Discovery is not finding new lands, it’s something else

“The real act of discovery,” wrote Marcel Proust, “consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” The trick is to cultivate what George Carlin called “vuja dé”: a strange sense of unfamiliarity in the familiar, thereby revealing opportunities or solutions you hadn’t previously noticed.

But the question is: How? Manipulating the world we see through our mental lenses comes naturally to us. Seeing and manipulating the lenses themselves, on the other hand, feels much tougher: It’s like trying to explain the concept of water to fish. But Colum McCann’s eight-point-font trick points the way: Frequently, the way out of stuckness is to defamiliarize yourself with what you’re working on by shifting your perspective.

One simple technique is to put physical distance between yourself and the problem. Research suggests that people rate an idea as more creative when it’s described as having originated in some far-away country, perhaps because they picture it, in their mind’s eye, as “off in the distance,” so that only its most important features stand out. By contrast, when it’s pictured as being close at hand, they’re more likely to get bogged down in irrelevant details, or nitpicking objections. Maybe that’s why it always seems like you get your best ideas on airplanes, or hiking in Glacier National Park: Your challenges seem far off, so the basic contours of a solution to your problem, or the next step for your project, stand out.

If hopping on a plane isn’t an option right now, try simulating temporal distance instead: That’s the message of the timeworn advice to imagine the eulogy at your own funeral. Looking back at your life from this imagined future perspective, it’s suddenly far easier to see what really matters, which battles are worth fighting, and how you’ll be proud (or ashamed) to say you spent your time.

Alternatively, externalize your thoughts by writing them down in a journal. The point isn’t necessarily that you’ll have an instant breakthrough, but that by relating to your thinking in this “third-person” way, you’ll loosen the grip of the old assumptions, seeing your thoughts afresh, and creating potential for new insights.Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter exactly how you choose to deliver a jolt to your unseen assumptions and fixed perspectives. What really counts, when you’re faced with a challenge, is remembering that it’s even an option.

Whither the proverbial box out of which we think?

I am back from facilitating a workshop with a group of managers. One of the topics we discussed and worked on is out-of-the-box thinking; in other words, thinking differently about the work we do, about managing, and about the way we think.

In a side conversation one of the participants shared the following: “I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it”.

Hard to disagree.

Any management equivalent to Truffaut and Godard?

A review of Two in the wave, a documentary on the friendship, collaboration and falling away of these two French filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague makes me miss and look forward to more research on how managers who are successful (on their own and in their respective fields or industries) help and support each other.

As critics for the iconoclastic film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in the early 1950s, Godard and Truffaut had shared a similar aesthetic. Their masters were Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini and Fritz Lang, whose films were underestimated at the time and whom they defended with the pugnacity of young prizefighters. (FT.com)

I wonder who the captains of industry, today’s masters of the universe, look to as their “masters”: Mentors? Fellow executives in the same industry or in other industries? Professional coaches? Consultants? Management gurus? Whatever book they bump into at the airport bookstore?

It also makes me look forward to a documentary on the collaboration of three Mexican film directors and producers who are doing excellent work together: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro. No rush though… not with the quality and original work they are producing these days.

New York by Gehry

New York by Gehry: two bigger-than-life characters, one unique building.

Gates and Jobs: the interview

In a rare appearance together on the same stage at the same time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs discussed each other’s contributions to the technology industry.Bill Gates and Steve Jobs discussed each other’s contributions to the technology industry.

All Things Digital hosted the event and its website provides a transcript of the event. Here is the highlight reel:

Besides allowing viewers to get to know both individuals and what they think of each other, the interview covers a lot of history of the personal computer, software development, standard adoption, and other subjects with which students might not be familiar.

Bizarro on creativity

Most creativity is a combination of instinct and practice. I’m always suspicious of anybody who has some kind of succinct advice to give, because I think it’s different in all cases. Ernie Bushmiller, who did [the comic strip] Nancy, he’s famous inside the syndicated-cartoon world for having said, “Dumb it down.” He’d say, “You know, I like your work, but you’d need to dumb it down, dumb it down.” And that was his belief — that a cartoon needed to be excruciatingly dumb and obvious for people to enjoy it. And it worked for him. And people who love Nancy will say, “It’s just so dumb, I can’t resist it.” It obviously worked for him. But it would not have worked for Gahan Wilson. It would not have worked for me….

I think that all great art comes from inside, and it’s a combination of your own instincts and talents and the amount of practice and effort that you put into it. And eventually you get somewhere good and that becomes your secret. (cecil vortex)

So what is innovation?

“Innovation is tied to time and place” “Innovation is hard to define, but when we see it, we recognize it.” “The vast majority of innovation occurs where opportunity meets preparation.” “One recipe for innovation involves blending two different things that come together to create a third thing.”

Innovators are like jazz musicians… or like permanent teenagers. These and other analogies flowed [at this MIT panel discussion], as top-flight tech inventors tried to put their fingers on the precise nature of innovation and how it can best be coaxed into existence.

Schools kill creativity

70/20/10 – Managing innovation the Google way

Thomas Schelling – Nobel laureate by ricochet

An author who has had a significant influence on my work (before he won the Nobel prize!) by confirming that the observation of everyday events is a good (though not necessarily “academic”) way to start.

An excerpt from a paper published recently (in pdf format) on his approach:

Schelling is the master of ricochet scholarship. He studies a real-world problem and develops a conceptual model. He then takes that conceptual model back to a dozen real-world problems to see how it applies, and then ricochets back to refine the model. He keeps the process going until he is happy with his model, and satisfied with his insights into the problems that most interest him.
(…) None of us could approach his skill level, but all of us could learn from his example. If you are analyzing a policy, you should consider what your problem would look like in stripped down form. Look for an everyday analogue, and determine in what ways it is the same and how it is different. Go out in the real world to examine the information that participants have, the incentives that operate on them.

I have always been inspired by how he starts with real-world problems and, after all the back-and-forth, lets reality determine the validity of the model. Models are an attempt at understanding reality, an attempt -in some ways- at explaining reality. This is the premise for the idea that there is nothing more practical than a good theory.