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?
