Tag Archives: Art

Eddie Van Halen, Simultaneous Innovation and the AI Regulation Conundrum

Eddie Van Halen, Simultaneous Innovation and the AI Regulation Conundrum

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

It’s great to have an excuse to post an Eddie Van Halen video to the innovation community.  It’s of course fun just to watch Eddie, but I also have a deeper, innovation relevant reason for doing so.

Art & Science:  I’m a passionate believer in cross-pollination between art and science.  And I especially believe we can learn a great deal from artists and musicians like Eddie who have innovated consistently over a career.  Dig into their processes, and we see serial innovators like The Beatles, Picasso, Elton John, Bowie, George Martin, Freddie Mercury, William Gibson, Lady Gaga, Paul Simon and so many others apply techniques that are highly applicable to all innovation fields. Techniques such as analogy, conceptual blending, collaboration, reapplication, boundary stretching, risk taking, learning from failure and T-Shaped innovation all crop up fairly consistently.  And these creative approaches are typically also built upon deep expertise, passion, motivation, and an ability to connect with future consumer needs, and to tap into early adopters and passionate consumers.  For me at least, that’s a pretty good innovation toolkit for innovation in any field.  Now, to be fair, often their process is intuitive, and many truly prolific artists are lucky enough to automatically and intuitively ‘think that way’. But understanding and then stealing some of their techniques, either implicit or explicit, can be a great way to both jump-start our own innovative processes, and also to understand how innovation works. As Picasso said, ‘great artists steal’, but I’d argue that so do good innovators, at least within the bounds allowed by the patent literature!

In the past I’ve written quite a lot about Picasso and The Beatles use of conceptual blending, Paul Simon’s analogies, reapplication and collaboration, Bowie’s innovative courage, and William Gibson’s ability to project s-curves.  Today, I’d like to to focus on some insights I see in the guitar innovations of Eddie.   

(a) Parallel or Simultaneous Innovation.  I suspect this is one of the most important yet under-appreciated concepts in innovation today. Virtually every innovation is built upon the shoulders of giants. Past innovations provide the foundation for future ones, to the point where once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, many innovations become inevitable. It still takes an agile and creative mind to come up with innovative ideas, but contemporary innovations often set the stage for the next leap forward. And this applies both to the innovative process, and also to a customers ability to understand and embrace it. The design of the first skyscraper was innovative, but it was made a lot more obvious by the construction of the Eiffel Tower. The ubiquitous mobile phone may now seem obvious, but it owes its existence to a very long list of enabling technologies that paved the way for it’s invention, from electricity to chips to Wi-Fi, etc.

The outcome of this ‘stage setting’ is that often even really big innovations occur simultaneously yet independently.  We’ve seen this play out with calculus (independently developed by Newton and Leibnitz), the atomic bomb, where Oppenheimer and company only just beat the Nazi’s, the theory of evolution, the invention of the thermometer, nylon and so many others.  We even see it in evolution, where scavenger birds vultures and condors superficially appear quite similar due to adaptations that allow them to eat carrion, but actually have quite different genetic lineages.  Similarly many marsupials look very similar to placental mammals that fill similar ecological niches, but typically evolved independently. Context has a huge impact on innovation, and similar contexts typical create parallel, and often similar innovations. As the world becomes more interconnected, and context becomes more homogenized, we are going to see more and more examples of simultaneous innovation.

Faster and More Competitive Innovation:  Today social media, search technology and the web mean that more people know more of the same ‘stuff’ more quickly than before.  This near instantaneous and democratized access to the latest knowledge sets the scene and context for a next generation of innovation that is faster and more competitive than we’ve ever seen.   More people have access to the pieces of the puzzle far more quickly than ever before; background information that acts as a precursor for the next innovative leap. Eddie had to go and watch Jimmy Paige live and in person to get his inspiration for ‘tapping’.  Today he, and a few million others would simply need to go onto YouTube.  He therefore discovered Paige’s hammer-on years after Paige started using them.  Today it would likely be days.  That acceleration of ‘innovation context’ has a couple of major implications: 

1.  If you think you’ve just come up with something new, it’s more than likely that several other people have too, or will do so very soon.   More than ever before you are more than likely in a race from the moment you have an idea! So snooze and you loose. Assume several others are working on the same idea.

2.  Regulating Innovation is becoming really, really difficult.  I think this is possibly the most profound implication.  For example, a very current and somewhat contentious topic today is if and how we should regulate AI.  And it’s a pretty big decision. We really don’t know how AI will evolve, but it is certainly moving very quickly, and comes with the potential for earthshaking pros and cons.  It is also almost inevitably subject to simultaneous invention.  So many people are working on it, and so much adjacent innovation is occurring, that it’s somewhat unlikely that any single group is going to get very far out in front.   The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and the race is on. The issue for regulation then becomes painfully obvious.   Unless we can somehow implement universal regulation, then any regulations simply slow down those who follow the rules.  This unfortunately opens the doors to bad actors taking the lead, and controlling potentially devastating technology.

So we are somewhat damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.  If we don’t regulate, then we run the risk of potentially dangerous technology getting out of control.  But if do regulate, we run the risk of enabling bad actors to own that dangerous technology.  We’ve of course been here before.  The race for the nuclear bomb between the Allies and the Nazi’s was a great example of simultaneous innovation with potentially catastrophic outcomes.   Imagine if we’d decided fission was simply too dangerous, and regulated it’s development to the point where the Nazi’s had got there first.  We’d likely be living in a very different world today!  Much like AI, it was a tough decision, as without regulation, there was a small but possible scenario where the outcome could have been devastating.    

Today we have a raft of rapidly evolving technologies that I’d both love to regulate, but am also profoundly worried about the unintended consequences of doing so.  AI of course, but also genetic engineering, gene manipulating medicines, even climate mediation and behavioral science!  With respect to the latter, the better we get at nudging behavior, and the more reach we have with those techniques, the more dangerous miss-use becomes.  

The core problem underlying all of this is that we are human.   Most people try to do the right thing, but there are always bad actors.  And even those trying to do the right thing all too often get it wrong.  And the more democratized access to cutting edge insight becomes, parallel innovation means the more contenders we have for mistakes and bad bad choices, intentional or unintentional. 

(b) Innovation versus Invention:  A less dramatic, but I think similarly interesting insight we can draw from Eddie lies in the difference between innovation and invention He certainly wasn’t the first guitarist to use the tapping technique.  That goes back centuries! At least as far as classical composer Paganini, and it was a required technique for playing the Chapman stick in the 1970’s, popularized by the great Tony Levin in King Crimson. It was also widely, albeit sparingly (and often obscurely) used by jazz guitarists in the 1950’s and 60’s. But Eddie was the first to feature it, and turn it into a meaningful innovation in of itself. Until him, nobody had packaged the technique in a way that it could be ‘marketed’ and ‘sold’ as a viable product. He found the killer application, made it his own, and made it a ‘thing’. I would therefore argue that he wasn’t the inventor, but he was the ‘innovator’.  This points to the value of innovation over invention.  If you don’t have the capability or the partners to turn an invention into something useful, its still just an idea.   Invention is a critical part of the broader innovation process, but in isolation it’s more curiosity than useful. Innovation is about reduction to practice and communication as well a great ideas

Art & science:  I love the arts.  I play guitar, paint, and photograph.  It’s a lot of fun, and provides a invaluable outlet from the stresses involved in business and innovation.  But as I suggested at the beginning, a lot of the boundaries we place between art and science, and by extension business, are artificial and counter-productive. Some of my most productive collaborations as a scientist have been with designers and artists. As a visual scientist, I’ve found that artists often intuitively have a command of attentional insights that our cutting edge science is still trying to understand.  It’s a lot of fun to watch Eddie Van Halen, but learning from great artists like him can, via analogy, also be surprisingly insightful and instructive.   

Image credits: Unsplash

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Harnessing the Dragons of your Imagination for Innovation

Harnessing the Dragons of your Imagination for Innovation

The harder I try not to think of myself as an artist, the stronger I’m pulled back to the idea that even if my art is a little different than traditional drawing, painting, photography, music, dance and other traditional arts, that it is still art.

Today’s article was inspired by a Lex Fridman podcast interview with the lead singer of Imagine Dragons – Dan Reynolds.

Dan is a Mormon, a musician, one of nine children, a father, and a surprisingly humble and astute person. All of these things are relevant because who we are as a person is the result of every facet of ourselves today, and in our upbringing. Our art comes from our experience and our empathetic connections to the experiences of others. While Dan is a musician, he is also an artist, and artists can and should learn from all different types of artists.

At the heart of every kind of art is truth, but more about that later.

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” — Aldous Huxley

In this article I will highlight what I took away from the interview and some of the great music they Lex and Dan discussed, but feel free to jump in and watch the conversation at any point:

The most important takeaways from the interview are these:

  1. People have really good bullshit detectors
  2. You must authentically feel something, and your audience must feel it too
  3. Having a source of honest feedback is critical to progressing your art

Let’s now look at each of these and relate them from music to innovation:

1. People have really good bullshit detectors

In the interview Dan contrasts their success with two different records “Bet My Life” and “Believer” – which both did well – but “Believer” out-streamed “Bet My Life” by 10x.

Here is “Bet My Life” from YouTube with its 160 Million views on YouTube:

And “Believer” with its 2.2 Billion views on YouTube:

Okay, maybe that’s a bit more than 10x, but Dan when asked about what went wrong with “Bet My Life” he admitted that they produced the song themselves and that they took what was originally a stripped-down song and over-produced it – costing the song some of its authenticity in the process.

If we cross over to innovation on this topic, in the past I’ve written that Veracity is Required for Innovation Success.

Yes, innovation is an art.

Here are some key thoughts from this article on the importance of truth to innovation:

“Fail to identify a solution with real innovation veracity and you are likely to miss potential elements of optimal value creation, you will likely struggle to make its value accessible, and there is a greater likelihood that you will fail to properly translate the value of the solution for your customers.

So, taken another way, the search for innovation success is a search for truth. You must therefore unlock the inner truths of your intended customers (think unmet needs or jobs-to-be-done), you must search in areas that your intended customers will feel are true for your brand, and areas that feel true to employees given the company’s mission and values. When your pursuit of innovation centers around truth and when you commit to a focused effort to increase your innovation capability – and to pursue Innovation Excellence – then and only then do you have your best chance at innovation success.”

2. You must authentically feel something, and your audience must feel it too

In innovation we often talk about how it takes 100+ ideas to find 10 projects worth investing time and money in, and from those 10 projects – if you’re lucky – you might have one show promise as a potential innovation.

In the Lex Fridman interview Dan Reynolds revealed that he writes about 100 songs a year and from those perhaps 10 might get recorded. Dan started as a drummer, and while voice is often as seen as the melody of a song, his vocals are in part driven by a percussion mindset. For innovation we like to speak about bringing different mindsets and perspectives to increase the chances of finding something meaningful.

Speaking of feeling and authenticity, Dan tells a story in the interview about how they were working on an album with famous record producer Rick Rubin and listened to a song that Dan believed in, but after hearing it he told Dan “I don’t believe you.”

The path to adoption is through belief…

Some of the songs they listened to in regard to ‘feeling it’, included Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”:

Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son”:

And Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”:

Identifying whether you are transmitting authentic feelings or not is very difficult. We’ve already spoken about the importance of veracity, and if we build on that using something I wrote about in my article That’s Innovation with Two V’s, leveraging information from the movie A Good American, about how the following three components can help you identify signals and drive the transformation of DATA into INTELLIGENCE (or innovation veracity in our context):

  1. Volume – in order to derive meaningful conclusions you need a lot of data inputs, in this case, lots of idea fragments (ideas come later)
  2. Variety – multiple perspectives are necessary to avoid blind spots and increase the potential for connecting idea fragments
  3. Velocity – volume by itself is not enough, momentum is important too. You have to keep Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

3. Having a source of honest feedback is critical to progressing your art

Making art that resonates with others is incredibly different. It is easy to get lost in our own perspective.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb

It is incredibly important as an artist, as an innovator, that you find a group of trusted voices to allow you to accelerate the development of your art – or your innovation. Science experienced an incredible acceleration in the private clubs of London in the 1600’s, impressionist art experienced an amazing acceleration in the south of France in the 1800’s – because of the rapid exchange of ideas and feedback.

For Dan Reynolds, one of those trusted voices is his father, he also has one of his brothers as the band’s manager, another brother as their lawyer, and brings in external voices to help with the production of their records – people like Rick Rubin.

Listening to your trusted external voices can help you see where you’re falling short. There is a great quote in the interview above regarding Dan’s realization around the sometimes-uncomfortable role of a famous person in society.

“By not saying anything, I was saying everything.” – Dan Reynolds
(re: LGBTQ issues at the time)

It is only from being open to receiving feedback that we can learn anything. And when it comes to art, when it comes to Optimizing Innovation Resonance:

To achieve and maintain innovation resonance, you must nurture a commitment to learning fast, both during the innovation development process and after the launch of a potential innovation. You must maintain a laser focus on how you are creating value, helping people access that value, and translating that value for people so they can understand how your potential innovation may fit into their lives. So, do you have processes in place as part of your innovation methodology for measuring and evolving solutions in place to help you get to innovation resonance?

And to help reduce the tyranny of the innovation hero and to encourage innovation collaboration, I created the Nine Innovation Roles:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Conscript
  3. Connector
  4. Artist
  5. Customer Champion
  6. Troubleshooter
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

… to make a place for everyone in innovation.

Conclusion

There is a reason this blog is called Human-Centered Change & Innovation. The reason is that when it comes to change, innovation and transformation, the people side of all three is everything.

To be successful, you must consider “the other.”

You must engage with “the other.”

You must understand “the other.”

This requires empathy, this requires veracity, and when you bring empathy and veracity together, you have a chance at achieving resonance.

All types of art and innovation require empathy, veracity, and resonance for success.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the interview, the music, and the conversation.

I hope all of this will help you slay your dragons, imagine a future where you are connecting more fully with your audience, and creating something amazing.

Keep innovating!

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Time Travel Innovation

Time Travel Innovation

Is it really possible to travel back in time? What about traveling into the future, have we finally figured out how to do that? Well, you’ll have to read on to find out…

But before we explore whether someone has finally figured out how to successfully time travel and recruit you to join me in investing in their pre-IPO startup, I’d like to introduce one of the most important visualizations from the world of innovation that many of your have probably never seen – Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity from January 2016.

If you’re not familiar with this incredibly important visual artifact from the work of Neri Oxman from MIT’s Media Lab, you should be because it does an amazing job of capturing the interplay between Art, Science, Engineering and Design in the creation of innovation. It builds on John Maeda’s Bermuda Quadrilateral from 2006:

John Maeda Bermuda Quadrilateral

And Rich Gold’s Matrix, also from 2006:

Rich Gold Matrix

While Rich Gold’s visualization builds on the logical bones of John Maeda’s Bermuda Quadrilateral and introduces the concepts of speculative design, speculative engineering, and the contrast between moving minds & moving molecules, it lacks the depth of Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity visualization. But the Krebs Cycle of Creativity does lose Maeda’s expression of the linkages between science & exploration, engineering & invention, design & communication, and art & expression. But even without these assertions of Maeda, the Krebs Cycle of Creativity still captures a number of other powerful tensions and assertions that can benefit us in our pursuit of innovation.

Time Marches On

The Krebs Cycle of Creativity can be viewed from a number of different perspectives and utilized in a number of different ways. But, one way to look at it is as if it were a watch face. In this context as time moves forward you’re following the typical path, a technology-led innovation approach.

Using the Krebs Cycle of Creativity Canvas in a clockwise direction will help us explore:

  • What information do we have about what might be possible?
  • What knowledge needs to be obtained?
  • What utility does the invention create?
  • What behavior do we need to modify to encourage adoption?

It begins with the invention of a new piece of technology created by the usage of existing information and a new perception of what might be possible within the constraints of our understanding of the natural world, or even by expanding our understanding and knowledge of the natural world using the scientific method.

Neri Oxman Krebs Cycle of Creativity

You’ll see at 3 o’clock in the image above that it at this point in time that most organizations then hand off this new knowledge to their engineers to look at this new understanding of nature through the production lens in order to convert this new knowledge into new utility.

Engineers in most organizations are adept at finding a useful application for a new scientific discovery, and in many organizations this work is done before designers get a peek and begin to imagine how they can present this utility to users in a way that drives behaviors of adoption in a way that the behaviors of using the product or consuming the service feel as natural as possible and as frictionless as possible.

And unfortunately the artists in any organization (or outside via agency relationships) are called in at the eleventh hour to help shape perceptions and to communicate the philosophy behind the solution and the to make the case for it to occupy space in our collective culture.

Pausing at the Innovation Intersection

The way that innovation occurs in many organizations is that Science and Engineering collaborate to investigate and confirm feasibility, then Engineering and Design collaborate to inject viability into the equation, and then Design and Art (with elements of marketing and advertising) collaborate to create Desirability at the end. This may be how it works in many organizations, yet it doesn’t mean that it is the best way…

Feasibility Viability Desirability for Innovation

Traveling Back in Time

But as we all know, water can run uphill, the moon can eclipse the sun, and yes time can run in reverse. Viewing the Krebs Cycle of Creativity in a counter clockwise direction and pushing the hands of the watch backwards will have you following a user-led innovation approach instead.

Using the Krebs Cycle of Creativity Canvas in a counter clockwise direction will help us explore:

  • What information do we have about what is needed?
  • What behavior should we observe?
  • What would create utility for customers?
  • What knowledge must we obtain to realize our solution vision?

It begins with the identification of a new insight uncovered by the investigation of existing information and a new perception of what might be needed within the constraints of our understanding of our customers, or even by expanding our understanding and knowledge of our customers by using ethnography, observation, behavioral science and other tools to enter the mind of your customers, employees or partners.

You’ll see at 9 o’clock in the image above that it at this point in time that user-driven organizations after having their business artists use their perception skills to investigate the culture and philosophy underpinning this new understanding of behavior and pass it off for their designers to look at through the production lens in order to convert it into new utility.

Designers in many organizations are adept at finding a useful application for a new behavioral understanding, and in user-driven organizations this work is done before engineers get a peek and begin to imagine how they can build this utility for users in a way that creates new knowledge in a way that will differentiate the products or services of their organization from those of the competition.

And in user-driven organizations scientists are called in as needed to help overcome any barriers engineers encounter in realizing the solution that best satisfies the users’ identified needs, while leveraging new scientific perceptions that help shape our understanding of nature and empower new philosophical beliefs about what’s possible.

Conclusion

While we haven’t torn any worm holes through the fabric of the space-time continuum with this article, hopefully we have expanded your repertoire with some new tools to facilitate conscious choices around whether you are going to pursue technology-led innovation (clockwise) or user-led innovation (counter clockwise).

Hopefully we have also shown you a better way of visualizing where you are in your innovation journey and where the turning points in your innovation pursuits lie as you seek to take a quantum leap and transform your past into a bright, shiny future.

So now it is time to answer the question you had at the beginning of this article… Is time travel possible?

Well, nearly a decade ago NASA ran an experiment that proved elements of Einstein’s theory of relativity, specifically that the fabric of space-time warps around the earth in response to gravity. Read about it here

And yes, time travel is theoretically possible, or at least time is not theoretically constant as described in this NASA article.

Neither of these indicate that it is possible to travel backwards in time (despite what Superman physics says), only to affect how time advances, but if anyone wants to invest a million dollars in my time travel startup, I’ll cash your check. Because who knows, maybe your check is what will finally make time travel possible!

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

 

Image credits: Neri Oxman, MIT Media Lab; Rich Gold; John Maeda; Pixabay

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The Art and Science of Futures Research

The Art and Science of Futures Research

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

Every year, unforeseen events shape our lives—from pandemics to technological disruptions. It’s therefore no surprise that organizations of all types, ranging from governments to businesses, increasingly recognize the need to stay one step ahead of the curve. Futures research play a critical role in this process, blending the art of strategic scenario planning and the science of data-driven trend analysis to build a more resilient tomorrow.

At its core, futures research is a method of studying and anticipating change to better equip decision-makers to cope with, and capitalize on, opportunities and challenges of the future. It uses a blend of qualitative and quantitative research to consider both the immediate situation and a variety of potential scenarios, examining all elements that might affect this future, from socio-economic trends to proper investments. Most importantly, it is a way to proactively prepare for the inevitable changes that lay ahead, allowing organizations to make decisions with the greater context in mind.

Case Study 1 – Local Government

Take, for example, the Ontario Drinks Initiative (ODI), recently undertaken by the Ontario provincial government. ODI was established as a response to the explosive growth of hard seltzers and craft beers in the alcoholic beverage industry. The provincial government sought to understand not only current customer preferences and market figures but also the evolving trends in consumer demand that could shape the future of the sector. Futures research, in turn, allowed the government to more accurately predict the potential response to its proposed policies, providing insights on both the short-term actions and long-term investments needed to capitalize upon the industry’s transformation.

Case Study 2 – Healthcare Industry

A separate example can be seen in the healthcare industry, where a merger of hospital networks in the Midwest had become a major political issue. The medical staff, business leaders, and government officials had different opinions on the proposed merger, but they realized that the only way to make an informed decision was with the help of a more comprehensive and future-oriented analysis. Through futures research, the stakeholders managed to better understand potential long-term implications, economic impacts, and regulatory aspects in addition to more immediate pros and cons. In the end, this more nuanced research allowed for decision-makers to make a more informed and strategic decision.

Conclusion

Ultimately, futures research can be a powerful tool for any organization that is looking to stay ahead of the curve and stay ahead of the competition. By blending the art of qualitative scenarios with the science of quantitative data analysis, it can equip decision-makers with the greater context and insight they need to make more informed strategic decisions that can lead to long-term success.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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Confessions of a Business Artist

Confessions of a Business Artist

I am an artist.

There, I’ve said it. This statement may confuse some people who know me, and come as a shock to others.

Braden, what do you mean you’re an artist? You’ve got an MBA from London Business School, you’ve led change programs for global organizations, helped companies build their innovation capabilities and cultures, are an expert in digital transformation, and you can’t even draw a straight line without a ruler. What makes you think you’re an artist?

Well, okay, that may all be true, but there are lots of different kinds of artists. I may not be a painter, a sculptor, a musician, an illustrator, or even a singer, but I am an artist, a business artist.

What is a business artist you ask?

A business artist sees through complexity to what matters most. A business artist loves working with PowerPoint and telling stories, often through keynote speeches and training facilitation, or through writing. A business artist loves to share, often doing so for the greater good, sometimes to their own financial detriment, in an effort to accelerate the knowledge, learning, and creating new capabilities in others. A business artist is a builder, often creating new businesses, new web sites, and new thinking. A business artist is comfortable stepping into a number of different business contexts and bringing a different energy and a different approach to creating solutions to complex requirements. Part of the reason a business artist can do this is because a business artist values their intuitive skills just as much as they value their intellectual skills, and may also consciously invest in getting in touch with higher levels of intuitive capabilities, enabling them to excel in roles that involve a great deal of what might be termed ‘organizational psychology’.

A business artist often appears to be a jack of all trades, sometimes bordering on what was portrayed in the television show The Pretender, and can be an incredibly powerful addition to any team tackling a big challenge, but a business artist’s incredible ability to contribute to the success of an organization is often discounted by the traditional recruiting processes of most human resource organizations because of its emphasis on skill matching and experience, skewing hiring in favor of someone with a lot of experience at being mediocre at a certain skillset over someone with limited experience but greater capability. A business artist often appears to be ahead of the curve, often to their own detriment, arriving too early to the party by grasping where organizations need to go before the rest of the organization is willing to accept the new reality. This is a real problem for business artists.

Now is the time for a change. Given human’s increasing access to knowledge, and the shorter time now required to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills required to perform a task, people who are comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, and capable of learning quickly are incredibly valuable to organizations as continual change becomes the new normal. Because experience is increasingly detrimental to success instead of a long-lived asset, given the accelerating pace of innovation and change, we need business artists now more than ever.

So how do we create more business artists?

Unfortunately our public schools are far too focused on indoctrination than education, on repetition over discovery. Our educational system specializes in creating trivia masters and kids that hate school, instead of building a new generation of creative problem solvers that love to learn and explore new approaches instead of defending status conferred based on mastery of current truths (which may be tomorrow’s fallacies). We are far too obsessed with STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) when we should be focused on STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Music). Music is creative math after all. My daughter’s school has a limited music program and NO ART. How is this possible?

To create more business artists we need to shift our focus towards art, creative problem solving and demonstrated learning, and away from memorization, metrics, and repetition. Can we do this?

Can we create an environment where the status quo is seen not as a source of power through current mastery and instead towards a system where improvements to the status quo are seen as the new source of power?

Organizations that want to survive will do so. Countries that want to stay at the top of the economic pyramid will do so. So what kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of company do you want to be part of?

Do you have the courage to join me as a business artist or to help create a new generation of them?

Image credit: blogs.nd.edu

This article originally appeared on Linkedin


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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 24, 2012


On Einstein’s quote “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” from yesterday:

“I don’t think it is either/or proposition. Imagination leads to new knowledge and new knowledge leads to imagination. At end of the day, you need a balanced team of imaginators and knowledge practitioners/executioners to move the needle.”

– Sanjiv Karani


“Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.”

– Mason Cooley


“In our hyper-competitive, always-connected world, organizations are increasingly becoming focused on improving both their speed to market and their revenue per headcount. In this environment, more senior leaders every day are seeing innovation as the primary way to gain competitive advantage and to simultaneously increase revenue and cut costs.”

– Braden Kelley


“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”

– Steve Jobs


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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