crisis. If we compare what has happened over a period of eight weeks with what happened over the previous eight years, we can see that we humans can react.” (Pohjavirta)
Reaction, however, is not proactive action and deep structural changes are required. The very appropriateness of current models of education is now on the table, and a measure of its success will be whether or not education allows people to develop their ability to self-direct. In a world where distributed work and constant learning are the norm, self-direction will be a key competence. And the choice is stark — successful ongoing learning for people, or increasing economic exclusion. The models need to change.
“I have a challenge with the words education and learning, so let’s just like get the terms right. Education is where someone, typically not an individual but a society or an organisation, has decided what a certain part of the society need to learn or to be skilled at doing something.” (Pohjavirta)
Was that the 19th century model, we wondered?
“It is actually the 2000 BC model. In education everything is about controlled outcomes and controlled thoughts and controlled skills and knowledge, so education is a mechanism of control. In emerging markets, people have noticed that there is no such thing as control, or control is negative. And that is why they’re focused on learning. Learning is access to things, things that have enabled them as individuals, and as parts of the community, to act in a better way.” (Pohjavirta)
Do the “developing nations” have a thing or two to teach the rest of us about the will to learn and the methods to gain that learning?
“In those emerging markets, in places like rural Nigeria or Bangladesh, people understand that no-one else will give them a better future. They need to build it themselves. They need to equip themselves with the skills and the attitude that they are themselves responsible for building that better future, and they can’t each do it alone. That is also quite clear to them, so they need to build it together. As a result, the people in emerging economies have a far better view on how the future of humanity will be shaped. We have to remember that this future of education, the future of our planet, is actually not about our children. It is us, the middle aged men, who especially need to learn to unlearn things and to adapt. It’s not our kids, it’s us.” (Pohjavirta)
“The key question about education, anywhere on Earth, is what that education ought to lead towards. It is only from answering that question that we will be able to formulate any appropriate future educational solutions. We have to take into account economic factors, needs of the labour market, the future of the planet, and to design education so it creates the right conditions for individual self-expression.” (Bochiński)
As with all things exponential, change will not happen overnight but when it does come it will be “sudden”, eventhough it had been coming for some time. So where’s the space to aim for? What are the gaps that we need to fill?
“Instead of earning a living, you should be learning a living — understanding that through learning, you’re also able to earn. You could have access or subscription to any kind of learning environment for your entire life, instead of only that period between your fourth and your 20th year. You would never be an alumnus because you would never finish.” (Kampman)
“That is interesting because we have also been prototyping a concept of “earning by learning”, where we worked a lot with entrepreneurs and employability services, looking at grants available around the world. There are massive non-governmental organisations checking whether someone has completed a course, and then giving them a grant or a loan. How about making it all digital and accessible instead? So, Marcel, if you have completed a particular course with three stars, you automatically get this hundred dollars into your bank account. Why can’t we build a mechanism like that? These are the questions where we see the existing establishment becoming defensive, because that would erase a lot of jobs. These organisations are asking, what will happen to all of our employees who are now managing these systems? And the answer is the same as what happened with the monks in the scriptoria when Gutenberg’s movable type printing came along — they all got new jobs.” (Pohjavirta)
But then, for the longest time, we’ve been conditioned to believe that learning was something you did in a room with 10, 20 or 30 other people, with someone delivering the knowledge. The responsibility has been on the side of the deliverer, and the students are sitting there, being the the passive receivers of it. Now, being innovative is ranked as a requirement, but there is a problem.
“We expect of people that they will do new and innovative things, yet through their education they were not allowed to do any such thing. The system is designed to tell people what they cannot do.” (Bochiński)
If we are to speed up the pace at which education systems adjust to the requirements of our civilisation, this needs to be reversed. Indeed, taking responsibility for oneself was a central theme of our conversations, mirroring sentiments expressed decades ago by the American poet and public intellectual Adrienne Rich, in a college commencement address:
“You cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one […] Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you (…) [It] means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions […]“
So, where do we begin?
“Goal setting is a skill which today’s education seems to be ignoring. This leads to repercussions since we are creating a generation of people who do not know what they want from life, or indeed who they want to become. Through setting of goals we are able to learn more, since the point is not always to reach that goal but for it to be sufficiently ambitious, or difficult, so the very process of getting there is a learning experience. In Poland, right now, we do not teach anything like that. It is the teacher who sets the goal, explains how to get there, and gives a mark based on how well the student was able to follow the instructions. One of the most important things we can change in education right now is to allow young people to set their own goals, so they actually learn to do it. That way, we may end up with people who will hold agency over their own lives.” (Bochiński)
But goal setting has been the staple of “motivational speakers” for a generation and attaining goals has somehow become a goal in itself. Instead, we need to see goals as milestones in an ongoing process of constant becoming.
“You get born at some point and then you go to primary school, secondary school, then maybe tertiary and finally there’s a graduation. When you’re born you have 100% potential, but depending on where you’re born, who your parents are, the music you listen to, and so on, your potential might drop.
So we draw this “potential line” going down like this, really simply to say, here you have all the choices and potential in the world, and here you became a bookkeeper. The area between your potential and when you become is the dream gap.” (Kampman)
But then, not a lot will happen unless the student is driven to discover. Sir Ken Robinson and many others have argued that children have plenty enough of drive, and it is our schools that systematically kill it. So we need to reignite that curiosity, that desire to learn — or simply stop killing it as part of “schooling.”
“Curiosity is central to education. If students are not interested, they will not want to learn. It is curiosity that builds a desire to learn, to discover new things and to gain an education.” (Bochiński)
Of course, a desire and a healthy curiosity are not, in themselves, enough. A firm grounding is required.
“Lately there has been a lot of talk of future competencies being defined as creativity, ability to communicate, problem solving, critical thinking, curiosity. Basic competencies such as reading comprehension, numeracy or ability to manage finances have been less in the news but it is important that we do not neglect those. Crucially, we have to remember that such basic competencies are fundamental building blocks of how one builds up one’s understanding of the World, otherwise we will be educating a generation of people who will have no solid basis for their thinking processes — creatively inspiring people into not comprehending how the World works. The consequences of such dramatic skills gaps can be already seen today in, for example, how few people are able to understand the exponential nature of the growth in COVID-19 cases.” (Bochiński)
”This crisis and it context gives people a reason to want to learn FOR something, which is new and difficult. Traditionally, instead of good reasons to learn a thing there have been boxes to tick, lists to complete and tests results to compare. It has been impossible to quickly see any cause and effect there but with this pandemic we can now certainly see such cause and effect in action. With all of the graphs, infographics and flattening curves we can see with only a small delay what the impact of our efforts is. That is not the immediate feedback of traditional education. This is one positive aspect of this situation as is really the first time you maybe see this direct relationship. Those are the kinds of feedback loops that need to be designed into curricula to enable people to know how well they’re doing, and what they’re doing it for in the first place.” (Kampman)
New forms of delivering and discovering of knowledge will become the norm. Learning for fulfilment of potential and not for filling of workspaces in offices and factories will become a central principle. Technology will be important in this process, of course, but this is more than a matter of introducing new technolgies into classrooms — be they physical or virtual — and suggests that a redefinition of the role of the teacher is also needed.
“Closing the gap between reality and potential involves a lot of different responsibilities and more people than only the students — it involves the teachers, the local community and there is a massive effort to be done by parents. Learning to learn new things is complicated and the same goes for learning to teach new things in a new way. Teachers are taught to be teachers, so each teacher goes to teacher school to be taught to be a teacher by teachers who are taught to be teachers. Before they are able to teach differently, there’s also a big process there and we need to design for this.” (Kampman)
Teachers’ motivation is to see their pupils thrive so providing spaces for professional development for individual teachers is probably one of the wisest investments that any education system anywhere can do. This will enable them to, indeed, become more facilitators of knowledge rather than “teachers.” If we give teachers tools that enable them to do the tedious, routine things more efficiently, so that they don’t have to focus on control, we give them the opportunity to train themselves to support their development as individuals.
“Technology could also take over some of the more repetitive aspects of exercises in, for example maths or physics, through gamification. In turn, at school we would be able to concentrate on building relationships, on coaching young people towards discovering where their interests may lie, and in the process of self-observation.”(Bruszewska)
“One of the greatest takes on learning technology came from Issac Asimov, talking about the future of education back in the 80s and predicting how every one of us would have access to good quality teachers, to learn about things that we’re passionate about. That is what we should start discussing. Every one of us individuals on this planet, should start with the diagram that Marcel drew. Each one of us has these passions and in the future we should be fully focused on developing those passions, and giving skills to people to become better at those passions while giving them tools to build a livelihood on top of that passion and to develop an understanding that you’re not good at everything, so you need to collaborate with others by becoming better at being you. That is what we should focus on, not learning skills that can be replicated, but actually developing the skills that are unique to you, and making them your assets.” (Pohjavirta)
“In the Netherlands, education is organised around educational goals which students have to fulfil every year, but no-one says how they should get there. All the schools are using same methods provided by the big publishers and so they all use the same books. There’s nobody saying the schools have to use those same books, but it’s McDonald’s convenient to learn everything about Napoleon, except nowhere does it say to go outside and play, or go to England to learn English. The only thing that you have to fulfil as a school is to test to see if the kids learned the proper amount of English, but it is something of a discovery that you are actually free as to the methods.” (Kampman)
“We can envision that in the near future we should be able to hand over some of the general knowledge subjects to online learning of the type carried out by Sir David Attenborough and his natural history programmes. Netflix is a valid source of knowledge in that way.” (Bruszewska)
Schooling in such a way as to reach the prescribed goals but to do it in a way which engages the students and builds their curiosity and desire to learn… Enter, the Dream School.
“It started with me giving a talk about the impact of technology on children some years ago. It somehow grew into a large global conversation which we then condensed again into a local plan. We were determined to cook up this ideal school and now it has been built — a school for kids from twelve to eighteen years old, from below 70 IQ to pre-university, 2000 children and 300 staff, and it’s amazing. My daughter started there last year. She loves it that dancing classes are weighted in the same way as maths. If you’re not good at maths, you can balance your overall score by dancing well. We had to find a process to build a creative place where we would invite children to learn, and to make manifest the best possible version of themselves. And how do you design for that? How do you architect a building for that? How do you create a culture that reflects these principles? What kind of symbolism does it need?” (Kampman)
Reorienting our methods of schooling to build up teamwork and collaboration appears to be a way forward.
“Project work in teams, designed so as young people learn to solve real problems is, largely, how education of the future should look. Project-based learning addresses does two things. To begin with, it answers a direct economic requirement through the education of people able to solve problems and find gaps in societal needs, which need filling. In addition, it helps to bring up happy, fulfilled people, who are able to learn and work while satisfying their interests and feeding their passions. This kind of education sparks in young people a certain curiosity about the World, and often results in students ending up in far better relationships with their peers, built up through mutual support.” (Bruszewska)
Such an approach ought to make it easier for both the students and the teachers. But what of the underlying economic problems? We already had a growing economic gap between different different socioeconomic classes, which both stemmed from a growing educational gap and then translated back into one. So now with remote education, are we learning that a large percentage of the developed world’s population is being altogether left out because people can’t afford computers for their kids? Is this situation only going to make the gap larger?
“No, that’s really the wrong way to be looking at this. Everyone on the planet has access to a mobile device and that’s the whole idea why we started Funzi. If mobile has changed the way the world consumes music, games, has given access to communication to billions of people who could not communicate, now we can use that tool to also deliver learning.” (Pohjavirta)
So, which way the future?
“Don’t focus on the boundaries. If you think something is impossible, reconsider, because you’re not really pushing yourself. If you’re in the field of education, you’re always with other people. And you may be feeling like you are playing a small role in a large life but that don’t feel restrained or limited because to find people around your means you don’t have to fix everything yourself.” (Kampman)
“We can’t change our past but we do build our future and the biggest impact that we have on our future is to learn better things. Everything is in our hands and it is our own responsibility and this is the point in time where we can learn anything we want. There is no one who can come and say “don’t learn that” or if there is then you have to you have to seek support. There are individuals like myself or organisations like Funzi or Boma — reach out to those and seek support, and you will find it. This is actually the moment of liberation where the education system needs to focus on the family’s needs, to focus on learning. It’s not about passing the test. It’s about having, and teaching, that empathy and compassion and responsibility to those future learners.” (Pohjavirta)
Most ideas are never used, or even remembered. They come, flash brightly, and are gone again. The neural connections that generate new ideas are fleeting, electrochemical sparklets easily lost in the flow of conscious thought and unconscious churn. New ideas are formed in the high pressure zone between the known and certain, and the unknown and unpredictable — when we allow our minds to wander freely while attached to some point of reference residing in what we know; anchored, as it were, in the ordered while perusing the disordered.
Creativity is in part about connecting what is in our heads with ideas from “the edge” and seeing patterns and vectors which may not be apparent to anybody else at the time. This is an entirely subjective process, so any framework designed to capture the ideas of those around you needs to take into consideration the simple fact they all those people will probably work in different ways.
“The problem is that the broad world of ideas has become largely separated from the world of business.”
That new ideas are vital and that there are not enough of them may seem self-evident. Unfortunately, as with many things in life, just knowing the problem does not necessarily get us any closer to solving it. A study by the eminent recruitment consultancy Robert Half found that a third of Chief Financial Officers in the US see lack of new ideas as the biggest barrier to their companies becoming more innovative. It would be too easy to giggle smugly at that statement as being obvious, but let us consider its heft for a moment. Top managers believe that their companies are not innovative enough because their people do not have enough new ideas. This is after we have had decades of creative thinking training, long yardage of shelves filled with creativity books by top notch specialists, and study after study pointing to the economic importance of innovation. Rick Wartzman of the Drucker Institute has been quoted mirroring that sentiment: “The problem is that the broad world of ideas has become largely separated from the world of business.”
Part of the problem lies not in there not being enough ideas, but in not enough ideas being captured. Jennifer Mueller, with Cheryl Wakslak and Viswanathan Krishnan, in their 2013 article “Construing creativity: The how and why of recognizing creative ideas” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology put it simply: “the bottleneck in innovation is increasingly in the recognition of creative ideas as much as the generation of ideas.” The Robert Half study, with understatement typical of high-end consultancies, adds “Getting your staff to think creatively isn’t always easy.” Indeed. Can it be fixed? Well, Robert Half put “give your employees a reason to care” as the number one way to “encourage creativity and innovation in your team.”
This is an indication that creativity grows out of engagement and we know that engagement grows out of having a purpose — a purpose beyond showing up, going through the motions and collecting the pay. Interestingly, the №2 on that list is “Empower your employees to make decisions and take action.” Empowerment, engagement and creativity are, evidently, all to be imbibed from the same vessel.
The COVID19 crisis has, with stark relief, lit up the inadequacy of the many systems which surround us, and leaders in many organisations are finally realising that it is time to address issues other than the easily calculated bottom line. The choice before us is a simple one — try to return to “the way things were” or push through to create systems which actually serve us.
The fallout from the disease is going to be broad and deep-reaching. Estimates of intermittent lockdowns till well past the end of 2021 are now getting their hearing so even here, in crisis control, it is clear that what is badly needed is imagination — a chronic lack of which has got us to where we are. Stubbornly pressing on to return to how things were before the virus, will only get us back to that same point where our lack of imagination will be sure to lead to another crisis.
Without imagination, we are not going to be able to deal successfully with this crisis, or with any other crisis that is just around the corner. Without imagination we will try to force our way back, instead of visioning a world that could, and must, come to pass. This is true as much on an individual level as on a nation-state level but this writer is concerned with business, so let’s take a look at that a little more deeply.
As much as organisations resisted it, the process of change has been forced on us, and it is happening faster than even the most ambitious futurists ever dared suggest. People who work in this field called innovation have been repeating like scratched records, for decades, that change is inevitable, change is happening all the time, change is the only constant, change is something that you need to work with, not against, that change is fuel, not a reason to be terrified, change is the defining principle of our times…
Well, here it is. Change, in all of its awesome (primary meaning of the word) power. If you are not seeing this moment in time as a point of inflection, a shift in reality, you are kidding yourself.
So, what are you going to do about it? We are now faced with a situation where the old frameworks of thinking are no longer sufficient. Are we are likely to adhere to them regardless?
Every innovation manager on Earth will at some time quote the famous Einstein line that you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it in the first place, without actually realising what they’re saying. It’s not that you’re addressing problems, it is that you actually have to change the mindset. And, as most psychologists will tell you, that is not an easy thing to do, not least because of our evolutionary history.
Once we emotionally invest in a mindset, then most of the time it’s actually a lot easier to deny the existence of other possibilities, and other other possible mindsets, than it is to address the fact that perhaps my mindset may be insufficient; not broad enough. Maybe I’m just not looking at enough things at the same time? We celebrate imagination but somehow have an innate fear, that what we might concoct once we start to imagine will force us to change. Ah, the terror of it!
Now it’s being illustrated to us very clearly that we have been suffering from a great deficit of imagination, and the reality brought on by that deficit is truly terrifying. Epidemiologists have been telling us for at least ten years, probably closer to 20, that the likelihood of a rapidly spreading and deadly pandemic was high. We have ignored that. The majority of healthcare systems on Earth are woefully underfunded, often because of “conservative” elements in politics concentrating on the cost of maintaining extensive healthcare systems.
How does that reflect on our collective ability to imagine scenarios and possible outcomes, and to prepare systems that are supposed to take care of us? Taking a wider view of this, how does that affect the long-term viability of markets and industries, when the people who make up those markets and industries are not able to work, to transact, to earn, and to spend with the same patterns as before? How is that possibly a parallel, a reflection, of industries and companies ignoring the broader picture?
The nature of sudden change has come into full view. The nature of innovation is such that what has been has zero guarantee of continuing beyond tomorrow, and the spill-over effects are everywhere. The CEO of a large Polish software company has found himself surprised that, after 95% of his staff went into remote work over the space of a few days, their productivity actually increased. “We did not have any systems in place to manage such a volume of remote work, but we have created them quickly.” Now he is not expecting all of his people to return to working at their offices whenever it becomes possible to do so. We can assume that this is not a unique, isolated case, and that there will be many leaders of “knowledge work” companies who come to the same conclusions. How will that trend affect everything from commercial real estate value to how office supply companies, catering businesses, and recruitment professionals adjust?
We now are faced with a situation where there are no clear ethical solutions, not because Ethics is somehow deficient in itself, but because our reality had been constructed devoid of any meaningful input from Ethics.
The situation in which many businesses find themselves right now is instructive. Entire industries are clutching, hanging on to the old way of doing things, desperately trying to figure out how to preserve their market position, how to make sure that once this disease has passed they can get back to the way things were just as quickly as possible. We can be sure that this kind of thinking is not going to do them any favours.
Crystal ball technology has been lost in the mists of time, but it is clear that those industries will find it very difficult to adjust to this new reality if the leaders of those businesses continue to insist on trying to return to how things were six months or a year earlier. We have walked through a door with one-way hinges, and it is not going to let us spring back into the old reality.
A complete system redesign is required, and we cannot afford for it to take a century. It needs to happen within a couple of decades, if we are to still have a civilisation in another generation or two. There is a ton (or even a tonne) of work ahead to make sure that what we actually build following this current dreadful event has resilience and is built on principles of social inclusion and ecological restoration, rooted in Ethics.
Ethics is a funny thing. The answer that comes up most often when you ask corporate leaders the simple question, “what about ethics?” is “yes, ethics is very important, and we must must think about it.” Full stop. At business school, Ethics may be mentioned as something worthwhile and important, and please do read some of the books by the Ancients sometime, and now let’s everybody get back to those rational decisions and spreadsheets.
So if we are finding that Ethics can’t help us with answers right now, it is because for a very long time we have not been asking the right questions, only a very narrow range of the easy ones.
We now are faced with a situation where there are no clear ethical solutions, not because Ethics is somehow deficient in itself, but because our reality had been constructed devoid of any meaningful input from Ethics, over decades if not centuries. Lipservice paid to Socrates’ relationship to Truth is not the same as delving into challenging definitions of the phenomenon and how it relates to your own life and business decisions.
And this goes back to the question of imagination. How do you even come up with a list of difficult questions if you can’t imagine where to look for them? More to the point, how do we come up with that list, before those questions arise and kick us in the proverbials? It is certainly easier, intellectually and emotionally, to drive for a return to the “normal” and a lot of people in business will now push very, very hard for just that, without realising what very slippery slope they’re on.
Unless we ask those hard questions – of reason, and belonging, meaning and true purpose — we will just keep sliding down that slope every time another so-called Black Swan comes and slaps us in the face with its wing. Except, this particular crisis wasn’t even a Black Swan, because according to Taleb’s definition it could, and has been foreseen; it’s just that it was too hard to think about the questions it brought up, so it was ignored. (Sounds like a lot of “innovation management” that has gone on in companies I have known, without being too pointed about it…)
A dreadful paucity of imagination has ensued in too many places and areas of endeavour, as a sort of pathetic default setting. We have been great at implementing, planning, executing, strategising… Wondering what colour we will repaint the superstructure of the Titanic once she has completed her maiden voyage. We have been concentrating on the obvious, instead of looking at the important and the likely surprising. It’s easier that way, of course, and anyway, “they’re not paying me to think beyond my brief.”
Which is why our reality is now on the table, and up for renegotiation.
A redesign of Capitalism is necessary, if we are to preserve a level of sanity in our society, going forward. We truly have arrived at a crossroads and we must choose the way forward consciously. The system itself is in urgent need of an upgrade, and a rework of the core architecture is way overdue, to use software parlance. If we skip the important and attend instead to the obvious, we will not be reaching deep enough.
The initial designs will be prototypes in need of rework, it will not be uniformly distributed, of course, it will be patchy and halting to begin with, but there are now enough voices that are loud enough, finally asking “How can we build a more sane society and how can business be a part of that process?” Business can, and must, be a force for good, otherwise it will become a grimmer version of its recent self.
We have never known what tomorrow might hold, yet we’ve usually imagined that it would be much like today. No any more. We are given a once in a century opportunity to take stock of this great discontinuity of assumptions, and build a better world. This is as terrifying as it is exhilarating. On our watch, the Future is being remade and it is evidently a plastic thing and we can stretch it in a myriad ways. If I may go full Aristotle on you: “the future which is known, cannot be changed, and the future which can be changed, cannot be known.”
Will we accept whatever comes along without much critical thinking? Or should we expend effort to build a future that we actually want?
In a time of extreme uncertainty, the natural tendency to stick to the tried-and-true may seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, almost everybody else will be heading down that path. Some faster than you, some cheaper, all of them almost equally motivated. The only thing entrenched viewpoints guarantee in a time of extreme uncertainty is more competition. A better way seems to be to “out-terrify” terrifying reality by learning some new tricks, both individually and in terms of the organizations we lead.
Orthodoxy cannot usually be fought head-on. The visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller knew this when he said:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The most essential new trick we can learn—as individuals and organizations—is to decrease our tolerance for same-think, and simultaneously increase our capacity for handling diversified teams. That a broad diversity of backgrounds and opinions enables better decision-making has been amply demonstrated. It may take longer for a diverse group to coalesce into a true team — which is why management orthodoxy has usually seen diversified teams as unnecessarily expensive — but diverse teams pretty much uniformly produce better results, even if they take longer to get there. Disagreement and discussion fuel necessary bursts of innovation.
Sustainable innovation, however, requires diversified teams plus an organization suffused with a culture of openness to creativity and discussion. That requires long-term effort in building up the internal systems, tools and methods that support such a creative culture. And most importantly, it means identifying and enabling a group of people who will usher the process along — your Ambassadors of Change.
Admittedly that phrase is a bit grand, but the key concept I want to introduce here sounds more esoteric still: the “mycelium of innovation.” Bear with me. Mycelium, the “root structure” of mushrooms, is extraordinary. It is delicate, ever-changing, yet penetrates deep into the substrate, carrying with it the next generation of mushrooms. As mycelium does its work of spreading, enlarging, and penetrating, it changes the ground above it, to enable the build-up of ever-deeper layers of soil. This makes it possible for ever greater forests to grow above.
Creativity is the mycelium of civilisation and, at a smaller scale, of organisations. It permeates and grows in all directions, enabling organisations to build something new and great on top of what has gone before.
READ MORE in The Journal of Beautiful Business on Medium
If there ever was a time in our lifetimes when we needed new ideas, it is now. But when you need an idea, what kind of actions do you take to keep generating better ideas, to keep them coming? Especially when cortisol and adrenaline are washing through your system in bucketloads, limiting your very ability to synthesise concepts and to roam the landscape of your mind in search of such concepts in the first place?
Here are three suggestions I give clients, and — taking my own medicine — use myself when stuck for ideas: the right environment, the right level of concentration and the right amount of data and distraction. BV (Before Virus) it was relatively simple to find at least two out of the three. AV (yes, that’s what it means, After Virus) our ability to look for the right physical environments is, at least for a while, severely hampered. To keep those ideas coming, therefore, we need to consciously construct virtual environments which are actually conducive to creative thinking.
Given that in order to have a few good ideas you need to have many ideas, it is necessary to get into a mode of thinking has been best described as “open” — your mind is free to wonder, synapses are clicking and buzzing with connections — and stay there for extended periods. This is a “Goldilocks state” level of stimulus — not too much, not too little, just right, and that is highly individual.
For me a fundamental building block is music, and the choice depends on what I’m doing. If it’s conceptual work with research, concentration, writing, generally working with words, it’s ambient or instrumental jazz. If I’m doing layouts or working with visuals (form rather than text), it’s grunge or fusion and usually rather loud. This is just something I have noticed — and it works for me. (It is also a rather excellent reason to explain having a CD library of over 2000 titles… and a pair of rather pricey studio quality Denon earphones. That’s my excuse.)
Sound, the aural environment, is often neglected, or at least overlooked when designing work spaces.
Cafe noise, at around 45 dB and without intelligible conversations, can help and is the second reason why many people like to work in cafes. That activity is now out of our immediate reach, but we can transport ourselves to virtual cafes, courtesy of a myriad of recordings available online. Do a search for “cafe+noise” and you will come up with such gems as RainyCafe (which is what it says on the tin, and you can adjust the volume of both the rain, and the cafe), or selections of recordings form my beloved Lisbon, by FreeToUseSounds. As with any digital property, finding the “right” aural environement is actually as far away as your internet search engine. (This article was written with RainyCafe’s sounds in my headphones. No they’re not paying me to say that.) Recently, I’ve come across this rather delicious collection of ambient atmospheres and loops to soothe the soul and invigorate the synapses : https://www.ambient-mixer.com/.
Physical space may seem more difficult, but your eyes are actually a lot easier to trick than your ears, and there’s no need to splurge thousands on the latest virtual reality kit to transport yourself into places other than your work desk.
If you have a second monitor — which you really should, to save yourself, in aggregate, hours of time otherwise spent on looking for the right open document window — then there’s nothing to stop you having your peripheral vision occupied by an image of, for instance, a virtually created cosy cafe with people and cars moving outside, or almost any other space you care to think of. It turns out, there’s a whole subculture of virtually created ambient spaces out there, including a royal library, complete with a crackling fireplace, and a Japanese ryokan. Open fields work for some — and there are hours of “open field ambience” videos; cluttered studios for others — yes, those, too; while there are people who like empty rooms. As with everything to do with creativity, the preferred environment is an individual thing.
The point here is to trick your brain into switching off the conscious processing of data points outside of what you wish to concentrate on. Luckily, your most important organ is actually fairly easy to cheat that way.
Lack of interruptions is absolutely vital. Ask any creative professional and at the top of their list of things required to get work done is “for everyone to leave me the hell alone while I’m working.” Being stuck at home, “social distancing”, certainly makes you appreciate not being in an open-plan office… Open space offices spell death to creativity, unless people can enclose themselves in their own space, usually through the use of headphones.
So, no calls, no emails, no tweets — concentration is the lubricant that keeps the creative wheels turning and the glue that sticks various ideas together. Ideas are precious, fleeting things and have a way of starting to disappear as soon as they come up, so you need to capture them instead of being distracted by the latest, ….oh wait what was I saying?
If there is a blessing to be appreciated in this terrible time, being forced to sit and think by yourself might just count as one. (Yes, I realise, home schooling kids while stuck at home is not easy. Don’t shoot me. I’m just thinking aloud, here.)
Finally, input. If your goal is to come up with new ideas, then usually the rule for input is “as broad and as varied as possible.” Input comes in two forms – data and random, both of which are vital for ideas to keep flowing. Data is simple – this is all the stuff you need so as to be able to get into the work, understand what you’re doing, delve deep into the subject. This is of course highly subjective and depends on the type of work you do. A musician will have a very different set of data from a hardware engineer.
Random is more interesting, and also more universal. I very often walk up to my library, open a random book case and pick out a book that has nothing to do with whatever I’m working on at the time, in order to “ping a different perspective.” This can just as easily be books of, and about, mythology, or collections of photographs of graffiti.
Il Professore, Umberto Eco, was famous not just for having written great books, but also for having had a personal library consisting of great many of them. Some thirty thousand, apparently, but who’s counting? When asked about the reason for having so many more volumes than anyone could hope to read in one lifetime, he simply replied “it’s to remind me how much more I still don’t know,” or words to that effect.
Which is an elegant way of saying, if you are looking for new ideas, you need to look for them in places other than where you have found your old ideas. That may be an obvious thing, but scratch the surface of almost any writer’s working method, and browsing through volumes entirely unrelated to his or her current project is high on the list of favourite practices. And it works not only for writers.
There is also the visual random, which for me is very important. My study is lined with photographs, paintings, prints, oddball sculptures, masks and puppets – which drives my wife nuts, it is just too busy for her. It works for me, though, since I’m able to use them as “unrelated objects to stare into while thinking”(there is probably a word for that in some ancient language that is about to go extinct, and we’ll never know…)
Finding “data” is what we are trained for. Any competent professional, tradey, researcher, artist or artisan knows how and where to find information related to his or her work. Finding “random” is somewhat more difficult since, of course, you don’t exactly know what you are looking for. Rifling through antiquarian bookshops and fleamarket stalls is out for the time being, but luckily there are people who have taken it upon themselves to provide at least starting points for such journeys into the unknown. As this is a fundamental component required in the construction of a framework for generation of new ideas, I will be writing more about it soon since it warrants a lot more exploration.
These three building blocks will work for you, but you need to find out in what proportions, and in what circumstance. Just like each of us has a different definition of the perfect cocktail appropriate for each different occasion so, too, finding the right “thinking space” is a matter of trial and error. You might say, almost like creativity itself.