Infinite drive: LOST in an "alternate geography"

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In describing the many clever ways in which baffles were used to defend castles and to force would be attackers to expose themselves to danger, the author of this piece at BLDGBLOG also pointed out in the comment section that a "digital baffle" had been set up to hide important government and military centers in plain sight. Besides reminding me of the island on LOST, which was famously difficult to get to or to leave, "alternate geography" struck me as an interesting way to think about an old term.

"Baffled," indeed.

Wayne

Genius always starts with a question, not an answer

A while back I stumbled on a quote that appealed to me because it captured the fundamental tension between the act of creation, where everything hangs in the balance, and the choice to avoid risk and achieve little of note. "How long do you live in the question?" is from a book that I'm finally getting around to read, "Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance." The author, Jonathan Fields, does particularly good job of pointing out that if creators, or anyone else for that matter, are unwilling to take risks they will get predictable results, and of suggesting ways of living in the question long enough to arrive at a place where the initial risk finds its reward.

That can never happen when the outcome is known.

Innovation and creativity cannot happen when every variable, every outcome, every permutation is known and has been tested and validated in advance. You cannot see the world differently if it’s already been seen in every possible way. You cannot solve a problem better if every solution has already been defined. You cannot create great art if every way to stroke a canvas, connect a note, or grace a stage has already been inventoried, categorized, and laid bare for all to see. If everything is known and certain, that means it’s all been done before. And creation isn’t about repetition.

Genius always starts with a question, not an answer.

The hazards for someone like me, fueled by an interior life, is that my thoughts, whatever their merit, might never be challenged - and improved - by others. If you've been reading this blog for a while, that you know that my particular danger is walking, still, into figurative walls that others, habituated to talking to other people, avoided with relative ease. It started with the question: "am I willing to act?" and will end, I'm quite sure, in the satisfaction of knowing that the unknown wasn't something to be feared. In the end, it was just unknown.

Wayne

"New Groupthink:" Is "joining" bad for creativity?

Can "joining" stunt creative outcomes? In the past decade as always-on, collaborative work has become the norm and it has simultaneously become harder to escape the daily intrusions of connected life, some bright people are asking for a collective time out from the crowd. Jaron Lanier, for example, offered this cheeky take on "wiki world," or the group, in his essay "Digital Maoism" of a few years back.

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out.

William Deresiewicz has connected solitude to a kind of know-your-own-mind leadership more recently. Ever the skeptic, Nicholas Carr suggests that digital media is changing us, and not for the better. And Susan Cain, who has excellent representation and book due soon (I'm buying it), offered a provocative take on group think at the New York Times over the weekend.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Keith Sawyer pushes back on his blog, Creativity and Innovation, labeling it, surprisingly, as an "attack."

I'm not at all surprised that Cain's work is drawing attention. Speaking as someone who works out what he thinks alone and not in a continuous exchange with others, her book, and the essays mentioned here, are a useful corrective to a narrative that a majority of people, energized by the group and skeptical of soloists, find perfectly natural. There are hazard to introverts of course, but I think that many, many IdeaFestival fans are similarly inclined to seek out that unexpected connection in a book - or in front of the canvas - or in page of equations - or, like I do, looking to the heavens over a period of months and watching the stars pivot about Polaris. As for whether individual or group work is more likely to lead to creative outcomes, who knows? I do think, however, that in this time and place, particularly in this time and place, introverts have something to add to the conversation.

Wayne

Winter wrecks games

It's snowing in Kentucky this morning and my mind turns toward this kind of slip and slide.

Don't you wish you could fly?

Have a great day, wherever you are.

Wayne

Sometimes you just feel small

Sooner or later it happens. You find yourself hopelessly outmatched by that uber-talented/energetic/bright soul who effortlessly connects the dots. I can relate. Working with the IdeaFestival, feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard - that's why I liked the advice recently handed out by Ben Casnocha on his blog, pointing out a letter from a high school senior applying to MIT who was discouraged by the sheer brainpower at that institution. A comment on Reddit, where those misgivings were expressed, tells the student that what he's approaching, irrespective of intelligence, is a decision about feeling inadequate. In other words, buck up.

Casnocha says it's not enough to simply resolve to do better. Much more important - and a lesson, I might add, that I've learned much later in life - is to think honestly about what makes each of us unique. There are many, many kinds of intelligences. For some, logic and reason are predominate. Others can think visually and spatially. Others have an effortless emotional intelligence, and can pick out the tiniest social cues and respond with the right words. They're invaluable friends.  "No one," as Casnocha, " is smarter than you in every possible way."

Wayne