But it isn’t all about letting go, having that insightful seed bop you on the side of the head, and then skipping happily down the yellow brick road toward the promised land. Once that insight comes, the real work begins.
Even though 3M has incorporated play and napping into their corporate culture, they don’t rely on relaxation and distraction alone to generate new insights. As Larry Wendling notes, at some point, “you’ve got to take a more active role … We want to give our researchers freedom, but we also want to make sure the ideas they’re pursuing are really new and worthwhile.”1
Enter horizontal sharing: “people sharing knowledge across fields.”2
My most memorable experience of ‘horizontal sharing’ in action was when I was the field project manager for development in the visitor core of Mammoth Lakes Ski Resort. Developer and creative genius Doug Regelous would hold these big project reviews. He would fly the whole team in, from interior designers to mechanical engineers, and we’d sit in one big room with healthy snacks and review the entire project – together. The construction superintendent could comment on the look and color scheme of the interior designers. The mechanical engineer in charge of HVAC systems commented on the usability of the kitchen layout. One of the best discussions was when all the guys participated in a passionate debate about their favorite cooktop. They all loved to cook and knew their appliances! I don’t remember being asked this question in my initial job interview, but coincidently (and maybe not), all the team members were musicians, and many were also visual artists. I’ve worked on many big developments, but this one was the most beautiful and meticulously curated to serve the user. Doug believed in thinking of every last thing to improve the product’s quality and how it serves the ultimate user. Unfortunately, the Great Recession hit just when we were transitioning from planning and design to construction, and it was never built. But the value of that horizontal sharing was not lost. I use it now in every team effort.
Capturing ideas and carrying them out in the trance of idealistic romance and not considering the daylight of reality most often results in work that serves no one well. Even in the children’s book Harold and the Magic Crayon: ‘Harold still has to obey the rules of reality. So when Harold draws a mountain and then climbs it, he must try not to slip and fall down. When he does slip – gravity exists even in this crayon universe – Harold has to draw a balloon to save himself.”3 Our great ideas need to be tested, discussed, examined, and deconstructed. Will they actually work without tweaking? Probably not. Analyzing them with our left brains, consulting with others, considering options are the next steps in the journey toward something original and innovative
This discernment process is called conceptual blending. Connecting and combining seemingly unrelated ideas is a crucial creative tool. Insights come from connections between seemingly unrelated thoughts. Originality and innovation are “really an act of recombination.” The history of innovation is full of inventors – engaged in “compounding” and “transposing.” Radical concepts are just a mixture of old ideas.4 The practices of discernment make those old ideas innovative answers to current questions.
Photo by Jordan Carroll on Unsplash
1 Jonah Lehrer. Imagine: How Creativity Works. Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. pg 37 Note: Subsequent to the publishing of this book, Mr. Lehrer was found to have fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. In my opinion, the information he researched and used in this book still has great value and is replicated in creativity research of other authors. I do not include any Bob Dylan quotes Lehrer wrote.
2 Ibid. pg 37
3 Ibid. pg 38
4 Ibid. pg 39
