Expanded Minds...

Riding in a small plane from Philadelphia to my home town of Washington DC the other day, I could not help but hear (it was one of those small regional jets) the stories of a returning marine coming home. A very self-assured man of no more than 20 years old relating his experiences to the row in front of me. It was indeed an interesting 45 minute flight.

You see, he was a crew member in a helicopter. Not sure if he was a machine gun gunner but suffice it to say that his days were packed with dynamism as he so eloquently related about his days running missions to and fro. An "adrenaline rush" and "Intense" and "exhilarating" were some of adjectives he used to describe his daily missions. He then moved on to talk about his home-town visits and how he could not understand how people could live such boring lives with very little to do. No wonder, I thought. His mind and experience-map had expanded to the point that going back to his old world was a very limiting option.

Of course being one to derive insights whenever and wherever I can, I thought of corollaries with what I do. Coming up with concepts and structures requires the need to live in a heightened state of awareness where one forces clashes of ideas and business models in order to derive new ones. It is quite and addiction in fact, and it actually can be overwhelming since the mind can play "what if" scenarios incessantly. It can also be frustrating when others do not see the vision and intuition that emerges from refining fore vision.

So what is the take away?

An expanded mind cannot be put back in its old state. It is simply not possible, in my view.

Society needs to evolve to accommodate the expanded mind of that marine and businesses need to evolve to manage the creative energy released by newly developed creative minds.

"False Flat" Syndrome

False flat is a term used in cycling and it refers to a situation that occurs when one is pedaling in what one believes to be a flat road.
The mind is a funny organ an tricks us all the time. Faced with a perceived flat portion of a road, ideally in a sunny day in a California road with low humidity and no cars, the mind relaxes and perceives the challenge of pedaling the next few miles to be easy and consistent. We are basically seduced by our visual perception of the terrain. Said perception starts to change as the pedaling becomes arduous for no apparent reason and we start to feel differently. All the while the brain is still persisting in that this should be easy; it is a flat road after all.
Is is amazing how a 1% to 3% incline, not readily evident to our visual sense, can affect physical effort and of course results over a long period. The longer the miles pedaled in such a section, the longer the struggle and the longer the dissonance.
In my experience a very similar thing happens in organizations that are trying to be more innovative. It happens when the resident culture tries to delay and block business models and innovation that threaten the status quo.
How?
By engaging with the new change-driven culture (one of the side benefits of an innovation practice) via a collaborative approach that with time proves to be a form or quiet resistance, the resident culture basically aims to kill and/or delay new ideas. This  syndrome is exacerbated by organizations that repeatedly engage in restructurings that induce "wait and see" behaviors. There are many versions of these behaviors that I will not detail here but suffice it to say they are there and obvious for the analytical eye.
These behaviors are the corporate equivalents of the false flat syndrome and if not recognized and addressed, it will kill innovations and new ideas. Gauranteed.

The Burden of Maturity

Recently my wife and I had occasion to reflect on the different levels of maturity that our children have to deal with as they go about their growing up. The discussion evolved, unexpectedly, to organizational maturity. Don't ask me how the leap happened, but it did.

What makes the human drama so perplexing and interesting is that we are all very different. We learn differently, our brains are wired differently, we are different. Why should maturity be an exception with our institutions? At the end of the day our institutions (and dare we say "governments") are managed by us.

In my eternal quest to try to understand how best to manage companies via an innovation imperative, I find that this maturity coefficient must be relevant and it will influence an organization's innovation DNA. A lack of maturity severely retards development and the generation of new ideas. Enhanced maturity allows for more openness, exploration and the generation of ideas (quantity and quality).

Focusing back on the individual; one of the burdens of professional maturity and the ability to understand the need for change before others, is that one stands alone - in many instances - and this is not a good place to be in organizations that do not assign value to maturity and fore-vision. We must develop support structures for people in these circumstances.

Recently I heard from an Innovation consultant that described a sudden insight from one of his clients when discussing his company's ability to generate ideas. His insight was that it is about quantity and from there the ability to manage the funnel to identify the jewels. Couldn't agree more.

The thing is,  I instinctively know that there must be a strong correlation between an organization's ability to generate ideas and its level of maturity. Now we have to prove it.

Thoughts on FaceBook's "Frictionless Sharing"

The question of Face Book's new "frictionless sharing" was asked in a recent Trends forum in LinkedIN. My contribution to it is written below. 


Yes, I consider myself a techno-utopian and believe that technology can help us immensely. Witness the emerging field of neuro-science and how it may be able to help us understand ourselves better and aid our poor decision making skills. 


On the other side of the coin, I have witnessed how technology has atrophied our social abilities: call it our "social curation" abilities. Regrettably, I think Facebook frictionless sharing will exacerbate this trend. Like the author says: there is value on what our friends write or say and we base a lot of our decision on this curation from our circles of influence.

Overall, I have mixed emotions about Facebook. It can be a great tool for communication but it can also blunt our humanness in ways we are only now experiencing. How many of us just "park" our friends in Facebook? I have "friends" in Facebook that I have not seen in years, although we are but 10 miles away and I have made repeated attempts to connect in 3D.

Let us face it, we are 7 billion humans now and if you think of us as a currency, we are being devalued just based on demographic growth. Technology and social networks play and additional role (ironic, really) in the acceleration of this devaluation by allowing us to create content (self broadcasting) that is competing with a lot more content contributed by millions of us. At the margins then, my specific contribution is devalued due to the shear amount of content being produced. Now, with the reduced value of my "curation" the content is devalued even more so.

Change Blindness

I came across Nova Now on PBS yesterday and the episode had to do with the growing field of Neuro-Science and the different fields of research. An absolutely fascinating piece of content that everyone should watch and that profiles various scientist and their areas of focus. You have always wondered how magic happens? Well, now you will know:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/change-blindness.html

My particular interest is in merging this field with business management and thus explore better ways to run ourselves and our institutions and also to pursue innovative ways of being. Who would not want more Steve Jobs, right? There is so much to delve into, but one area that is interesting and applicable to my World has to with the perception of change. 


There is a phenomenon called: Change blindness  and it occurs in situations where we are so focused on one thing that we miss a larger event happening right in front us.  For more intriguing demonstrations, see this website maintained by psychologist J. Kevin O'Regan, one of the first scientists to describe the phenomenon.


As one that has been in the trenches trying to shift people's minds to new ideas, this was very intriguing and I am now wondering if the research can translate to change management. In other words, can the specific findings of why and how it happens shed light into why people resist change? It turns out that in the process of change blindness we have neurons that make us focus on movement and another that makes focus less on what is happening around us. (I am not doing it justice so please see the episode). It appears that our brains are wired like this so we could see that tiger or lion that was about to eat us. In order words, a self-preservation instinct.


So, the question begs, is this self-preservation instinct going array and is it now stopping many of us from accepting the inevitability of change? Now is not the lion but that new product or idea that will unseat my power-base; absolutely, I see this every day. The harder question now is how to prove it - scientifically - and how to develop techniques to counter it. Anyone want to cooperate on this?

This is the work, this the hard work, this is the hardest work.

Living on the edge

Two separate and distinct events occurred to my wife and I as we were trying to help people with their specific causes. Please remember that I wrote help - as in going out of our daily routines and struggles to assist another human being with their specific idea and cause.
In both instances the people that we were aiming to help (after getting their approval for us to do so) reacted in ways that were anathema to the situation. Both felt challenged and the basis for these feelings appeared to be caused by a sense of loss of control. In addition, both seemed to have reacted impulsively without giving the circumstances its due deliberation and thought.
This got me thinking, and while I am not a psychologist, it occurred to me that as we live on the edge driven by economic  and social insecurities, we are reacting instinctively and protecting our "space" even when people are trying to help us. Or, is it a more profound issue, where people have lost their ability to distinguish friend from foe because we have been immersed for so long in this mercantilistic culture and "what is in for me" ethos?
Whatever the cause, both are unacceptable and all this will do is stop our collective efforts from helping each other dig out of the mess that we have created for ourselves. This is actually reflected in our political sytem which is a mirror to - yes - us.

Reductionism & Innovation

In keeping with the new digitally enhanced human behaviors, we must pay attention to how these behaviors are carried over to the rest of people's lives. This means that we must be aware of the "impatience" factor that has been accelerated by our digital expectations. I feel that as we adopt communication technologies with increased speeds - such as mobile broadband on our smart handsets- these accelerated expectations are being carried over to the rest of our lives. I can't prove this is happening, of course, but I can feel it and based on my past reads of emerging trends, I am probably right on this one.
This is reflected in our increasing intolerance for "too much"; too much text on web sites for example, too much going on in car dashboards, too many TV channels, too much avertising. We are now processing more information faster than ever and - well - there is only so much we can retain.
Recently, I experienced a more poignant example of this impatience factor and my brain's need to see less. In entering my latest hotel room here in Frankfurt, I was confronted with 8+ different informational pieces sitting on desks, TV, radios, my bed, etc...One of them was for how to use the room phone. Really? Who uses hotel phones anymore. Get rid of it. Too much.
Reduce the pieces and alleviated the clutter in the room and in the mind of the guest. We simply don't have the time to process all these customer "touch points" anymore.
So, please, innovators and marketeers; please adopt messaging and product strategies that reduce and simplify as much as possible. It will be to your benefit
Short and sweet.