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Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one:  to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format.  Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for  “solidarity, social protection and security.”  Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work.  According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years.  If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out.  Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: capitalism, competition, culture of innovation, Edmund Phelps, flourishing, free enterprise, free labor, grassroots, individualistic, innovation, mass flourishing, priorities, productivity, values, work, workplace

Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

July 29, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Welcome to the “white-water world”—a world that is rapidly changing, hyper-connected and radically contingent on forces beyond our control.

The social environment where we live and work today:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate these turbulent waters successfully (the so-called “caring” professions may be the only exception);

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone;  and finally,

– this world requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

You’ve heard each of these arguments here before. Today, they get updated and expanded in a commencement address that was given last month by John Seely Brown. He was speaking to graduate students receiving degrees that they hope will enable them to drive public policy through innovation. But his comments apply with equal force to every kind of change–small changes as well as big ones–that we’re pursuing in our work today.

When you reach the end, I hope you’ll let me know how Brown’s approach to work relates to the many jobs that are still ahead of you.

Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

John Seely Brown is 78 now. It seems that he’s never stopped trying to make sense out of the impacts that technology has on our world or how we can use these extraordinary tools to make the kind of difference we want to make.

Brown is currently independent co-chairman of the Center for the Edge, an incubator of ideas that’s associated with the global consulting firm Deloitte. In a previous life, he was the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (or PARC). Brown speaks, writes and teaches to provoke people to ask the right questions. He stimulates our curiosity by defining the world in simple, practical terms that are easy to understand but more difficult to confront. As a result, he also wants to share his excitement and optimism so that our own questioning yields solutions that make the most out of these challenges and opportunities.

He begins his commencement address with quotes from two books that frame the challenge as he sees it.

KNOWLEDGE IS TOO BIG TO KNOW

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. We even had canons . . . But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.  (from “Too Big To Know” by David Weinberger)

A WEB OF CONNECTIONS CHANGES EVERYTHING

The seventh sense is the ability to look at any object and see (or imagine) the way in which it is changed by connection–whether you are commanding an army, running a Fortune 500 company, planning a great work of art, or thinking about your child’s education. (from “The Seventh Sense” by Joshua Cooper Remo)

These realities about knowledge and connection impact not only how we think (research, practice, and create) but also how we feel (love, hate, trust and fear). Brown analogizes the challenge to navigating “a white water world” that requires particular kinds of virtuosity. Thet virtuosity includes:

– reading the currents and disturbances around you;

– interpreting the flows for what they reveal about what lies beneath the surface; and

– leveraging the currents, disturbances and flows for amplified action.

In short, you need to gain the experience, reflexes and opportunism of a white-water rafter to make the most out of your work today.

Becoming Entrepreneurial Learners

 To confront the world like a white-water rafter, Brown argues—in a kind of call to arms—that each graduate (and by implication, each one of us too) needs to be a person whose work:

Is always questing, connecting, probing.

Is deeply curious and listening to others.

Is always learning with and from others.

Is reading context as much as reading content.

Is continuously learning from interacting with the world, almost as if in conversation with the world.

And finally, is willing to reflect on performance, alone and with the help of others.

No one is on this journey alone or only accompanied by the limited number of co-workers she sees everyday.

John Seely Brown

Years before giving this commencement address, Brown used the “one room schoolhouse” in early American education as the springboard for a talk he gave about the type of learning environment we need to meet this “call to arms.” In what he dubbed the One Room Global Schoolhouse, he applied ideas about education from John Dewey and Maria Montessori to the network age. This kind of learning has new characteristics along with some traditional ones.

Learning’s aim both then and now “is making things as well as contexts,” because important information comes from both of them. It is not simply the result (the gadget, service or competence with spelling) that you end up with but also how you got there. He cites blogging as an example, where the blog post is the product but its dissemination creates the context for a conversation with readers. Similarly, in a one-room schoolhouse, a student may achieve his goal but only does so because everyone else who’s with him in the room has helped him. (I’ve been taking this to heart by adapting each week’s newsletter into a blog post so that you can share your comments each week with one another instead of just with me if you want to.)

On the other hand, learning in a localized space that’s open to global connections and boundless knowledge means that it’s better to “play with something until it just falls into place.” It’s not merely the problem you’re trying to solve or the change you’re trying to make but also creating an environment where discovery becomes possible given the volume of inputs and information. This kind of work isn’t arm’s length, but immersive. (I think of finger-painting instead of using a brush.) It allows you to put seemingly unrelated ideas, components or strategies together because it’s fun to do so and–almost incidentally–gives rise to possibilities that you simply didn’t see before. In Global Schoolhouses, “tinkering is catalytic.”

Because “time is money” in the working world, one of the challenges is for leaders, managers, coordinators, and teachers to provide “a space of safety and permission” where you can make playful mistakes until you get it right. Because knowledge is so vast and our connections to others so extensive, linear and circumscribed forms of learning simply can’t harness the tools at our disposal to make the world a better place.

Some of the learning we need must be (for lack of a better word) intergenerational too. Brown is inspired by the one room schoolhouse where the younger kids and the older kids teach one another and where the teacher acts as coach, coordinator and mentor once she’s set the table. In today’s workplace, Brown’s vision gets us imagining less hierarchical orgnizations, workers plotting the directions they’ll follow instead of following a manager’s directions, and constantly seeking input from all of the work’s stakeholders, including owners, suppliers, customers and members of the community where the work is being done. The conversation needs to be between the youngest and the oldest too. For the magic to happen in the learning space where you work, that space should be as open as possible to the knowledge and connections that are outside of it.

In his commencement address, Brown refers to Sherlock Holmes when describing the kind of reasoning that can be developed in learning collaborations like this.

[W]here Holmes breaks new ground is insisting that the facts are never really all there and so, one must engage in abductive reasoning as well. One must ask not only what do I see but what am I not seeing and why? Abduction requires imagination! Not the ‘creative arts’ kind but the kind associated with empathy. What questions would one ask if they imagined themselves in the shoes, or situation of another.

Here’s a video from Brown’s talk on the “Global One Room Schoolhouse.” It is a graphic presentation that covers many of the points above. While I found the word streams snaking across the screen more distracting than illuminating, it is well worth the 10 minutes it will take for you to listen to it.

There’s Cause for White-Water Optimism

We’re worrying about our work for lots of reasons today. Recent news reports have included these troubling stories:

– the gains in gross national product (or wealth) that were reported this week are not being shared with most American workers, which means the costs and benefits of work are increasingly skewed in favor of the few over the many;

– entire categories of work—particularly in mid-level and lower paying jobs—will be eliminated by technologies like advanced robotics and artificial intelligence over the next decade;  and

– the many ways that we’re failing to consider the human impacts of technologies because of the blinding pace of innovation and the rush to monetize new products before we understand the consequences around their use—stories about cell phone and social media addictions, for example.

Brown’s attempt to produce more white-water rafters who can address these kinds of challenges is part of the solution he proposes. Another part is to balance our legitimate concerns about the changes we’re experiencing with optimism and excitement about the possibilities as he sees them.

Brown closes his commencement address with a story about the exciting possibiities of new technology tools. It’s about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become Intelligence Augmentation (or IA). “[I]f we can get this right,  he says, ” this could lead to a kind of man/machine virtuosity that actually enhances our humanness rather than the more dystopian view of robots replacing most of us.”

Brown witnessed this shift to “virtuosity” during the now legendary contest that pitted the greatest Go player in the world against AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program. (Maybe the world’s most complex game, Go has been played in East Asia for more than 2500 years.)

There is a documentary about AlphaGo (trailer here) that I watched last night and that I agree with Brown is “stunning.”  It follows at close range the team that developed the AIphaGo program, the first games the program played and lost, and the final match where AlphaGo beat the world champion in 4 out of 5 games. What Brown found most compelling (and shared with his graduates) were the testimonials and comments at the end.

Those who play the game regularly, like Brown apparently does, found the gameplay they witnessed to be “intuitive and surprising,” even “creative.” Passionate players who watched the human/machine interaction throughout felt it expanded the possibilities and parameters of the game, “a different sense of the internal beauty of the game.” For the world champion himself, it was striking how much it improved his Go play after the epic match. Brown was so excited by these reports that he felt the 21stCentury actually began in 2016 when the championship matches took place. In his mind, it marked the date when humans and machines began to “learn with and from each other.”

Of course, Brown’s AlphaGo story is also about the entrepreneurial learning that produced not only an awe-inspiring product but also a context where literally millions had input in the lessons that were being learned along the way.

+ + +

The past year’s worth of newsletter stories have considered many of the observations that Brown makes above. If you’re interested, there are links to all published newsletters on the Subscribe Page. Here’s a partial list of topics that relate to today’s discussion:

– how technology influences the future of our work (9/13/17-why “small” inventions like barbed wire, modern paper and the sensors in our phones can be more influential than “big” ones like the smart phone itself; 10/1/17-how blockchain could monetize every job, big and small, where you have something of value that others want);

– how openness to “the new and unexplored” is key to survival in work and in life (8/20/17–working groups outside your discipline are better at “scaling up” learning in rapidly changing industries; 6/24/18–a genetic marker for extreme explorers has been found among the first settlers of the Western Hemisphere); and

– the value of playful tinkering (7/2/17 -if you really want to learn, focusing less may allow you to see more); 8/27/17–how curiosity without formal preparation can win you a Nobel Prize in physics; and 10/17/17–the one skill you’ll need in the future according to the World Economic Forum is the ability to play creatively).

What John Seely Brown does in his June commencement address is to link these ideas (and others) into a narrative that’s filled with his own excitement and optimism. In my experience, the commencement address season is a particularly good time to find his kind of inspiration.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning, Entrepreneurship Tagged With: Ai, AlphaGo, connectedness, connection, entrepreneurial learning, IA, innovation, John Seely Brown, learning, playful work, technology, tinker, too big to know, tools, transformational work, whitewater world

Lemmings

September 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Theil was in Philadelphia on Monday sharing some of his contrarian views. One that he expanded upon at length affects innovation, education as well as our careers. Theil described it as “people acting in lemming-like ways.”

lemmings-350x220Lemmings are tiny hamster-like creatures that live near the Arctic Circle. Our image is of them frantically following one another to coastal cliffs in places like Scandinavia where they jump to their deaths in the frigid waters below. While we’re wrong to characterize lemming migration as mass suicide, there is no denying the herd-mentality that characterizes their movement from one place to another. It is the tendency we all have to jump off the same cliff that Theil was complaining about.

His impatience comes from wanting to nudge the world in a better direction if he thinks he can. As a result, Theil tends to be optimistic about innovation’s impact on the future and impatient with those who are failing to make the most of it. For example, on CNBC last week, he described Twitter as a “horribly mismanaged company” given its possibilities (“a lot of pot smoking going on there”), and took on Harvard Business School during the talk I attended, expressing his puzzlement about the games that are played there while accomplishing so little. Among entrepreneurs, his concern is that almost everyone is intent on “riding the last wave.”

“Big Data.” “The Cloud.” Whenever an idea gains some cache as the next big thing, everyone rushes in to contribute to what he calls “1 to n,” the adding of endless variations to something that has already been done. He called it the tendency “to ape” in the sense of imitating. Much harder but much better is to solve problems that no one else is thinking about in the way that you are. In other words, it is being able to go from Zero to One, which is also the title of a new book that captures his in-class discussions about entrepreneurship.

PETER THEIL / photograph by Olivia Poppy Cole
PETER THEIL / photograph by Olivia Poppy Cole

 

“Theil, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Faceboook, is probably the most successful—and certainly the most interesting—venture capitalist in Silicon Valley,” notes a recent piece about him in the London Telegraph. Whatever people are doing at Twitter or Harvard Business School or in places where the topic is innovation, Theil gets exasperated whenever they seem more intent on climbing onto one another’s bandwagons than in thinking for themselves.

For some people, going to the best schools you can get into for four or more years after high school is just where the herd is headed. In Philadelphia, Theil admitted that he might still have gone to Stanford for college and then on to law school, but “would have thought about it a lot differently beforehand.” I know what he means. When a high school student has a more individualized sense of direction, why should she follow everyone else into higher education? So Theil started the 20-under-20 Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, an admittedly rarified experiment in personal and professional development that I’ve talked about here before.

With a propensity to learn by doing, the fellows work with mentors that Theil has assembled in a 2 year, paid program that helps them to launch their own companies. When he was attacked by Larry Summers and others for what they viewed as his anti-college stance, Theil responded:

I didn’t think it would hit this sort of raw nerve. I mean, how fragile is the education system when 20 talented people leaving and doing something else is somehow enough to threaten it? My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Which brings us to the work that we do. The career path that leads from the best possible kindergartens to the best possible colleges and professional schools is clearly the path that most young people want to be on. And they’re paying for the privilege with record student loans and crushing debt that hangs over them for years, if not decades. Is it worth it?  Here too, the road less travelled—where you sit with yourself and figure out what you need and want from your work instead of simply following everyone else—has much to recommend it. Wherever it leads will not only make you happier, but also vastly improve the chances that your career could take you (along with the rest of us) from Zero to One.

During his Philadelphia whistle stop, Theil said that we all tend to underestimate what is different, those people and things “that don’t have a comparable.” When someone as different as Theil himself achieves conventional success, it allows him to trumpet “the unique perspective” in front of Philadelphia’s management class. For those of us who seek the courage to be different, he connected the personal benefits to the opportunities it can give us to change the world in often breathtaking ways.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Daily Preparation, Entrepreneurship, Heroes & Other Role Models Tagged With: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, herd mentality, innovation, lemming, Peter Theil, Theil Fellowship

Thinking With Your Hands

November 10, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Drawing reduces what you’re seeing to its essentials.

It can be what you’re looking at, or what your mind’s eye is trying to visualize. Putting what you’re seeing down on the page may be like photography (aiming at accuracy) or like poetry (capturing the feeling of the moment).

Drawing has a different objective when you’re trying to “think though” a problem. Then it can be a tool for arriving at place that’s totally new.

LEONARDO DA VINCI-THINKING ABOUT FLYING

Drawing is essentially shorthand. It has been described as low vs. high definition. Drawing generalizes and leaves the specifics until later, that is, until you’ve gotten the basics right—which is usually the hard part of creative thinking.

To draw is often a solitary act, between your thoughts, your eyes, and your hands, holding the paper while you’re making marks on it. Drawing yields its best rewards when it’s like this, a low instead of high tech endeavor. A screen or tablet introduces complexity, requiring the manipulation of software, a mouse or stylus. Hand drawing is at its simplest & more direct when it’s just you, a pencil and a piece of paper.

(Of course, this kind of drawing also gives you the singular satisfaction of crumpling up your mistakes, and hurling them away before starting over again. Nothing you can do on a screen lets you start over with that kind of flourish!)

The directness & simplicity of sketching out your ideas has additional power as a vehicle for collaboration. Its shorthand often suggests different ways of completing what you’ve jotted down. Your specifics don’t get in the way, inviting other people into your thought process to modify the essentials.

Drawing your ideas on a whiteboard (instead of a piece of paper) may be the optimal way to invite others into the creative process. In fact, as a tool for innovation the whiteboard is hard to beat. One technology reporter, Farhad Manjoo, has noted their ubiquity in our so-called “cradle of innovation,” Silicon Valley.

Whiteboards reward bigness: Because you’ve got to draw objects large enough for everyone to see, and because dry-erase markers are too fat to allow you to write too much text, the whiteboard encourages thinking about the highest levels of an idea, and it discourages getting lost in details.

In a recent video interview, Manjoo elaborates on the role that the whiteboard plays, even at companies whose business is preserving your handwritten notes and drawings on-line, such as Evernote.

Some of our earliest tool-based memories are often of drawing with crayons in a coloring book or with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. These competencies, repeated over & over again as children, created neural pathways (see Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code) as we first learned how to visualize our thoughts. When you pick up a pencil or marker and start to draw out your thoughts, you are tapping into a basic aptitude that is, in a sense, “hardwired” into almost all of us.

I was reminded of the power that drawing can unleash in all creative activities while reading a recent post by Laura Busche. Wanting to know why the act of sketching her ideas has such a powerful impact on her design work, Busche reviewed the work of neuroscientists, psychologists and others who have explored the possible connections. A couple of these findings bear repeating for those of us—everyone really—who struggles to “open up” their thinking and unlock their imaginations every day.

It may seem obvious, but incorporating drawing early on in your problem solving will have the greatest impact. When you’re inviting others to think through the problem you’ve drawn, creative beginnings may be enhanced even further when key limitations (like a product’s dimensions, or a service’s current cost) are specified. Then, like a thought balloon, the visualizations you’re sketching out are tethered to earth by one or two basic presumptions.

Another key take-away is that drawing your way to new possibilities improves with practice. Busche is particularly eloquent on this point.

What happens when you continually draw and connect symbols as you sketch? What happens when your brain tries to recall shapes that are appropriate to the idea you are trying to externalize? It isn’t hard to see that the better you become at translating imagery from your mind to paper, the more visual resources you will have to draw on and the easier it will be to retrieve them in the future. . . Hand-sketching forces you to access and cultivate a unique visual library in your mind.

Modern life is increasingly automated. Aside from dexterity on a keyboard or touchpad, our cultivation of manual skills (beyond eating, cleaning, driving and maybe playing a sport) is limited.  We look at things or listen to them, often passively, instead of changing them or making them.

Our hands can help us to transform old thoughts into new ones. We know how to use them. They’re right in front of you, waiting to be used.

It may be time to start drawing again.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: collaboration, innovation, open source, problem solving, visualization

It’s Time to Expand Your Range

August 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

You’ve got a “bad boy” side, even if you keep it buried in a hole somewhere in the backyard. Whether you’ve repressed a little or a lot, you’ve probably walked a pretty straight road since you shoved it all down. If you’re feeling stuck, maybe that’s why.

To tap into the mix of inspiration and passion that leads to fulfilling work, the time you spend completely ignoring the straight-and-narrow can easily be as important as the time spent on it.  As I’ve noted before (and not entirely in jest), it may be why East Asian economies produce lots of hard workers but few innovators:  nearly everyone there is intent on finding a figure-it-out-once-and-for-all approach to life & work.

Maybe you’ve been following their lead.

Maybe you’ve tried to identify the 5 or 10 factors that motivate you to do your best. You read about successful entrepreneurs, hoping to find a formula embedded in their stories that you can make use of.  You poke around the wellsprings of innovation with the aim of capturing a secret sauce to take back to the office. But it’s likely that the recipe you’re after will only be discovered when you abandon the notion of a recipe altogether.

Of course, there’s paradox here, with a plan only becoming meaningful once you understand why all plans are useless.

But order depends on chaos.

Discipline learns the most from rule breaking.

So maybe at least some of what you’ve buried needs to be dug up.

William Blake, God Calibrates Chaos During Creation in “The Ancient of Days”
God Calibrates Chaos During Creation (William Blake)

To be happy-at-work doesn’t require you to start your own company. But if that’s your goal, you may need something that nearly all entrepreneurs have, namely, better hot wiring to your freer spirit.  It’s why you’re never too old to find happiness at work; it’s not your youth (or even your energy level or health) but the range of your life that matters.

With broader parameters, when you’ve identified a problem that needs solving in your marketplace, you don’t spend all your time with the conventional wisdom. When you’re confident taking risks and roaming widely in your personal life, you have no problem looking outside your business or even your commercial culture to find new ways of meeting your challenges. You’re not afraid of making mistakes or of defying the reigning masters.

You know it’s not just about sweat & ambition, and that insight in one area is more likely to come when you’re hard at work doing something else—or nothing at all. It’s why you stir replenishment (like smelling the clover) into your workday.

A study that tends to validate time spent off-road came out last month by economists Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein. They found statistically significant correlations between risky, even illicit behavior and wealth generation by individuals who went on to start their own companies (people they call the “incorporated self-employed”).

In addition to the most successful entrepreneurs being smart and coming from stable, well educated families, the authors found that as teens they were more likely to have broken the rules by drinking, smoking pot, dealing drugs, stealing, gambling, even being violent.

[A]s teenagers, people that incorporate [their own businesses] later in life tend to score higher on learning aptitude tests, exhibit greater self-esteem, indicate that they aspire to be managers/leaders later in life, and engage in more aggressive, illicit, and risky activities than other people. Moreover, it is a particular mixture of pre-labor market traits that is most powerfully associated with entrepreneurship. People who both engaged in illicit activities as teenagers and scored highly on learning aptitude tests have a much higher tendency to become entrepreneurs than others without this particular mixture of traits.

While entrepreneurial success later in life may correlate with a higher tolerance for risk acquired early on, I think it’s more than that. It’s having learned that you’ll not only survive but also thrive with less certainty & security that delivers the work/life pay-off.

If this is right, the answer isn’t upstanding citizen by day, criminal by night. For most of us, an ethical perspective evolves with maturity. Moreover, how we end up striking the balance between risks & rewards is too individual for a self-improvement formula, recipe or secret sauce.

Some of us extend youthful indiscretion into middle age before the pieces fall into place. Some spend 6 months “on the road” and 6 months off. Others of us allow for episodes of genuine chaos and total digression in our work before looping back. Or we have key people (“interrupters”) who regularly knock us out of our routines so that we return better, stronger.

It’s finding your own range—your rule-breaking margins whatever they are—so that whatever you’re doing everyday is feeding the force that enables you to come alive.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: entrepreneur, fulfillment, innovation, insight, life force, motivation

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