Month: December 2015

In my prior post I spoke about the use of a Surrealist writing technique called automatic writing as a way of getting into cognitive flow states. The point is to write freely, without concern at all for how nonsensical the material you are producing is. Just let the thoughts flow and intertwine through associative connections, and observe what occurs as it’s happening. With practice you may be able to make the observer another one of the actors, so that there will be a self-correcting and evolutionary process that is wholly different from the way most of us think the majority of the time. You will have shaken off the critical voice and habitual constraints that produce normative results and will have, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “taken a first step into a larger world.”

Now, some folks are going to ask what does this have to do with business solutions. And they’d be correct to ask that question, in regard to business solutions specifically, especially when it comes to developing a concrete and well-defined solution to either solve a particular problem, or to add value in some way to a particular context. What they might not be thinking, however, is that solutions of any sort come more often from people who have made a habit of thinking outside the ordinary constraints, to quote Yoda, this time, you need to “unlearn what you have learned.” The ability to unlearn the constraints that generally rule the context one is working in can derive from a number of different approaches as have been discussed in previous posts, i.e. observing one’s own thought process, as Steiner recommends, for instance, helps one to gain a meta perspective on the thoughts as they occur, as well as a view of one’s habits. From this viewpoint, you are more capable of making alternative choices on the direction you are moving, and short circuit habits that keep you looping through the same patterns. Automatic writing, because it relies on unconscious processes, frees up a large chunk of conscious awareness allowing one to practice observation. So along with being a way of tapping unconscious connections one may already have made, without being aware, it is way of taking baby steps toward something like a mindfulness practice.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of writing freely and without concern for results, it is time to begin focusing the process on an objective. You still write automatically, but begin to gravitate around a particular central theme. For instance, if you are working on a problem with the interface, in other words, it’s still okay to let thoughts flow about how the interface connects several planets and their inhabitants, and does so through the use of some sort of teleportation chewing gum, or any other absurdity that comes to your mind. You simply let that happen as you spiral in to what is most relevant to the conversation you are having with yourself, slowly working toward a useful outcome. Chances are, the ideas you generate, i.e. teleportation chewing gum, may contain metaphoric hints from your unconscious, or may evolve into something more practical, like the fact that chewing, which is in some ways like speaking, can move things from one place to another, without moving through the space in between and seemingly without observing the physical laws of motion, which is kind of what speaking does in regard to thoughts. In this case, the teleportation chewing gum may be your way of communicating with yourself that the interface requires wireless and satellite and/or internet communication between two or more remote locations, and you therefore need to format messages in a particular way, and manage them sequentially, in case they take different paths and arrive in a different sequence than they were sent.

Now, to take this kind of playfulness into a group setting will make you more powerful than you can ever imagine, but it takes a bit of courage, and an open-minded team, obviously. It’s also not something you just jump into, nor is it something you plan on your meeting agenda. You have to slowly train the people around you in a way that doesn’t seem like anything unusual is occurring. You make a joke now and then, just to lighten up to conversation. And jokes can be the source of ideas as well. But interweaving humor and play in through the entire conversation can be like giving it a spritz of WD40. Be careful, however, as you may get a reputation for being disorderly, irresponsible, unfocused and worst of all, disruptive.

 

Sure, there are numerous mind hacks one can use to get one-time results, but to attain mastery and fluidity at solution generation takes a kind of commitment, and a regular practice. The up side to this is that most people are not going to bother, so if you want to gain an edge you can easily do so, by creating a discipline for yourself. This can take many forms, the key being that you repeatedly challenge your brain to generate novelty on a regular basis.

James Altucher recommends writing 10 new ideas every day. This is good and simple approach, and James kind of believes that idea generation in itself will make one rich and successful. While that may be true in part, my caveat would be that being smart, and being able to generate a lot of ideas, even brilliant ideas, won’t on its own guarantee success. It may in fact make you less popular among your peers, who may envy you, feel threatened or just see you as weird. And you won’t always get credit for your ideas, as others who are better positioned can easily confiscate and take credit for them. Sometimes your great ideas are not going to be understood, as it takes others with open minds and imagination to appreciate a wholly novel and brilliant idea at the outset. It often takes a long time for people to fathom what just happened. The better and more significant your ideas are, the more trouble you can cause for yourself. Just ask Galileo and Tesla.

That said, it is something you can make work for you, not only in your ability to produce more and better ideas and solutions yourself, but to also gain an expertise in recognizing others’ good and great ideas, and how to build on them, and this type of collaboration can grow into something beautiful and unexpected, i.e. great teams, new products and business models that will help people adapt to the shocking acceleration of change we are experiencing during the new century.

It’s my humble but firm opinion (though I don’t have any hard data to back me up on this) that people who have some kind of artistic training or background are going to generally fare better in the idea generation biz, as well as see more clearly the whole system one is working with. I know a business owner who will only hire programmers with a musical background, and it’s been my experience that musicians make the best programmers. Many modern and postmodern poets, writers of fiction and visual artists tend to have an affinity for systemic thinking as their work tends to draw on and mirror complex patterns they have explored in the world around them.

This is perhaps only in part due to any innate talent, as there may really be no real thing we can point to and call talent anyway, but a number of minor propensities that somehow get linked together through practice. We all have the raw materials, it’s just that some are more compelled to explore and utilize them in ways that begin to form consistent mental circuits that may be a bit different from people who do other things with their time. The forming these currents is the key to having a brilliant and useful imagination. But again, this may be no salvation, at least in terms of having a superstar career. It is however a worthy discipline for anyone with the inclination, especially if you’re a geek like me, who thrives on it.

One of my favorite ways of getting the juices flowing is what I call Taking Dictation, which will be not be new to any of you who are familiar with art history at all, primarily Surrealism. In Andre Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, he defined Surrealism as:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

He prescribed a practice we now call automatic writing, which is a form of writing in which one simply unloads onto the page anything and everything that comes to one’s mind without involving the critical functions. This process can result in some really bizarre nonsense, but keeping it on your regular to-do list can help you tune into your unconscious resources. Sure, you will produce a lot of seemingly useless noise, but you will also begin to discern particular voices, and choruses of voices, that are more useful than others. They will often be associated with particular moods and flow states that you will come to recognize and trust more as you continue to gain in depth. It is a great way gain an affinity and fluidity with that part of oneself that may serve as a font of many great ideas and perspectives, as well as a way to get to know oneself more, and even help to increase emotional intelligence.

It is especially during the moments when it seems like there is a conversation of many voices going on in your head that you can make use of the jam session effect, which can be a thrilling experience as the ideas that come through like a white-water rafting of your brain currents through a rapture of new possibilities. Take it from me, as its the cognitive equivalent of extreme sports – and definitely pays for itself once you get the hang of it.

You can always go back later, into the material you have written, which may seem to those less familiar with the process like sheer lunacy, and extract what is that may be useful that day, or at some point in the future. Sometimes, the gold may be hidden within the apparent nonsense, and that’s where the interpreting process, and the interweaving of present thoughts into the past material, can be a creative adventure as well, a kind of surfing and weaving of your entire sensory and mental representational systems into a mercurial flood of novelty and innovation.

My hat’s off to those who follow the path, because they will be among the folks who are making the future, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Some of you may appreciate those great improvisational moments when rock or jazz musicians go on extended tours of the possibilities of the groove they are riding on. It could be the interactions between two horn players swapping riffs, or the modulating texture of the whole, when the bass, drums, and lead instruments not only synch up, but weave into unknown regions of kinetic force and color. Sparks fly. You may hear things you’ve never heard before, and if you get excited about that kind of thing, it can lead you to some really ecstatic moments.

It’s something you see in sports as well, on the football or soccer field, the basketball court, the split second interactions of players swarming in unexpected and unpredictable variations of common patterns. When it comes to fine distinctions between the players and teams, each with such awesome physical abilities of the players, it’s often the ability to read one’s team and opponents, and improvise on the spot, that makes the minute differences between the winning and losing. And winning and losing is perhaps even a minor part of it, essential, but only the justification for the game as it’s played in real time for our entertainment and our need for engagement in borderlands of chaos. Just as with jazz music, it’s not the score, but how it gets there that enthralls us.

We have these moments in our lives, these entanglements among others that can be quite profound or just infused with enough energy to engage all players, keeping them all focused and alive, following whatever byways that might occur. Solutions are born during these ventures, in the very belly of the unexpected, where the meeting’s agenda recedes into the background and the fire of the present stokes in every which way. Those who have experienced this kind of thing will realize it’s not simply something one can bullet-point in. It rather takes a particularly expertise: willing agitators (or disruptors), who are unafraid go tangential, and managers who can tolerate and navigate the complexities of these open-ended meanderings, make the best use of them, without losing track or one’s patience. It’s also something that needs to be cultivated, just as a jazz band or basketball team needs abundant practice to gain cohesion in ways that can generate and manage the unexpected. Great teams are not just complimentary skill-sets fitted together to make a static whole, but an alchemy of from which the un-thought newly possible may emerge.

In a similar way, we are individually made up of many voices, impulses, with thoughts often in collision and distracting one another.  Our stormy brains can sometimes seem a hazard, rather than asset, when we want to get things done, or simply get some peace.  So why do we insist that brainstorming is the optimal metaphor for idea generational practice? Because the language, in this case naming of the practice, will often set our pre-conscious expectations, naming your practice jamming, and cultivating the jam session practice, with ourselves and with our teams, will yield more desirable results, drawing out more of the collaborative genius of the group, whether that group is a sales or project team, or the swarm of many selves we each individually are.