Ho‘ohana Aloha

Excerpt, with an Einstein quote I have always liked:

The connection between perspective and creative thinking has to do with habituation and over-familiarization. Over-familiarization with something ( an idea, a procedure, a system ) is a trap. Where creative thinking is concerned, that is the irony of the skill: the more adept you are at something, the less likely you are to look at it in a different way; the greater your skill of a particular discipline, the less you will be tempted to experiment with different approaches. Einstein put it best when he once said, “An expert is a person who has few new ideas; a beginner is a person with many.”

Talking Story Archive Aloha for the weaving:

• Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From
• Are you able to discount your own certainty?
• What your Big Ideas do best
• Don’t get New Ideas caught in the ASA Trap!
• An idea is a fragile thing

I’m giving myself a Goodreads challenge again, and this was book 5 for me this month. I tend to read more early in the year, and my challenge is to read books more consistently. The Kindle Daily Deal helps immensely, for it constantly adds to the queue in an easily affordable way. So many books, so little time…

Where Good Ideas Come From

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (Goodreads links)
Link to Amazon.com if you prefer it: Where Good Ideas Come From byJohnson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a word, exceptional.

I greatly appreciate authors like Johnson who are ‘slow hunch’ cultivators, thorough researchers, and articulate explainers.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is a focused celebration of the phrase “hindsight is 20/20.” The scientific history of innovation is curated to support Johnson’s thesis, which is his answer to this question: What kind of environment creates good ideas?

There is another, more subtle question which lurks throughout the book as well: Are you open to sharing your ideas before they’ve fully formed? (…for here are the reasons why.)  …More

I’ve tumbled quite a bit from The 99 Percent over the last year’s time… great to see this recap as a handy review of several articles I liked too.

The visionary behind Monty Python, Brazil & 12 Monkeys talks about never letting your ideas become rigid, staying out of debt, and forgetting everything you learn.

And then there’s this:

And then I start talking to younger people and I realize that they don’t understand where things come from. They don’t understand how the system works. This is terrifying. They just are consumers, and that’s it. And that’s like the dream if Orwell had written the dream. We don’t live in a socialist or capitalist society; it’s a consumerist society, and nobody cares, as long as they’ve got their goodies.

Full interview.

Managers in large companies have to figure out ways to ensure that the best new ideas actually reach the people able to exploit them…

Utterly fantastic. Want some great ideas where you live? Just ask everyone else who lives there, and then…

This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city’s public spaces “smarter, more beautiful and livable.” Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city.

Be sure you click through for the slide show of ideas.

Mark Fuller, CEO of WET Design, sounds like a leader who has fun leading his company toward excellence: How’s that for a novel concept, fun? It shouldn’t be… if managing and leading your team isn’t enjoyable for you, you really should do something else.

Snippets of his interview with Adam Bryant:

I really love coming to work to develop the workplace and the team. I think it’s either a virtuous or a vicious spiral, and it’s exposed when you go to hire somebody.

To get really good talent, you need to be doing interesting stuff. Take a great kid out of college or somebody from another company — they’re not going to come if there’s not something really interesting to work on. I suppose you could throw gobs of money at them or something, but that’s not the idea. So you need to build the company so you have great talent, and great projects, and a great environment. You get those three, and then they just feed off of each other.

And this sounds like a philosophy similar to the one we have for the Daily Five Minutes:

Q. Why improv?

A. Improv, if properly taught, is really about listening to the other person, because there’s no script. It’s about responding. I was noticing that we didn’t have a lot of good communication among our people.

And about ideas, and expecting mistakes:

We also encourage people to put their ideas on our walls… The point is to get people to put their stuff out where other people can see it. We don’t want a culture of, “That’s my idea. I don’t want anybody to see it. Maybe they’ll find a flaw in it.”

…So one of the things I will do is to start some meetings by saying, “Let me tell you where I just screwed up.” That sets the tone of, we’ve got to put our mistakes out there. They don’t call it “learn by trial and success.” You learn by trial and error.