For innovators, surprise is the name of the game

From finding customers using your product in the "wrong" way, to listening to market misperception, to the role of ego in decision making, Fast Company's "How to Turn That Nasty Surprise into the Next Disruptive Idea" describes why surprises can be an innovator's best friend.

Most companies view surprises as things to be avoided... The underlying assumption is that predictability and control are good, and uncertainty is bad. No wonder every management book on Amazon with the word 'surprise' in its title is about how to prevent the phenomenon. But here’s the counterintuitive catch: If you want a breakthrough, something that really changes the game, surprise is actually the name of the game.

Read the entire piece. And stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Orin Zebest

We need more uncommon sense

Why is the Flynn effect, a generation-by-generation increase in human intelligence, not matched by similar measures of human creativity? Is there a creativity crisis? 

Described at ThinkJar as "the purposeful generation and implementation of a novel idea," creativity and innovation do not just flow from novelty, but depend on divergent thinking to have any chance at all. Before she became Tiger Mother, Amy Chua argued that diversity, a willingness by any host culture to permit its new entrants a chance at an upwardly mobile future, was a common feature of the hyper-powers in world history.

The same goes for ideas. The vast majority of ideas will never succeed because they're either bad or never successfully implemented. But the point is that it is impossible to know in advance what ideas will prove out. The ideaFestival celebrates all manner of thinking not because every idea is equally good, but because a humble recognition of our own limits argues for intellectual modesty when faced with the new and novel, an openness of mind that can simultaneously accept what one knows and the idea that it might need editing. Progress has never occurred any other way.

The recent history of science is instructive. Philosophers and scientists from the Enlightenment until the first part of the 20th century worked with the idea that the universe could be described in purely Newtonian terms, that each physical action could be mathematically enumerated and the whole of nature, in theory, calculated. That is until Max Planck and Einstein revolutionized our ideas about the vanishingly small and the very nature of time itself.

The British biologist and geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once said that any future reality will not only "be queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." That excites me. I'm excited by that because the future has always belonged to the restless, the unsettled, the westward movers. Pioneers have always had uncommon sense.

And thank goodness. If you are a pioneer, come to IdeaFestival 2012 and meet your peers.

Wayne

Success hinges on many little bets

Many ideas will fail. Some will succeed. Speaking in this TechCrunch video, "Little Bets" author Peter Sims talks about why a comfort level with experimentation is necessary for success. It doesn't mean that failed experiments are desirable, just that the creative act requires a willingness to get it wrong before getting it right.

In his experience, most successful entrepreneurs don't begin with the perfect idea. They discover it.

Morover, by adopting the mindset that "little bets" will often fail, entrepreneurs will be changed for the better - more resilient and undeterred by momentary setbacks.

Peter will speak at IdeaFestival 2012.

Wayne

Image on prior page: Some rights reserved by Blyzz

Physicists find elusive "God particle"

Lisa Randall, who will speak at the IdeaFestival, takes a turn in this piece from New York Times writer Dennis Overbye on the pop culture references to the Higgs Boson, nicknamed the "God particle."

Yesterday, physicists announced that they had found its signature in the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider. First proposed by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, the elusive boson is the final particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, and is what provides matter with mass.

While the model describes the action of the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces and their role as traffic cop to the known subatomic particles, which now includes the Higgs, a theory of physical universe will only be complete by accounting for gravity. String theory, for example, proposes one unified description of the universe.

Using some sand, foam and white board, Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample explains what the particle is and why it's important in this video.

PHD Comics also does a nice job in the video embedded here.

You, of course, can get a first hand explanation at IdeaFestival 2012 from Lisa Randall. Make plans to be there!

Wayne

If you've never thought of it like that, we can help

"PressThink's" Jay Rosen speaking on the nature of "wicked problems:"

It is hard to say what the problem is, to define it clearly or to tell where it stops and starts. There is no 'right' way to view the problem, no definitive formulation. There are many stakeholders, all with their own frames, which they tend to see as exclusively correct. Ask what the problem is and you will get a different answer from each. Someone can always say that the problem is just a symptom of another problem and that someone will not be wrong. The problem is inter-connected to a lot of other problems; pulling them apart is almost impossible. In a word: it’s a mess....

Tame problems are not easy to solve, but they are easy to define, to fix in a proper frame. How to build a bridge over the Mississippi that won’t fall down, and determining what it will cost: we’ve tamed that one. The engineers apply the science and select the best design within the constraints the government has put forward. The politicians figure out how to pay for it and how to sell it. We can know in advance what kind of expertise will be needed.

Wicked problems aren't like that. As the founders of the concept said in 1973, “You don’t understand the problem until you have a solution.” - Jay Rosen, speaking at the UK Conference of Science Journalists in June at The Royal Society, London.

While Rosen talks about wicked problems in the context of journalism - he's determined to keep "media" from gobbling up the press - the formulation is a useful way in which to understand the bedeviled nature of enormous issues such as climate change and health care, which have outgrown the capacity of their respective experts, alone, to solve.

Wicked problems require many sets of eyes. 

To create one of the largest scientific instruments in the world, the builders of the domed Allosphere in Santa Barbara recruited artists to visualize and sonify data. Working with their scientific colleagues they may just improve our understanding of nature. Confident behavior, artificial intelligence and epistemology are all linked by the concept of embodiment. Perhaps dance may serve as an interlocutor. Synesthesia, as Daniel Tammet so beautifully explained in 2010, is not just a neurological quirk but an opening onto the nature of human creativity.

Are you an architect, biologist or attorney? Do you sculpt, theorize or write?

The IdeaFestival excels at generating and exploring new connections. In addition to meeting some of the smartest people on the planet, at some point during the many presentations over three days - and you really should consider attending them all, the effect is cumulative -  you will relate something you have heard to something you do professionally. It will come as a surprise. Perhaps it will be the result of a point made by Lisa Randall about the vanishingly small nature of particle physics and the concept of scale. Or maybe Peter Sims' entrepreneurial experiences may suggest a way to optimize your medical office, or set up an experiment in your lab. The difference between the festival and the journals and experts in your field is that the festival goes wide, not deep. It will not suggest the answer. Nor will it implicitly narrow the scope of acceptable answers. And if you are anything like me, you will find it helpful to take a break from the data.

This is how it will go down: you won't understand something has been bubbling beneath the surface until 33 minutes into the fourth presentation on day two, and suddenly you'll sit a little straighter in your chair and say audibly, but not so loud that your neighbors understand that hundreds of bottle rockets are snapping off one after the other in your mind: "Oh! - Oh! - Oh, crap. I never thought of it like that." 

Then the fun begins.

Wayne

Image of Diavolo from IdeaFestival 2009: Geoff Oliver Bugbee