A Warrior’s search for Synchronicity

We do heartstorming, not brainstorming; creativity is much more about what people feel than what they think – Joey Reiman

Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage. But if you want a company that puts on stunning performances for adoring audiences, your people also need to spend time backstage, out of the spotlight, to craft new wares. – Robert I Sutton

If you focus on the pleasure of attaching the string, setting the arrow in the bow, drawing it back, and releasing it, rather than on hitting the target, you will be rewarded in two ways: You will take greater pleasure in doing the tasks and be more likely to hit the target as well

- Herrigel

The damage that seemingly light- hearted ridicule and put-downs can cause is illustrated by a story told by Gordon MackKenzie, who gives workshops on maintaining creativity in big companies and who had the title of Creative Paradox during his years at Hallmark Cards. MacKenzie taught a workshop at Hallmark where “with a bashful eagerness” a woman began a sketch that showed how she felt about herself, the Management of Information Systems group she was a part of, and Hallmark. Her coworkers reacted with a “rowdy taunting” about her lack of drawing skills. She quickly changed from looking eager to looking hurt, and then “after an apologetic explanation of her drawing, she scurried, eyes down, back to her seat.” MacKenzie confronted the group with their behaviour:

Teasing is a disguised form of shaming……….I suspect that when you teased this woman, it was an unconscious effort to throw her off balance-to stop her from risking, which she was most clearly beginning to do. Why would you want to do that?……… (B)ecause we don’t want to admit to others or ourselves that we are trying to stop growth, we disguise our shaming as teasing-”all in the spirit of good fun.” – Robert Sutton

Gordon Mackenzie – Orbiting the Giant Hairball – A corporate fool’s guide to survival

IBM’s founder and CEO, Thomas Watson Sr. called in a manager who had just made a mistake that cost IBM $10 million. The manager said, “I guess you want my resignation?” Watson replied, “You can’t be serious. We just spent $10million dollar educating you!” – Warren Bennis

Excellence can be obtained if you:

…care more than others think is wise;

…risk more than others think is safe;

…dream more than others think is practical;

…expect more than others think is possible.

Source Anon

“To me business is not about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials. ” Richard Branson

The vu ja de mentality is the ability to keep shifting opinion and perception. It means shifting our focus from objects or patters that are in the foreground to those in the background between what psychologists “figure” versus “ground”. It means thinking of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effect, or that matters most versus least. It means not traveling through life on automatic pilot. – Robert I Sutton – Weird Ideas that Work

Statistician Abraham Wald’s research on where to put extra armor on warplanes during World War II is a wonderful example. The British and U.S. air forces were concerned because many of their planes were being shot down. They wanted to use more armor, but were not quite sure where to put it. Wald put a mark on every bullet hole in the airplanes that returned from battle. He found that two major sections of the fuselage-one between the wings and the other between the tails-had far fewer bullet holes. He decided to put the armor in these places, where he saw fewer , not more, holes. Why? Because it stood to reason that the planes were hit randomly. The planes that analyzed had not been shot down! So it was the holes he wasn’t seeing-in the planes that weren’t returning-that needed extra protection. – Robert I. Sutton – Weird Ideas that Work

Brendan Boyle is founder and head of Skyline, the toy design studio at IDEO, a product design firm in Palo Alto, California. Boyle provides compelling evidence that innovative companies need a wide range of ideas and that success requires a high failure rate. Boyle and his fellow designers keep careful track of the ideas they generate in brainstorming sessions and informal conversations, and that just pop into their heads. Skyline keeps close tabs on its ideas because it sells and license ideas for toys that are made, distributed, and marketed by big companies like Mattel and Fisher-Price. Boyle showed me a spread-sheet indicating that in 1998 Skyline (which had fewer than 10 employees) generated about 4,000 ideas for new toys. Of these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12 were ultimately sold. This “yeild” rate is only one-third of 1 percent of total ideas and 5 percent of ideas that were thought to have potential. Boyle pointed out that the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that are bought never make it to the market, and of that those do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle says, “You can’t get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy and crazy ones. Nobody in my business is very good at guessing which are a waste of time and which will be the next Furby.” – Robert I. Sutton – Weird Ideas that Work

What then of Keat’s beauty and truth? The short, easy answer is that a package is the wrong place to look for either. And yet it seems clear that a poet two millennia hence would certainly learn more about our world by looking at cans from a supermarket than canvases from a museum. Moreover the aesthetic qualities of packages, because they are more closely tied to psychological perception of how people see and make judgments, would very likely be more intelligible over time than would the devices used by more inidvidualistic fine artists. Thus there is a kind of truth and beauty to be found in packages. – Thomas Hine