A Thank You for Miracle Innovations

I'm thankful to be in warmer Florida at the moment, sharing Thanksgiving with family, and am thinking about the miraculous recent innovations I now take for granted just on my way to the airport.

I don't make a lot of noise about techological innovations, since they get most of the attention when we talk about breakthroughs these days. But it's time to give them some appreciation. They truly are miracles--developments just a few years before we would not believe possible. Let's imagine this was just 5 or 10 years ago, as we trace a few typical moments on our way to the airport:

1. I go out of my home, press a button with my thumb, and my car not only announces itself to me (I park on the street and often forget where I parked), but opens its doors to me.

2. I take out my I-phone and press the "Map" app, type in my destination, and my best route is immediately on display. The has-been miracle of Mapquest just two years ago--typing into my computer and printing out my route--now is in the palm of my hand without paper or preparation. If for some reason I get lost, all I do, again, is press a button and a radar dot shows me exactly where I am in the world. Press another button and suddenly an actual photo of the physical location (thank you, Google Maps) also appears. 10 years ago (or two years?) this would be considered science fiction.

3. Instead of waiting in the dreaded traffic line to pay my toll, my trusty I-pass allows me to zoom right by--not only on my way to O'Hare, but also through more and more states, as my latest road trip through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York proved. Only once did I need to stop at a toll!

4. Finally, let's say thank you to one more innovation, though not as technological: the eminent suitcase on rollers. I still feel the cramp in my arm from a not-that-long-ago straining grip around a suitcase handle through the airport. This was a classic example of breakthrough and hybrid thinking: for years no one considered the now-obvious combination of a case and a moveable cart. I even remember being skeptical when I first saw them; too clumsy, taking up too much room, I thought. Now I can't live without them.

It's that flexible and combination thinking, whether technological--the map, the GPS, the all-in-one Dick Tracy "watch"--or otherwise that keeps us innovating and allows us to continue to take these miracles for granted in our day-to-day activities.

So let me say thank you to you for reading this blog, wish you a happy Thanksgiving, and inspire you with another combinatorial possibility of the suitcase-chair (see picture, above) that we may all be sitting on as we wait for our still-overbooked, still-delayed plane to arrive just a few years from now...

On Artist-Athlete Hybrids

On a recent Tuesday night I got a chance to experience two different roles--the artist and the athlete. We rarely combine these two, and often friends of one world are shocked to find out that I "play" in the other. But how different are they, really?

I began the night as part of the Adam and Dharmesh Show (see picture, right), where juggler-extraordinaire Dharmesh Bhagat and I put on a program for teens at the Lincoln Park Cultural Center that combined music, song, dance and juggling. We call it our P.T.S. show, where all participants practice one of the key groundrules that fosters creativity--Permission To Suck--and in just 50 minutes learn, rehearse and perform in a show that integrates playing musical instruments and songwriting (my contribution) along with dancing and juggling (Dharmesh). Our goal is to stretch all participants' creative flexibility and change their mindset about what they are capable of performing, regardless of past experience or previously assessed skill.

At the end of that full-group performance, I ran off to perform for another group, this being the final championship game of our co-ed softball league, where I pitch for the Cupcakes team. On my very first high-arcing pitch, their leadoff hitter smashed a bullet ball directly back at me, ricocheting off my arm (see left) as I was pierced with considerable pain. I kept playing, throb and all, pitching perhaps as well as I ever have, and we came together as a team to field and score with skill and consistency. We won going away.

Yes, the Cupcakes (named thanks to our sponsor Swirlz Cupcakes, orange t-shirts and all, see below) were indeed the champions, and gratifyingly so, after the razzing we had already experienced due to our rather unathletic name. That razzing underscores the tension that often exists between our conception of athletes and artists--masculine, hard and tough (the Killers) vs. feminine, soft and emotional (The Cupcakes). Many cultural forces are at work against the Athlete-Artist hybrid in the U.S.

But that's actually ridiculous. Many creative arts require tremendous physical dexterity, whether handling a paint brush or performing at our P.T.S. show. And the truly great athletes--I think of amazing quarterbacks and crafty pitchers, Walter Payton and Wayne Gretzky, a Steve Nash pass, a Roger Federer between-the-legs shot--are creative magicians. Creativity, as I've said before, is the great merging of polarities, the ability to access both the masculine and feminine, the soft and the hard, the mind and the heart. And because great innovations are often hybrids--or come from hybrid-thinking--we have a lot to gain from bringing athletes and artists together, and not just for one person on one evening. What would it look like if athletes and artists joined forces more often and learned from each other and performed together? Here's to the Cupcakes!

Diversity Jam for an Insular World

This morning I decided to sit in the Dunkin' Donuts at Belmont and Clark here in Chicago to watch the morning rush and see who really travels through that small corner of time and place.

I'm happy to report, in a too-segregated city, an astounding diversity in line. All ages and sizes. All shades of faces, white through dark brown. Tight black jeans with rolled cuffs, fleece vests over button-down shirts, dangling waist chains, sorority sweatshirts. Work boots and high heeled boots; heads with hoods, hats and bandanas. Ipods and phones, but thankfully not as many out as I might predict. A familiar-looking Allen Ginsburg-like homeless man comes in, sits, and leaves. Each person I watch is different--their walk and faces reflect a universe of relationships and work and attitudes likely to be quite different from my own. It's a great reminder that my reality is just one island of experience and perception.

How insular is your world? Our insularity--similar friends, routines, activities--is one of the culprits that limits our creativity. Because part of us craves order and simplicity in the chaos of life, we can get trapped in insularity, whether working in silos, going to the same bars, or having friends almost entirely of similar ages and social circles.

That's why I was particularly pleased to see an expanding diversity at our Creativity Jam (photo below, right, is from a previous jam) last night in Chicago. The Jam itself is an opportunity to experiment outside our insular islands, in this case with song and music and rhythm. But what has marked these Jams as unusual in the past couple years has been the different ages attending. Where else are we able to have a communal experience with different generations not only present but contributing and expressing themselves in front of others? (Please share if you have this experience regularly or on occasion.) For me and most people I know, it's rare to have a social activity with ages 5 to 65+ represented, and here we were with that very group, people in almost every decade in life singing together, expressing a little piece of themselves along with others they don't typically spend time with. Add to that a multiplicity of instruments coming together at the same time--guitars and drums and percussion, along with keyboards, violin, mandolin, ukelele and more--and you got yourself a genuine diversity jam.

Where can you go and what can you do to explore your own flexibility and experience your own brand of diversity jam?

The Simpsons & TV Breakthroughs

Click to read this blog from its original site with visuals

The incomparable Matt Groening (his self-portrait, below right), creator of the Simpsons, spoke here last week as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Alongside cartoonist and former college friend Lynda Barry (who frankly overshadowed him with her bubbly storytelling), Groening (pronounced "Gray-ning") shared a bit about how he got started and a few keys to the success of the Simpsons, still making us laugh and cringe after 21 years.

Amazingly, he still publishes his original "Life in Hell" cartoon, which he considers his "foundation." This says a lot about the man, maintaining this 30-year weekly streak despite the Simpsons' incredible run and his many interests and responsibilities, which has recently included developing Futurama, another animated show on Comedy Central. Groening uniquely balances the creative polarities of serious and silly, of preparation and spontaneity, like few others.

I believe the Simpsons to be one of the great breakthroughs in television history and one of the most enduring creative acts of our time. Breakthroughs are distinctive in not being predictable from what preceded them--and irrevocably changing the landscape of the domain. Two key creative breakthroughs I see in television this generation:
1. The Simpsons. Even though there were cartoons before, the Simpsons created a human-surrogate family and world in a new way, using the limitless parameters of animation to allow us through them to experience realistic and fantastical turn of events and not be worse for wear. Combine that with rare intelligence, more jokes per frame than ever imagined, creative range and satirical commentary on the day's issue, and you have a breakthough.
2. Reality Television: While there has always been an audience for realistic characters and real-life stories, the breakthough here was in thinking, Why not actual people? Sure "Candid Camera" had at least hinted in this direction and clearly the advent of cheaper video enabled producers to edit hours of film to capture the low percentage of interesting moments. But it was the crafting of narrative--telling a compelling story with real emotions and unpredictable turns reflective of real life--that has resulted in millions of addicted viewers and the prevalence of a new kind of program that did not exist before.

Developing our creative capacities includes cultivating our ability to make breakthroughs, so let me ask: What TV breakthroughs am I missing here? What do you see as the hallmark breakthrough innovations of television and what enabled them break through?

Accessing Multiple Intelligences to Break Through

As a culture--and as individuals and organizations--we more than ever need to make some breakthroughs. Sometimes this can be in the form of a "Breakthrough Innovation" that changes the way we work, communicate, access information, or structure our healthcare system (this would be a "miracle breakthrough," I'm afraid). Other times it's you as an individual suddenly seeing differently and getting insight that can make your life a lot better.

The creativity competency here for you to build is flexibility, which includes your ability to break out of a paradigm or mindset that you may not realize you're stuck in. Here's a mindset challenge I like to offer in my creativity sessions:
A great mathematician determined that half of eight can actually be zero. How is that possible?

If you can't figure this out immediately (usually only about 1/3 of people can), it means you need to change the way you're thinking, which researchers refer to as "breaking set" or "blockbusting." I call this the skill of shifting--your perspective, your lens, sometimes even your attitude. Understanding and consciously flexing our multiple intelligences is one way to do just that.

Multiple Intelligence theory, widely accepted in the world of education, came out of the work of Harvard researcher Howard Gardner, a great paradigm-shifter himself, who studied prodigies and people with brain damage to build his theory that intelligence cannot be measured as a single entity. In addition to the IQ-associated S.A.T. intelligences--mathematical/logical and verbal--he delineated at least six other autonomous intelligences that all healthy people possess, but not necessarily in equal strengths. They include the four above--visual-spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and bodily-kinesthetic--as well two others, auditory-musical and natural. These intelligences are quite different from each other--thus you can be great with words and terrible at math, smart in your head but not smart in the world. The key to understand about intelligences is that we are all smart. But it's how we are smart that matters, especially when it comes to our flexibility and creativity. Flexibly acessing different intelligences is not only a hallmark of creative people, but it is also essential for teachers and presenters who need to engage people who learn differently.

Consciously shifting your intelligence is a technique I use in brainstorming/ideation sessions to get you to think in ways you hadn't considered. When you're stuck, ask yourself, "What if I think about this visually or interpersonally or naturally?" Most creative business breakthroughs--ranging from wearing your music to the latest software program, from an experiential marketing campaign to the new restaurant that feels like it's outdoors--come from insight originating from a flexibility among intelligences, a movement from logical to visual, from words to moods, from the man-made to the natural.

Now back to our mindset challenge. To figure out why half of eight is zero, just shift from your mathematical intelligence to your visual...

The Future at our Fingertips

I've been waiting for a commercially viable Dick Tracy watch--you know, the all-in-one watch/phone/television/computer that will surely adorn all our wrists soon enough--but this video (below) makes me realize that the future may depend less on what we wear and more on what we project.

Pattie Maes and her research lab at MIT have actualized through the SixSense Device a different way of accessing information, one that I never considered before and one that we may all become much more familiar with in a few years. She explains that the device can act as a "sixth sense" to equip you with more ways of navigating your world.

Great breakthroughs and inventions come from thinking differently about a challenge. The aspiration for many businesses and inventors is to come up with a Breakthrough Innovation (as opposed to incremental innovation), which can be defined as a creative occurrence that cannot be predicted by what has proceeded it. The question becomes this: If you're unable to figure out a new way based on what has happened before, then what do you do? One of the tools I use in workshops to help people access different perspectives is shifting intelligences, based on the original research on Multiple Intelligences by Harvard's Howard Gardner. The move out of our logical intelligence to our visual intelligence, for example, may have helped this team of innovators to see a solution that hadn't been considered before. More on Multiple Intelligences next time.

If you go to the 7 minute mark of this video, you'll see there isn't really a need for a physical watch on your wrist if you can draw one yourself! Who knows, maybe in ten years we'll all be installing our ultimate "Sixth Sense" brain implant.