Stephen Zades-The Odyssey Network

Come on people now…

I was speaking to a parent at my son’s school, who recently moved here from Pakistan. In talking about the melt down of the global economy, he said, “...there is no other place I would want to be now but in the US.  In no other country could the economy lose over five million jobs in such a short time and not have major rioting and violence in the streets. Americans are incredibly resilient people.”

This conversation reminded me that people see differently, they learn differently, they hear differently, and they comprehend differently. My friend from Pakistan was seeing America with a fresh lens - one from outside the system.

Shifting perspectives beyond the limitations of our discipline, industry, convention and culture is liberating.  It emancipates us from the narrow rooms of our individual experiences. It powers us to conceive and revolutionize.

We need more conversations like this to get out of our unventilated rut.  Through these kinds of conversations you can imaginatively project yourself outside the situation you’re in and imagine you’re looking at it from some other place. It is fundamental to our ability to rethink, re-conceive and re-imagine our situation.

So here is my new angle of vision on America…  

The reaction of Americans to the downturn has been extraordinary. Our response to this shock to the system has been one of stoicism and admirable self determination.  And,  if you look deeper,  you can see that we are entering into a new era of American life.  The direction of which is very positive.  

Here are some of its characteristics.

We all make the world what it is

This meltdown marks the end of decades of narcissism and selfishness. This is a profound shift from a generation of - “it’s all about me and my wants and needs.”

As individuals we are learning to see the necessity and advantages of being a responsible part of a larger whole. We are defining ourselves increasingly by our web of connections with others. We are beginning to see how important good stewardship of the environment is. How sharing of resources and pooling of ideas creates real growth.  We are simutaneously part of a local and global ecosystem.

We have the tools to change our world.

Americans have the courage and the savvy to persevere through the aches of our world. This is far different from the hopelessness and scars that the great depression left on our fathers’ generation- one that had to endure over a third of the entire country being unemployed.

Today our level of education, worldliness, social safety nets and economic information is unprecedented.  These things give us the power to change our world. We have the tools and we’re learning to use them.

Balancing a vision of a “city upon a hill” with globalization

As famed social scientist Dan Yanlelovich puts it, “we’ve learned the hard way that left solely to its own devices, market forces serve only one master-the values of a market economy.  As we have seen, these forces can be brutal, relentless, pitiless, and oblivious to human consequences.”

There is a growing understanding that our heritage includes both the capitalist drive and the responsibility to do what is right for the greater good, not just when it is convenient to do so, but in our everyday lives. The quality of our profits matters.  As President Kennedy said “we must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill-the eyes of all people are upon us…for of those to whom much is given, much is required.”

This is the new spirit of America! A place where two people walking hand in hand is a movement.

The question for today is: Who are you holding hands with?

 

 

American re-Evolution…from Me to We

I’ve been traveling across America and everywhere I see a new variety of wildflowers springing up - the American people variety.

The rapid meltdown has disrupted the ecosystem in some positive ways, clearing out the underbrush and allowing whole new ecosystems built on imaginative intelligence  and distributed tools of innovation to emerge; a variable Galapagos of new organizations, combinations and collaborations that are finding ways to harness the new nutrients from the fallout.

The continuous flows of contradiction and change bring the essential ingredients necessary for the sustainability and reliability of these new species.

This can be hard to see if your portals are the news cycles that have us evolving into road kill for India and China this century.  The lens we need to capture this evolutionary shift through is more like programming found on The National Geographic Channel- footage Jane Goodall style.

What I see is everyday Americans - the microorganisms - evolving quickly to survive on a planet of failing organizations “too large to fail” by discovering and using their imaginative intelligence.  Evolving under pressures conventional wisdom deems too great to support new life - they find a way.  

Times and events of crises provide the necessary attraction and compression the diverse elements need to cohere. This is one of the major reasons so many great ideas and organizations are born of hard times, from The Muppets to Microsoft.

As we develop our imaginative intelligence, we allow ourselves to pull inspirations from a wide range of sources, to trust the creative process, and to draw on the innovators within all of us. Ultimately where change becomes the status quo, creativity becomes an essential and indivisible part of the enjoyment of everyday work and life. We learn to direct and enjoy the ride, rather than being thrown by it.

We become like boiling water: even cold water poured on us will heat up and transform.

How does pressurized imaginative intelligence manifest itself?

If you look deeply, everywhere you can see this societal shift. Americans are feeling a deep desire to connect- to end feelings of loneliness and narcissistic isolation. They are cultivating the best they have within themselves and actively searching for new ways to bring those skills back to the village and share them. Where ever this happens the connections become the genesis of new ecosystems, built on sustainable virtues with strong moral and ethical overtones.

 As we change our ecosystem, our concept of self also changes within. We evolve from me to we. We see ourselves as part of a larger system, a greater purpose, a global community. This in turn stimulates a virtuous cycle of new global growth. Only this time, we will have collectively evolved to understand that “United we stand, divided we fall” is an organizing principle for all citizens of our planet- not only Americans.

This re-Evolution holds the seeds of the future that are going to save us from extinction.

So the question to consider is:

What is your re-Evolution?

 

The Pursuit of Happiness

Americans today are on a path to greater happiness.

I realize that sounds like an outrageous assertion and flies in the face of relentless headlines about the death of the American Dream.  But, the happiness I am talking about isn’t the ephemeral burst of retail therapy, bungee jumping or “experience cruises to nowhere”, but of a more enduring kind- one that ultimately leads to more genuine gratification, purpose and lasting pleasure.

The right to the “pursuit of happiness” Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence- is the kind that inspires us to develop the virtues of gratitude, grace, and generosity.

I believe the real emerging story is not about the American Dream dying but of being reborn.  The opportunity to pursue a more meaningful life is the potential upside to the downturn.

It’s difficult for us to see this potential right now because we are bombarded by media images that focus on our eminent demise.  We are biased by a perceptual frame work of rampant individualism.  As Bob Dylan sang, “everybody sees themselves walking around with no one else.”  We’ve also bought into a mindset of endless consumerism. A misguided belief that more is more. These forces combine to blind us to some truly significant positive shifts in values, attitudes and action. A new spirit of determinism focused on living a more valuable life is emerging among us, muffled and all but suffocated by a cloying layer of scandal, skepticism, and suspicion.

To see it and sense it requires building some new vision and bandwidth outside our usual narrow spectrum. Once we tap into this broader wave length, we will see that the American Dream is being reborn – a dream that is far truer to our noble character and far more sustainable.

To have our country’s culture defined by consumerism and excesses cheapens our heritage.

Martin Seligman and Gregg Easterbrook have identified the paradox.  After decade upon decade of increased wealth, education, abundance - every objective indicator and measure of personal, family, and life satisfaction have not increased. Contrary to common belief, in study after study there is a surprisingly low correlation between wealth and happiness. This is true not only in the US but also in most other wealthy nations. As our purchasing power goes north, our well being goes south.

The kind of happiness we’ve been blithely chasing creates what Seligman describes as “an endless treadmill of hedonic habituation”. Like a mouse in a Skinner Box  or a junkie on dope, we live our lives chasing the next possession, the next experience, and the next notch on our gun belt. As we rack, stack and stuff it up, we find the things we’ve worked so hard for no longer make us happy. Nothing is ever enough.  Depression is now 10 times as prevalent as it was in 1960 and it hits us as a society at an alarmingly young age, often in teenage years.

Our bloated expectations - far beyond our real needs - fuel a pervasive mindset of failure and disappointment - a negative spiral of not only keeping up, but trumping the Joneses.

Like the crisis of the American diet, far too high in processed carbohydrates, unhealthy fats, and empty calories - so is our pursuit of happiness. It leaves us feeling exhausted, unsatisfied and ultimately not any happier.

In a perverse way, perhaps we should say “thank you” for saving us from ourselves.

So the question to consider is not a new one but an ancient one.   As Aristotle first posed 2,500 years ago during the Golden Age of Athens:

What are the components of a good life for you?

 

 

Cultivating the Imaginative Eye

Innovation relies on vision - on seeing untapped value. Today, in the Age of Ideas, when there is so much less surplus available to the material eye - no gold nuggets lying around, no herds of buffalo - our great resources for growth lie beyond the visible. As Plato explained in his concept of the imagination, it’s the thing behind the thing that is rich with possibility.

To see it requires the imaginative eye. And it can be cultivated! You may have had a place in your childhood where your imaginative eye worked better than usual: in your garage, under your neighbor’s porch, up in the attic, down at the creek behind your house. If you were to return to those places today, your material eye might find them surprisingly small, may by even shabby.

Were the friendships, adventures, and stories that you experienced false or unworthy?  Or were they real and vivid, but your imaginative eye has lost its strength? Atrophied? Any artist will tell you that the imaginative eye is a muscle that grows with exercise - and that its magic for childhood is rudimentary compared to its power for adults.

Can you feel it? Absolutely. It is the muscle we stretch when we wake in the middle of a dream and try to get back into it; it’s the empathetic problem-solver set in motion by someone else’s problem; and it’s the resource we too often leave behind when we go to work. Like an old car in the garage, it becomes sluggish not from age, but for want of driving fast on the open road. Imagine a work environment like the one you and your cousins created in your backyard, where the continuum of vision was not arithmetic, but exponential.

Some strength of the imagination is developed in our individual Walden Ponds, but history testifies to the clustering of its fruit, from the flowering of symphonic music in nineteenth-century Germany with Brahms and Beethoven to the explosion of technology in Silicon Valley. 

These clusterings develop because the imaginative vision is contagious. Those who develop it become sources of stimulation, interaction, and excitement. Magnets for learning, commerce and communication. They attract talent and excite an effervescent flow of experimentation. In these heady atmospheres, conventions fall away and new ideas, experiences, and expressions emerge.

Recession is not a time for each of us to be digging barren holes to bunker into.  Rather, it is a time to seek out and develop new connections and combinations.  It is a time to cultivate fertile crescents with others in both the real world and in virtual space. The key to dynamic growth comes from seeing the world with an imaginative eye - not an acquisitive, greedy one.

Now that you know that the imaginative eye is a muscle that grows with exercise...what's your new workout routine going to be?

 

 

The Tao of No School Today

No School Today. Those three words are absolutely scintillating at any age. The glimmer of possibilities - the rush of excitement and ideas of how you might spend your new found time sparks animated pleasure at any age.  

Those feelings where echoed today from Virginia to Maine as the Eastern Seaboard was blanketed in a major blast of white. As I write this post I too am snowbound by impassable roads in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This has me thinking about why we don’t feel this sense of possibility more often- like the feeling of opening night, every day. The clue here lies in the absence of activity - finding ways to not continually increase but decrease - to chisel away at the unessential.

In dealing with the unrelenting snowstorms of the VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, we now need to be supple and lean. We need to move faster and lighter. We need to learn to recognize and ride new forces well.

Learning to increase the essential by decreasing the nonessential is like building any other skill. It takes knowledge, practice and even some enlightenment. Think of it as a martial art. Like Jeet Kune Do.

The key to pushing new limits of endurance, speed, agility and power has as much to do with training the initiating muscles to undertake new loads as training the opposing breaking muscles to relax and decrease resistance.  The key is to minimize "antagonistic tension".  The cost of not doing so, extracts a high price for both the mind and body.  The result is early fatigue, wasted motion, and unnecessary tenseness in our excess effort. Essentially we are fighting ourselves, and the opponent with every move.

In the Age of Ideas we have before us a cornucopia of opportunities to create new value and enjoy phenomenal success as a result. To harness it will require rewiring your mind to see these new possibilities. This in turn requires turning off the old industrial reflexes and allowing a new pattern of neurophysiological adjustment to take place. 

As Bruce Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, “coordination is the quality which enables the individual to integrate all the powers and capacities of his whole organism into an effective doing of an act…muscles have no power to guide themselves, but the manner in which they act, and consequently the effectiveness of our performances, depends absolutely on how the nervous system guides them...learning coordination is a matter of training the nervous system and not a question of training muscle.”

So as the snow falls gently throughout the night, the question to consider is what can you decrease in your life to reduce costly physical and psychological drag and resistance?

Your answer holds the “qualities” to finding your maximum coordination.

 

A Perfect 10 - The Power of Positive Affect

af⋅fect/v. əˈfɛkt; n. ˈæfɛkt/  n. af-ekt: feeling or emotion. Synonyms:  influence, sway

All of us will find that developing, nurturing and protecting a positive affect will have a profound impact on the quality of our lives and our ability to harness our imaginative intelligence - whether you are in the entertainment, sunscreen or ceiling fan business, or if you work in the arts, education, or medicine….or if your searching for the next act in your life.

From a leadership perspective, cultivating a positive outlook and influence will be one of the most valuable mindsets and management behaviors we have in dealing with the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world. The research from the scientific community shows substantial evidence that even a mild positive affect has far reaching effects on the quality of our thinking, problem solving and decision making ability.

At a neurochemical level,  positive affect increases dopamine levels that improve cognitive flexibility. It also increases oxytocin levels that enhance feelings of acceptance and social bonding.

People in whom positive affect has been induced (wouldn’t you just love to be one of those lab subjects) were able to:

1. Increase thinking flexibility
2. Problem solving with greater creativity
3. Make decisions more efficiently and thoroughly
4. Cope better with adverse events
5. Decrease their level of  defensiveness
6. Think more abstractly and in multiple ways.
7. Engage in greater elaboration and flexibility reasoning
8. Increases focus and attention
9. Demonstrate more mental elasticity shifting between global ( broad)  and local focus ( narrow)
10. Access a richer range of their cognitive context-i.e. their more unusual and innovative thoughts.
    

In the Age of Ideas we need to see growth as a creative process, not an accounting practice. Positive affect needs to be added to the innovation tool kit.

My enthusiasm for this topic has been greatly inspired, informed and influenced by two “mad dogs” that I have had the pleasure of conversing with. For those who have read Mad Dogs Dreamers and Sages: Growth in the Age of Ideas, you know that the commendation of mad dog is the highest accolade, honor and gratitude possible.   Their scientific research tremendously informs our thinking here. They are Alice M. Isen, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Professor Paul Thagard, Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Computer Science University of Waterloo. Paul has written a new book, Hot Thought-Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition that I highly recommend.

 

 

 

 

Vision Quest

Approaching the world with a positive mindset has a profound effect on what you actually see and how  you see it. Your outlook has a direct impact on your ability to construct opportunity, problem solve creatively, and even find other positive material in your memory to link to and cue into action.

This is far from putting on rose colored glasses where the entire world seems aglow. In fact quite the opposite; positive feelings actually make one more discerning, better able to see connections as well as detect critical differences.

This area of cognitive science is called positive affect. It is so important to us now that I am going to devote a series of blogs delving into its timely lessons. A rich and growing body of research built from a confluence of cognitive, neural, molecular and social sciences shows the far reaching effects of positive affect on our daily lives.

For me this journey started on an innovation odyssey The Odyssey Network created in Palo Alto. We had the good fortune to work with Professor Donald D. Hoffman- one of the seminal minds in the field of visual intelligence and the author of a must read book titled, Visual Intelligence.

In working with Don, we learned how vision is not merely a matter of passive perception; it is an intelligent process of active construction. Our actual vision is far from being a faithful camcorder of events-rather our eye and brain actively construct every aspect of what we see…or think we see.  We are just now beginning to understand the visual virtuosity of our visual constructions which happen so fast, often unconsciously, that they dwarfs the speed of today’s fastest supercomputers.

This is part of the innovation trap. In the hard work of creating innovation, we often do not pause or shut off the perceptual auto pilot long enough to consider looking at problems in different ways.  We don't question our assumption biases.  We don't contemplate and examine equally viable alternative courses of action.  Rather we default to the most obvious and expected positions.

With Professor Hoffman as guide we ventured further into understanding the impact of visual intelligence and cognitive science on culture, advertising, marketing, management and imaginative intelligence itself- our ability to create.  This quest has led us to the work of some of the world’s most preeminent minds in neurobiology, perceptual psychology, computer science and philosophy.  So stay tuned…

It’s easy to loose sight of opportunity when our diet consists of so many empty calorie news cycles. Be it from the left or the right- from FOX,CNN ,MSNBC ,HLN… the thinking is so short term. The endless focus on up to the minute accounts of everything create a relentless, perspectiveless view- the kind of jolting negative energy where markets just keep reacting to markets, not necessarily real events, in an endless global twitter. Every headline must compete to trump the last-after all these are advertiser supported mediums that depend on ratings.

So, instead of feeling knowledgeable and informed, the experience leaves us exhausted and depressed. I am not, however, advocating the denial of objective reality or espousing any virtue in being uninformed-this is not a time for putting ones head in the preverbal sand.

What I am advocating is the care, feeding, nurturing and protection of your positive affect.

So try thinking about the economy this way:

The combined output of the world’s economies is estimated to be somewhere north of $70 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of opportunity for creating, innovating, buying and selling.

 

Survival Skills for Uncertain Times…Tales of Brave Ulysses

When it comes to surviving--no actually, thriving in uncertain times-- there is no better teacher than Ulysses.

Odysseus, his real Greek name, is a hero for our times of mythic stature. His journey is so epic, so powerful, and so resonant around the world that it has been retold for thousands of years… and for good reason. Just ask those swindled by “the street” about those sirens sweetly singing.

The challenges Odysseus faced everyday were extraordinary. He was constantly navigating between Scylla, a six-headed monster and Charybdis, a whirlpool that alternately sucked down and spewed out.  Odysseus figured out ways to succeed even when there were no obvious solutions.   He saw dilemmas as sources of inspiration and understood they required different kinds of engagement.

So what lessons can we learn from this cunning ancient hero about thriving in strange places with even stranger customs?

The first is about disruption and creation itself. Clinging to old mindsets, we will remain perpetually unprepared and off balance for the rapid shifts and surprises of multiple currents. But it was just in this very convergence of multiple streams bringing with them such a variety of strange new elements that Odysseus learned to embrace and actively seek out the new nutrients. As change became the dominant certainty in his life, he learned to develop the competing muscles of focus and range. He moved beyond the tyranny of “or” to the genius of “and.”

Well as you might imagine, Odysseus’s journey lasted 10 years. In that time he learned lots of little micro-moves of adaption as he faced endless waves of challenge and uncertainty. F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote “the test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  Odysseus set a new model for the test of first rate intelligence—that of agility. Not just the ability to hold multiple ideas at the same time, but the ability to shuttle between them.

Odysseus also found intense pleasure, zest, kick and spice in the journey itself-sparkling waves, dancing through the turquoise, and “…carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind”- wonderful phrasing from Eric Clapton.

Let’s realize that this journey is going to be epic in our lives. The impact will be with us for a long time. Odysseus is a unique hero because he is so physically and mentally muscular. He trained his large muscles to respond to fear and crises and used them to enhance his performance when he needed them most. But importantly, he also developed his finer muscles of variety and ambiguity and protected them, as he knew that they would be short circuited by urgency.

When we are tired, scared or overloaded-or startled by something different from the familiar patterns-we can lose our fluency and fail to make the critical connections. In an idea economy, this can be fatal. Our odyssey is a quest to find the right yin/yang balance. To see an example of this mindset in action today in Silicon Valley see Charlie Rose's interview of Mark Andreesen

The challenges we face now are not greater than the problems the country has confronted in the past. They are, however a shock to the baby boomer generation and their children who are not used to putting off any of their desires into the future.

 

 

 

“With respect sir, I think this will be our finest hour.”

Everywhere, everyone needs to be stepping up to the plate and saying these words to their bosses in the C suite.  You know, the folks with a C in front of their title- CEO, CFO, CIO,CMO, CSO,CTO- those entrusted to lead. And with all due respect, those in the C suite need to be instilling, with a bold voice, this kind of confidence in their people.

Words to this effect were spoken by Gene Krantz-artfully played by Oscar nominated actor Ed Harris in the film Apollo13. The time was a seminal moment-like now.  As flight director, he assumed total responsibility and accountability for the outcome of what appeared to be NASA’s worst disaster. Facing the catastrophic, he adopted a failure is not an option mindset. This unleashed some of the most unprecedented problem solving success in NASA’s history.  In this case what was on the line was not the success or failure of a toothpaste flanker line extension but the lives, careers, hopes and dreams of a generation of space pioneers. So let’s all take heart because our task is so much easier.

Creativity thrives on challenge. Scarce resources, rather than serving as an excuse for inaction is actually the blast of alpine air we need to clear out the bureaucratic underbrush and sharpen our ideas, collaborations and programs.

In the age of ideas, the greatest asset of an organization is its people. Too many organizations seem to be forgetting that people are the very source of innovation itself. Real leverage against the bottom line will be driven by creative development and utilization of the individual and collective imaginations. Imagination responds to big challenges, but it needs the right kind of leadership and inspiration as a catalyst.

Leaders create the future in their organizations, especially in volatile times. (For some really interesting thinking on this, see Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early and his blog, The Future's Now.)

So the real question is-What are you doing to actively supply the nutrients, stimuli and knowledge for your people… (For yourself)… to increase their ability to make the unlikely connections that ultimately lead to growth.

 

So sir, will this be our finest hour?

 

HOPE...for creativity

Most organizations today are in a real code red. We’re barely into February and too many have already written the entire year off. Everywhere you see CFO teams leading the charge-cutting people, slashing programs, shifting into reverse, and pressing the pause button.

What’s more, their freezes seem to have paralyzed an already skeptical market as growth collapses all around.  In a recent article by Financial Times Columnist, Lucy Kellaway in The Economist, she calls this the year of the CFO.  In store for us is a new bleak corporate environment where thinking outside the box will yield to checking the boxes. The balance of power will shift to the CFO suite and the “implications of his ascendancy will be felt far beyond the figures and will last much longer than it takes to make them look healthy again.”  Cultures will swing from one of egalitarianism and empowerment to management by fiat -decree, sanction and order. Is this what we need…more masters of administration?

Does this sound like your organization?

And let’s not be too quick to forget the mindset and skills that brought us this incredible financial engineering along with the genetic financial mutants from the last downturn-Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia.

I spoke recently with Daniel Yankelovich the visionary interpreter of trends and famed social scientist.  Dan came to prominence in the early 60’s as a young Harvard Professor whose polls correctly predicted Kennedy’s victory over Nixon.  He has coined the phrase “lurch and learn” to describe the way societies, economies and companies evolve.  The perpetual over swing of the pendulum goes from extreme to extreme- missing the mark until a new, evolved equilibrium is found.

The reality is, we are continually digging out from the collateral damage brought on by overshooting the mark.  In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara’s mea culpa, he reveals that those around President Johnson saw the quagmire of Vietnam, yet the culture within the oval office would not allow anyone to say so. Does this culture sound familiar?

So even though we can now see the alarming fallout of the lurch we are in, are we doomed to repeat the inevitable fallout from the over swing?   We believe now is the time to learn from history and explore new options.  This is the time for creativity, the life blood of innovation to come to the forefront.

What do you think?