Month: September 2015

Some of you may remember a series of TV commercials aired decades ago, where two people, one eating out of a jar of peanut butter, one eating a chocolate bar, somehow collide into each other, or in some other way get the peanut butter and chocolate mixed up. Each person ends up with their snack tainted by the other’s. The dialog would go something like, “Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter,” and “Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate.” They would then simultaneously taste the result, and follow with exultations of joy and wide-eyed discovery. This was a marketer’s make-believe story about how the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup may have come into existence – in attempt at coaxing us into buying the product – through the accidental juxtaposition of two foods that were up until one mythological moment categorically exclusive.

Trite and silly as it may seem, I’ve chosen it as a way of illustrating my point, in part because it gives us a goofy game that we can play that will actually produce real world results, and not least because Reese’s is my wife’s favorite candy.

At some point during the 1980s someone said something like “you got your desk top on my computer screen,” which gave birth to what is commonly known as the computer’s graphical desktop, a fusion of an actual desk top, where people would have various tools, such as typewriters, staplers, tape dispensers, scissors, and a text-based computer screen, which was up until then just a dark place with streams of esoteric codes. While there had been personal computers previous to that, it was the more user-friendly desktop design of Apple’s Mac and Microsoft’s Windows, that revolutionized personal computing and made it universally usable.

There are examples from the history of popular music: somewhere in the past, folk singer Bob Dylan shocked and disturbed his fan base by touring with electric instruments, creating what would be known as folk rock, and later alternative music, while soon afterward, African American kids in the Bronx started uttering streams of words in a half sung, half shouted, chant over clips of previously recorded music, creating what would eventually be called Rap or Hip Hop music. In the case of Dylan, he joined two musical styles that were until then held apart by a what posed as almost a strong ethical code. For the kids who gave birth Hip Hop, it was kind of a hybrid of speech-making and R&B.

These are examples of what entrepreneurial guru James Altucher calls “idea sex,” and what cognitive grammarians Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner call Blending, or Conceptual Integration. You can follow along with James Altucher’s discussions on website, which I wholly recommend, especially for people thinking about starting their own businesses.

In all cases above, we’re talking about the blending of, or integration, of ideas. In Fauconnier’s and Turner’s book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (from which  I borrowed the above desktop illustration) we are given a multitude of examples, and some very specific structures we can use to generate new ideas, and analyze how a particular idea arose from the marriage of two or more others. We will leave these details for a later discussion. For now, we will begin with a really simple set of rules. The seed ideas from which the blend comes about need to have:

1. Something between them that is different
2. Something between them that is common

An example from your every day life may be systems integration, or the data mapping of interfaces between two systems. There needs to be something in common between the output system and input system or else there would be little justification for sending data back and forth between them, while at the same time, they are intrinsically different applications, with different purposes and functions. They also likely have a mismatch of data elements between them, places where you need to build in rules that say that these two or three variables from system A mean that these other variables from system B need to be set in a specific way, although there is no direct one-to-one translation. This is how stock price movements become those crooked lines you see on CNBC, and how the number of gallons of milk you may be getting from your cows, if you happen to be a dairy farmer, may be tabulated against expected weather conditions, supplies, and a number of other variables into what is called the “Futures Market.”

Use this as a mind hack to get through blocks whenever you need to. Start with the most unlikely pairs. You can take a guitar and an umbrella, and imagine something like a new type of satellite dish. Or an air conditioner and entertainment system, to create a new sort of home environment system that lets you tune precise degrees of temperature, humidity, lighting and sound to simulate the weather at a place you have vacationed, to enhance your every mood, or to motivate your employees, if you are a business owner. Eventually you can work your way back to the issue at hand, perhaps by blending two things you hadn’t thought of, perhaps a some aspects of the Whole System we had been discussing in a previous post. Very often the point where real valuable innovation takes place is between the way a system current operates, and the needs, desires and behaviors of someone who may some day use it.

 

 

One way for a change agent to cultivate creativity, or thinking outside the box, is to simply grow one’s box. This is something you may already be doing all the time, perhaps without being aware, if you have an interest in the world you are living in, but especially if you like your job and are keen on keeping it and getting better at it over time.

If you are working from a broader perspective you are going to be thinking from a larger frame, with more tools to draw from. You might start with just one application, something with a limited purpose. But that application will need data from other sources, and will need to provide information to some other system or systems. You end up with a bit of a cobweb of flows in and out, the conventional flow chart. Perhaps the application has a user interface, with various views and ways for people to enter or modify data. You’ve already moved outside of the conventional mapping of a system implementation, since people have interactions outside the processing of information directly between themselves and the machine; they may be getting information from other sources, or they communicate via email, phone, among themselves in their office space. They may be focused primarily on the function at hand, or using it while telling stories about their weekend, goofing around, or while they shop on Amazon. The application may be used by people in various offices globally, in different office spaces, each having their own conversations about the weekend or a dinner party where they met so-and-so or played golf with the CEO, or the author of some oblique book about Basque culinary arts. The application may be part of an online service that reaches hundreds, or even millions of people outside the company. It may be linked to supply chains of goods, distribution services. The periphery continues to grow. It’s the reverse of the pealing of an onion, as what is called the Whole System surges out into the fuzzy extents of the absurd.

You may begin to think that the application, or system of systems, as a bit of a prosthetic tool that extends people’s reach, their power, allows us to do things we could not easily do with pen and paper, stone tools, wax carvings, papyrus. It immediately replicates the information you put into it many times, in many flavors, for variety of purposes, all over the web or network you are working in, not unlike DNA, or the processing of digestion, the chemical and nervous systems of the body. Yes, every system we devise is in a way a model of ourselves, or parts of ourselves, distributed over silicon chips, wires and fiber optics, encoded in a simple binary, similar to our yes and no, pleasure and pain, the basic structure of all our gut and rational decision-making.

Granted, it’s not always going to be useful, or even entertaining, to consider all the possible connections or ramifications of the implementation project you are working on. It is indeed impossible. But there are times some simple steps outward may save your life (or at least a bit your time).

Some years ago I was dealing with a difficult design problem, and I just happen to be reading Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, a book about Darwinian Evolution, and its relation to the mind, i.e. brain processes, but also looking at the whole history of natural processes as a sort of mind process. Bateson was trained as a biologist, but also worked in the field of anthropology, among other things, like cybernetic war craft, psychology, the language of dolphins, you name it. The brain and its mind processes, he argued, worked in a way that was parallel to the way evolution proceeded (and is still proceeding), as an interaction of two main random processes: nature randomly generated changes (mutations) over time, and the environment those changes were born into randomly selected whether those changes work, whereas the brain randomly produces thoughts, and the world randomly selects which thoughts are a valid use value, or not. For instance, the thought that one cannot simply walk across the air when one gets to the edge of a cliff, was a successful thought early on and survived to this day. Over millions of years, both processes – mind and nature – working in parallel, have produced all the wiring and the patterns that make up our world.

Now, you can accept that model, or not, as a truth about how we and our world came into being. Either way, it does give us is a set of algorithms that can be adapted to our own needs by shrink-wrapping and modifying some of the variables. The two random processes can become two not-so random processes, that make the types of selections you require and design into a kind of feedback loop, possibly for creating validations, or reconciliation, whatever it is you need to do. At the time, Bateson’s book was challenging and engaging enough to consume a great deal of my thinking, turn my thoughts about everything on their head, and in the end helped me get unstuck and produce a fairly elegant application design, as well as a way to move forward in the future.

But you needn’t take such a huge shift in the size of the frame in order to grow your box, you need only look outward from the edge of the box you’re currently working from. I find I need to remind myself that the flows of an implementation project are not merely those I see on the flow chart, but also all of the human interactions that occur around them. They form something like an emergent web around the system flows, a hyper or meta system, that when tweaked at one point, will send vibrations through the entire system. Think of a guitar. You pluck one string and the entire wooden box begins to resonate, giving off sound into the room, perhaps into other rooms, out through the windows, where the tone may blend and clash or harmonize with other sounds – birds chirping, the noise of traffic.

Your job at times is to find those guitar strings and pluck them. It may be an easy-to-alleviate inefficiency somewhere, or the resourcefulness of a particular person who is under-utilized, and who, once unleashed, will add amazing value to the organization you are serving.

You’re a member of an organization in the midst of change. Perhaps your role addresses change directly. For instance, you may be a business analyst, project manager, IT manager – these roles would have little meaning outside the context of change. You likely wouldn’t have a job, or if you did, your role would be something different, perhaps more static and procedural.

But for better or worse, you are part of a team that is known for creating both miracles and mischief, opportunity and chaos. Everything always gets better… eventually, although there are often speed bumps along the way. Software can never be tested as well as it should, no matter how many iterations of the known, or imagined, possible issues you test for; there are unexpected shortfalls where dependencies are unfulfilled, which create breakdowns in critical processes; people are not trained as well as they should have been, or are simply resistant to utilizing the new procedures you are implicated in bringing about.*

You are not always everyone’s favorite person. Your team may be looked at as pariahs who have set out to ruin people’s careers, end life as they know it, possibly enemy agents of some competitor trying to undermine entire businesses that have taken years to perfect. Yet there are moments, after everything gets fixed, people discover the new ease and efficiencies, and things just get better all around, that you might get a wave of kudos from the people who hated you until just last week. They may even seem to like you, ask you out for cocktails. Until next time.

You are a change agent – something as mythical as it is practical. You need a special set of tools to do your job well, or exceptionally well, and they may not all be things that you can learn by gathering degrees and certifications. You may learn them playing chess or on a high school sports team, playing music, being a bartender, who knows?

One skill you will NEVER be able to do without, if you want to be more than a filler of slots as defined by HR, is to think outside the box. You hear this all the time, but what does it mean? Is it simply about having new ideas? And even when you DO have a genius creative idea, you will often see jaws drop, eyebrows rise, you’ll get hushed by the other twenty folks in the room who just don’t get it. They may even be really smart people who often have great ideas themselves, but they just can’t fathom what you’re getting on about. It might take them time. It might take them years, if you don’t find another genius idea about how to present your idea in a way that is consumable to your audience.

But is thinking creatively actually a skill? No, a skill is a habit, a well-formed process that you have developed over time, and that continues to work for you. Creativity, or thinking outside the box, is exactly the opposite of that. It is the breaking of habits – habits are the box you need to get out of. So how do you perform creatively on a consistent basis? You develop a different sort of habit, on a different level, a habit of changing the way you look at things. You learn constantly, you become a bit of oddball, perhaps. But you’ll be in good company.

 

*Although at large well-greased software companies, as in my current gig, we don’t have such luxury, and have methodologies in place to eliminate implementation issues down to the infinitesimal.