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Leaders make shared sense of complexity
Leadership is the art of making shared sense of complexity.
Part of a longer article at ThinkJar, "Creative Leadership and Sense Making: Interview with Chuck Palus," I couldn't wait to share this quote on leadership with IF blog readers. I think it's fantastic because it doesn't turn leaders into superhumans, just better humans, able to put disorienting or difficult events in a perspective that makes sense for everyone.
I think it's fantastic because the people I've admired the most in my life have not only been able to explain big ideas, like why our thinking, sentient, reflective first-person accounts of the world are still such a gaping mystery to science, or why, given a few simple rules, the vasculature in human vessel and respiring leaf can take such form and variety, but, accompanying the friend who has buckled while absorbing bad news - really bad news - can, alongside him, take a knee in shared and quiet solicitude.
It's the kind of leader I want to be.
Wayne
Finding cold fusion
Many of you older than 40 will remember the brief "cold fusion" euphoria of the late 1980's, the "discovery" that an almost infinite amount of energy was available from obtainable ingredients. The claimants, Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons, were soon discredited, and I have always considered Fleischmann, when I thought of him at all, as something of a carnival barker.
In his time Martin Fleischmann was an established scientist, however, and an electrochemist who had published often, according to an obituary in the New York Times Sunday.
These paragraphs in particular caught my eye:
In the early 1980s, the two were hiking in Mill Creek Canyon in Utah when their conversation turned to experimental results from the late 1960s that still puzzled them. They began to conceive a follow-up experiment and fleshed out details at Dr. Pons’s kitchen table while sipping whiskey.
'Sometimes we like to talk about the impossible just for fun,' Dr. Fleischmann told The Los Angeles Times in 1989.
The two put up $100,000 of their own money for the research (Dr. Pons’s contribution was larger) because they feared others would think the enterprise 'stupid.' Around 1983, they began to see promising data. Six years later, when they found out that another researcher was approaching cold fusion in a different manner, they made plans to publish their separate findings in the same journal.
But according to the story, their institution, the University of Utah, concerned about the possibility of sharing patentable information, rushed the "discovery" to the public, bypassing the journals of the day. Peer review might have buried the claims with injuries only to academic reputations. Or maybe the two knew better than to publish. Perhaps Fleischmann and Pons wanted to believe too much. Perhaps competitive natures got the best of them. Maybe they just weren't very careful scientists and their luck ran out. In any case, the two became outcasts.
Fusion may well be impossible on Earth. After all, the only known fusion is happening in the cores of stars. But reading Fleischmann's obituary, I found myself feeling a bit more sympathetic - just a bit - to the man who said he "liked to talk about the impossible just for fun." I think it's because nothing much of worth happens unless there is some fun involved, or at least an intense curiosity to see what's around the corner. For me the two are interchangeable. I'm a bit more sympathetic - just a bit - because many great claims often make fools of the claimant. Initially hailed for their breakthrough, I wonder if any misgivings over their slippery data may have had simply disappeared in the too-human reaction to the recognition and the lauds. Maybe stars in jars were possible after all.
There are always lessons in failure. And for me, the lesson is never to bet more than can be lost, so that - so that - one can wager again. To achieve something that lasts, make many little bets.
Wayne
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Daily Events
ART+FM
International debut Sept. 19, 2012
www.artxfm.com
(Kentucky Center)
Free, magic, and irrepressible, radio is the soundtrack of contemporary life. Dominated for the better portion of the century by commercial and religious programming, the airwaves are seldom available for experimental or artistic exploration. In today’s digital age, however, as financial and practical chores are increasingly handled by online services, radio presents itself to creative thinkers as alluring and uncharted territory.
Making its international debut at this year’s IdeaFestival, ART+FM has a new vision for this powerful medium and a specific mission to open the broadcast dial to those working to expand the concept of radio and all of its communicative possibilities.
Committed to providing artists and community members access to the airwaves for creative and experimental use, ART+FM employs sound, music, and conversation, to explore the hidden properties of audio broadcasting. Sculpting with frequency that is delivered in watts, ART+FM amplifies contemporary art ideas and broadcasts international creative dialog.
Proud to launch the global stream and part 15 transmission on September 19, 2012 direct from the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, ART+FM will provide LIVE COVERAGE of this year’s IdeaFestival and its many affiliate events.
Broadcasting interviews, experiments, conference updates, and various entertainment, ART+FM will provide background information, behind-the-scenes knowledge, and interactive opportunities for conference attendees - real and virtual - to further their understanding of IdeaFestival topics and reveal their essential connectivity.
IF Bookstore
Hosted by BookstacksPlus
Offering presenter authored and recommended books, CDs and DVDs sales.
Innovation is "a diversion, a surprise"
The word diversity comes from the Latin roots meaning 'to turn aside.' The same root gives us the words divert and diverticulum - the term physicians use to describe an abnormal out-pouching from a structure such as the bowel or bladder. A diversion is a deviation from the expected path. By definition, every fundamental innovation, whether in the biological or intellectual arena, represents just such a surprise. Our penchant for safety and predictability sometimes leads us to regard unexpected outcomes as failures. Yet without such surprises, we would never learn anything truly new....
Above all, we need to guard against the impulse to impose simple solutions on complex problems. As physicians know all too well, panaceas frequently fail. Pathology consists not of one disease but hundreds of diseases, which in turn manifest differently in different patients. One-size-fits-all solutions are not just ineffective but often counterproductive. An organization of clones will be rife with redundancy, while a diverse organization stands to reap the rewards of complementarity. By prizing diversity, we promote not only success but humanity's full breadth and richness.
Taking his cues from biology, Richard Gunderman, MD and professor of radiology, pediatrics, medical education at Indiana University, applies the lesson of diversity to the brain, demonstrating how rich cognitive terrain prepares the brain to withstand neurological damage from brain disease, and to organizations, demonstrating how, for bureaucracies, the injuries are self-inflicted. As for incoming medical classes, his immediate concern, diversity he argues "is an excellence issue."
Like Gunderman, the IdeaFestival believes fundamental innovation cannot occur without surprise, and surprise cannot occur without a diverse and wide range of people and ideas. Surprise truly is an innovator's best friend.
Wayne
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Some rights reserved by hanna b™