Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Creativity”

29 Mar 2011

“Artistry Unleashed: Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life” – quotes

Quotes from panel session held at Savoy hotel, London, 29/3/11.
Panel:
Dr. Hilary Austen, Adjunct Professor, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto and Author, Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life (Rotman/UToronto Press, 2010)

Tyler Brulé, Editor-in-Chief, Monocle

Prof. Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto; Author, The Responsibility Virus, The Opposable Mind, The Design of Business and Fixing the Game; Director, Thomson Reuters, Research in Motion

Tom Hulme, Design Director, IDEO

Daniel Weil, Partner, Pentagram

Quotes (with my favourites in bold)

Artists take on a wicked problem with glee

It is the qualitative experience that enables the right diagnostic to be done

Measurement is not everything when compared to a qualitative relative comparison

Where is the room for serendipity?

Entrepreneurship is the most creative profession

Tell stories to create value alignment in humans by showing the value objective

Identity is a qualitative experience of self

Where is qualitative taught (other than architecture?)

Vision is a set of principles that allow you to take steps that otherwise
you wouldn’t

In arts, interpretation is key. There is none of this in science. Interpretation should be taught: the meaning for its creator and its meaning for you

Social media is a great way for enabling our children to be creative (network influencing/ leadership/ relationship interpretation)

Learn more efficiently than everyone else from failure

There is a new belief in craft

Everybody should be an artist for 15 minutes

Real experience has risk and shouldn’t be avoided via the lobotomizing act of passive media consumption

Excellence in seeking talent and nurturing talent = future of corporations

Take away = you need to take charge of your own knowledge
development:
- experiential
- conceptual (awareness of your own frameworks and perspectives)
- directional (own ideals and hopes)

Contradiction is a dynamic relationship which enables you to define the processes that have led you to your conflict

Having a process unlocks creativity as it gives you bounds

Because it’s easier to communicate quantitative information, this is the reason we have a leaning against qualitative in education and corporations

How do you overcome the barrier of ‘you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’? – if you can’t measure it, it probably is one of the most important things for your business eg. attachment of readers to a magazine – what is the feeling in their hearts?

As soon as you measure it, you affect it. Employee satisfaction is a good example?

There is a lot of stuff off-balance sheet of the company that is incredibly important for the future success

How can we learn ‘beyond success’? How do we stop ourselves failing because of focusing on the development of mastery vs. the development of new ideas

Let the things that work be moments that pass by.

Find the edge of what is possible, rather than looking to win the medal.

We’ve overly-charged successful outcomes with too much importance

Forgetting is an important part of creativity. A quantifying mind doesn’t want to forget.

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Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Leadership, Learning, Reviews and tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment
10 Jul 2010

The Unfathomable Depth of Our Phenomenal-state Space

I’m nearing the end of an epic nine month consumption of Thomas Metzinger’s ‘The Ego Tunnel’:

‘The mathematical theory of neural networks has revealed the enormous number of possible neuronal configurations in our brains and the vastness of different types of subjective experience. Most of us are completely unaware of the potential and depth of our experiential space. The amount of possible neurophenomenological configurations of an individual human brain, the variety of possible tunnels, is so large that you can explore only a tiny fraction of them in your lifetime. Nevertheless, your individuality, the uniqueness of your mental life, has much to do with which trajectory through phenomenal-state space you choose.

Nobody will ever live this conscious life again. Your ego tunnel is a unicum, one of a kind’

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Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Neuroscience and tagged , | Leave a Comment
30 Jun 2010

Things Get Done When You Do Less

As a member of the human species, you are hard wired to achieve. You may not feel like that if you’re sat there: brain diffused from multitasking, web-thread-chasing and information channel hopping. The empty plate of cookies or pizza you can’t remember eating as you read about the latest thing you can’t remember reading on the screen five minutes ago: these things may feel a million years from hunting and gathering to achieve another day alive as your relatives did.

A counter-intuitive observation is that things get done when you consciously try to do less and have the will to stick to your commitment to do less. The more you even plan to do in an allotted period of time, the less you actually get done. Why is this? I often think of a computer to help me on this.

A computer has a hard drive to remember things – a bit like memories and knowledge in the human brain. A hard drive becomes fragmented when files and folders get broken down and spread out over the hard drive over time. This slows the computer down because it cannot process information as easily which is not held together. It has to read multiple places on the disk to piece together the information it needs. Defragmenting, or ‘defragging‘,  ’reorganizes the hard drive by putting pieces of related data back together so that files are organized in a contiguous fashion’. Contiguous means any two or more objects that are very close or connected in space or time.

When you undertake multiple tasks – or even create a long ‘to-do’ list for the day, you similarly spread your mental processing power. Thoughts on other tasks get in the way of you having continuous thoughts on a subject, and thereby slow your ability to achieve your objectives of getting things done. Even if things do get done, often the quality isn’t there because you haven’t been able to hold your attention on one thing for a sufficient period of time to get to the really good or break-through thinking. Don’t confuse this with the use of the conscious to take in multiple inputs for the unconscious to percolate on. In this concept, you absolutely focus on related subject matter for a period of time to gather inputs or ‘ingredients’ for your thinking, and then deliberately turn your conscious attention away to something else to enable your unconscious to work away in the background.

The problem with spreading your mental processing power as a human is that you haven’t got a power cable. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Creativity, Decision making, Focus, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment

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