Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 27 - August 5, 2020
Consider that we all know instinctively, as young as nursery school age, that the cruelest form of punishment we can inflict is to isolate and ignore another person.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,
Safiya trusted the questions that originated from her own self-reflection and cultural experience. This was a courageous act in light of the norms of objectivity that her doctoral advisory team expected.
Trusting that you are valued for who you are as a person is essential to a culture of inquiry. We need connection and acknowledgment of our basic human worth. When this does not happen at regular intervals, it dampens people’s ability to give of their creative selves, to ask the big questions that move us forward.
“How do you feel at work? Who do you like to talk to? When are you most motivated? Most productive?”
It is only through the discovery of what we don’t know that we are prompted to go off course to ask different, better questions.
Most of us find psychological safety in being around people who think like us. Otherwise, friction results. We assume that it is best to avoid the friction and that the process will go a lot more smoothly if we work with people who by and large think the way we do. Well, the process might go more smoothly, but the outcome will not necessarily be better.
I could never think to ask the sorts of questions you would and vice versa. That is a really important acknowledgment. The more diverse the inputs, the more innovative the output.
Inquiry requires us to observe and listen more actively in order to frame better questions.
Interview a colleague. Spend time devising at least 20 questions, and then prioritize five of those questions. What new things did you learn about the colleague’s life? About his or her professional journey? What lessons can you incorporate back into your own life?
Keep in mind that chaos is not anarchy; it is randomness. And order is not control; it is structure. Wonder and rigor are parallel manifestations of the chaos and order in a chaordic system
But how can you scale improvisation throughout an organization? By ensuring that the rules are embedded in a fluid structure that allows employees to problem-solve in the moment.
Generating something new and novel starts with a dissatisfaction with the status quo.
One incremental way to practice improvising is to “quietstorm”: this is individualized brainstorming, in silence. Set a timer for 90 seconds, and give yourself a prompt like “What are all the things I could make from a paper coffee cup?” Don’t edit yourself, allow for a rapid stream of consciousness—
and, better yet, return to the mind-set of your goofy eight-year-old self. Practice quiet-storming on a regular basis. If you’re feeling more daring, try taking an improvisation class. Many local theater companies and comedy clubs offer them.
My parents gave me an incredible gift, the permission to do what I loved, and then trust that opportunities would come to me.
The Art of Intuition: Cultivating Your Inner Wisdom,
Deciding to listen to your heart is a brave—and often solitary—path.
Reflect on and journal about all of the times you have followed your heart. What was the result? Gain courage from this. Journaling the way you have historically followed your intuition will become a documentation and memory bank of your intuitive leaps.
What made our tribe work was that all of our distinctive personalities were complementary. Our quirky differences were accepted and allowed to sparkle depending on what was at stake and at play.
It is hard to go it alone when generating something new. It helps to have the right team around you. The Steelcase study discussed in chapter 1 reported that for 90 percent of respondents, collaboration was essential to create new and better ideas.
To be in community takes effort, reconciliation, and the creative abrasion referenced in chapter 3.
Rituals institute order and rigor into our lives, often with wondrous outcomes. What is a personal ritual you could create for yourself to feel more connected to your work community? It could be a salutation you say to yourself upon entering the lobby; it could be an object you reference at your desk; or it could be a quick daily walk around the office floor quietly observing your colleagues and absorbing what they contribute. Check out Rituals for Work: 50 Ways to Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, and a Culture That Can Adapt to Change, by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, for more ideas.
AMPLIFY WHAT IS UNIQUELY HUMAN
Paul Petrone, head of academic and government marketing at LinkedIn Learning, wrote, “While robots are great at optimizing old ideas, organizations most need creative employees who can conceive the solutions of tomorrow.”
Watch Balder Onarheim’s TEDxCopenhagen talk on the neuroscience of creativity. Try one of his tips at the end. For example, while brushing your teeth, practice stringing along as many words as possible through random association. For example, how many randomly associated words can you come up with after thinking of the word “airplane”?
The Creative Brain.
We defined fashion thinking as “a creative approach to business strategy that utilizes the best practices from the fashion industry to harness the power of technology, story, experimentation, trends, and open sourcing to add meaning and value to the functional and experiential spheres of products and services.”
Don’t make excuses about a lack of time, suboptimal staffing, or scarce funding to put off creating. Creativity loves constraints. All that you need is right within you and sitting before your eyes. You must shift your paradigm.
Create a list of wonder mentors and rigor mentors: i.e., creativity mentors! What do you like about them? What about their work speaks to you? What can you borrow from them and put your own spin on?
Until we shift our perspective, we can’t possibly know what we don’t know.
Your translation skills are key to creativity: translation is how you get buy-in; buy-in is key to collaboration; and collaboration yields the most dynamic creative results.
Create a safe environment where people feel they can express their true selves. You know the name of their spouse, when their birthday is. If you don’t build relationships, people won’t trust you, and they won’t want to work with you.
I share my experience because it demonstrates what happens when we have a myopic view about what counts as data: We risk missing the bigger picture, losing out on empathy, and ignoring opportunities to collaborate with a broader segment of our network to solve problems.
That is because “when we play, the brain is learning how to learn.”
The Pulse titled “Why We Play.”
Play is also part of our evolutionary path. In the “Why We Play” podcast episode, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University described it as “a vehicle for achieving powerful learning.” Mentally, play contributes to brain health because it strengthens our ability to switch back and forth between the frontal cortex and limbic region of the brain.
Whether we are jumping up and down during a card game of Uno, playacting through a game of charades, or running around outside while we toss a ball back and forth, the kinesthetic nature of play is a recharge.
Play is as important to our brain and physical health as sleep. What if your work could become your play?
One day, anthropologists and historians may look back on this lack of play as an epidemic, one that meant we attained only a fraction of the amount of innovation that was actually possible.
The net result of our beliefs about play is that we treat vacationing and leisure like guilty pleasures instead of as sacred pauses.
Play is wonder and rigor to the max.
The best way to rebound from a situation that catches you off guard is to have fluid structures in place. Try taking away some of the structure and leaving space for more open inquiry, improvisation, and intuition. Keep in mind that markets are unpredictable and inconsistent because they are made up of people. Embrace it.
Move, translate, and play to challenge your assumptions and navigate complex situations.
The word dérive is French for “drift.” It’s a great way to describe, for example, the wandering that naturally happens as you walk through the serpentine streets of Venice, Italy. Go get lost on purpose during your lunch break, or drive a different way to or from work without the aid of a GPS. Notice how you feel and what you discover.
