What Itō Jakuchū teaches us about creativity
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. What Itō Jakuchū teaches about creativity I was fortunate to catch the Itō Jakuchū exhibit Colorful Realm of Living Beings at the National Gallery of Art the other day. The exhibition, which ends April 29, marks the first time all 30 paintings have been displayed together outside of Japan and are on loan from the Imperial Household. The 30 paintings, shown along with his Sakyamuni Triptych donated by Jakuchu to Shokokuji Temple nearly 250 years ago, are all displayed in one room much as they might have been seen in a temple.
What was really interesting about the paintings themselves is the numerous techniques he uses, many of which had never been seen before in his time. From mixing, matching, and shading to layering his pigments on the front and back to create detailed spatial depth, it was said that much of what made him unique was his meticulous attention to detail (he created many of the scenes from actual animals and gardens he kept for the purpose of observation) and his unique position as an outsider – he was the eldest son of a grocer.
Of course there was natural talent get in the door and he certainly learned by studying top masters, but it was his naïve curiosity that made him great. His ability to look at the back of a printing surface and see opportunity. So often we think that we don’t have enough knowledge or information to do the things we want, but often it’s a matter of not realizing how our own experiences might be the very thing that changes the rules of the game.
As organizations look to define what makes them unique, it might be good to stop and think not about how they could be more like what is expected, but more like who they really are. If the long tail teaches us anything, it's that being authentic to some is better than being dull to many.
Poking Life
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Poking Life. I watched Steve Jobs – One Last Thing last night (one of the newly found bonuses of being an Amazon Prime member is free streaming) and came across a quote I had never heard before. "Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you ... the minute that you understand that you can poke life ... that you can change it, you can mould it ... that's maybe the most important thing." As we get ready to close one year and start a new one, I can’t think of words that better point to a world where nothing is beyond possibility.
Entrepreneurial Obscurity
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Entrepreneurial Obscurity. I came across an interesting article on PSFK quoting Peter Rojas, the co-founder of gdgt.com and the creator of Engadget, Gizmodo, Joystiq, and RCRD LBL (my personal favorite of the bunch), on obscurity. He says:
“Entrepreneurs should leverage the trend of obscurity: Obscurity is good. Seriously. Everyone focuses a lot on trying to blow up overnight and using social media to drive as much attention as possible to whatever you’re doing, but I think one of the best assets you have when starting out is that no one knows who you are and no one cares what you’re doing. This lack of attention gives you the space and time to experiment—and to make mistakes before too many eyes are on you. The smartest entrepreneurs I’m meeting with these days are just building, getting feedback from early users, and then seeing what works and iterating from there. They’re focusing on improving their product and getting it right, and then trying to attract more attention after they’ve figured things out.”
Connecting failure to innovation is not new. But I think Rojas provides a unique twist in pointing out that the freedom to fail is a kind of psychological state that is hard to create when everyone is watching.
Problem with Passive Design
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Problem with Passive Design. I’ve been reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, which is a fascinating read on the bridging of physics and sociology into a kind of social physics. In talking about how certain systems organize, he included a quote by U.S. economist Herbert Simon that caught my eye:
“I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief expressed by architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just “grown” in response to myriads of individual human decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose hand it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as naturally as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without the Designer!”
In organizations that have been around a while, there is often a belief that the processes and procedures that exist have been developed to support specific goals or fit within an overall strategy. In other words, they have been “actively” designed. After all, the thinking goes, why would we be doing it this way unless it was the best way possible?
The reality, however, is that many times the processes of an organization, and even the general culture, are not the result of any specific policies, but simply the result of time. Like an inefficient path that has been cut across a grass field, there comes a point where people no longer question whether the path is best and simply except it as a given and follow it. This can lead to not only economic inefficiencies for the organization, but also severely hamper morale, which in turn reduces the sense of empowerment and intrinsic motivation that is necessary to drive innovation.
One way of dealing with passive design is to conduct internal process and procedural audits. Only when there is actual data on how inefficiencies are impacting the organization can a real dialogue be initiated with all of the parties involved. Once an open two-way dialogue exists, it’s possible to actively design procedures and policies that help move the organization towards its objectives rather than pull it away.
What is Graphic Design?
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. What is Graphic Design? Graphic design is certainly a part of what we do at Diligent Rocket. This quick video from the UK Design Council helps gives some clarification about an area of work many people don’t really understand in its full meaning.
The Power of Great Photography
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. The Power of Great Photography. I came across some really wonderful photography of the LeMan's Classic 2010 by Laurent Nivalle who has been the artistic director, designer and photographer for the French car company Citroën for the last 10 years. The event took place at Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France, which is most famous as the venue for the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race
It could be that I'm partial to French cars as my first was a Peugot (though it certainly didn't have the elegant lines of Citroën's DS), but I think these photos offer some keen insight to anyone looking to use photography as a medium.
If I Had 10,000 Hours
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. If I Had 10,000 Hours. While I don’t think the Barenaked Ladies will be remaking their classic sing-along hit “If I had a million dollars” song anytime soon, it would be interesting to hear how they would "spend" the 10,000 hours research says it takes to become an “expert”. In the meantime, however, one person isn’t waiting. Businessweek recently covered Dan McLaughlin in his quest to become a professional golfer. Oh, and he’s never golfed before.
His goal is based on K. Anders Ericsson’s work on how people become experts, which he came across in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. I first came across Ericsson’s work in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article called The Making of an Expert. The main premise is that new research is showing that “outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching, not of any innate talent or skill.”
The core of the article is that while many people practice doing things for long periods of time, it’s not the practice itself, but the quality of that practice. Ericsson calls it deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is different in that it “entails considerable, specific and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all.”
In the end, Ericsson explains that this deliberate practice takes time and often even the most gifted and natural performers need a minimum of 10 years or 10,000 hours of intense training before they can compete at the top level. If you’re thinking that maybe you can slide into that expert status in under 10 years, don’t worry it’s possible – Bobby Fischer managed to become a chess grand master in only 9 years.
It will be interesting to see how far Dan makes it in his quest to become a PGA pro. As of November, he had passed his 1,700th hour.
On an individual level, I think the 10,000 hour “rule” is a powerful framework for thinking about time in general. So much of it just seems to “disappear” that anything that makes us question how we spend our time, which eventually connects to the question of how much time we have in general, is probably a good thing.
But I don’t think the benefits of this thinking are for individuals only. I think it would be an interesting exercise for organizations to develop this type of thinking to really develop their organizations as a whole. In our experience, many organizations get by because they have become good at managing aspects of their organizations that are less than ideal. Rather than work through and and solve problems in these areas, which is usually tough, they focus on those things they already know how to do well and use those skills to circumvent those areas. This is the complete opposite approach of Ericsson’s deliberate practice model.
Regardless of how you interpret the research, or whether Dan makes it to the PGA, when I think of what we'd all be if we had an extra 10,000 hours, the Barenaked Ladies said it best in the last line of their song: I’d be rich.
Creating Trust
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Creating Trust. I came across this UK program called the Creators Trust via It’s Nice That and I really like the idea of a large collaborative where people encourage others to not only take on projects, but help fund those projects up to the tune of about £5000 per application.
The main difference between a program like this and something like Kickstarter, another great program, is that with the Creators Trust you can’t apply for yourself. You can ONLY apply for someone else.
It reminds me a little of the idea trading concept I came across in Taylor’s Practically Radical. As I remember, in that company they created an online system where employees could post and vote on ideas online thereby bypassing the need for a great deal of the personal “selling” of ideas which was the typical path.
The main realization from that project was that almost everyone in an organization has ideas – and a lot of times they are really good. The stumbling block for many is the public side of internally selling and hustling the idea. Not everyone is comfortable publicly speaking about and promoting their ideas. So rather than deal with the pain of public speaking, many would just not say anything at all, which meant that often only the ideas that were the most vocalized ending it making it far enough to even be considered.
The connection here is that sometimes organizations, and the world for that matter, don’t tap into the best ideas or promote the best people. They actually get the ideas and people who best promote themselves. While I am a firm believer in taking the time to understand how to more effectively communicate and interact with others on a variety of scales (it’s an aspect of my job that I really like), I also feel that when the problem is large enough, we need to make sure we explore all options and ideas for arriving at the right solution.
If all organizations took the time to better understand, cultivate and truly tap into all of their value creators (their employees), not only would there be an increased sense of intrinsic motivation for delivering value, but a greater degree of trust – and that to me is the currency that is really in need of salvaging.
Google's Failing Health
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Google's Failing Health. Earlier this year, I came across Google’s new (relatively) online personal health record (PHR) management system called Google Health. Launched in 2008, the system was setup to help users manually manage their health records. The launch came on the heels of Microsoft’s web-based platform called Microsoft HealthVault started in October 2007. Here's what TechCrunch had to say back in 2008, "It’s been a long time coming, but at first glance it looks like it will be a strong competitor to existing personal health sites such as Microsoft’s HealthVault (which launched last October), Revolution Health, or Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline). It seems they were a bit off.
As you can see from the screenshot of the service (below), Google Health has to be one of the least inviting interfaces ever designed (and this with a supposed redesign in 2010 that upgraded the “look and feel”). The first time I saw this screen was actually the last time I’ve looked at it until now. In a post-Jobs world, where we now know you should start with the customer first and work backwards to the technology, it’s amazing that some people actually thought this was a product that could generate enough adoption to become a global platform.
But the failure of Google’s Health program is not all about design. Mistaken assumptions when trying to come up with a solution were also a big part of why this solution didn't work. I think Isaac Kohane, the director of the Children’s Hospital Informatics program, said it best in a recent Fast Company:
“The real message about the failure of Google Health is that they made a premature assumption about the liquidity of patient data. They were not able to do their typical small-team conquering of a large universe of data, because that large universe of data was not there.”
It’s interesting that in a time when there are so many well done and relatively open platforms for monitoring and trading stocks, that there still isn’t a common platform that lets each person manage their own health. That kind of begs the question of what factors are preventing this which gets into a much larger discussion.
The other more positive note is that it is great to see a company as big as Google, over 31,000 employees as of September 2011, still focusing on new possibilities and never seeming to forget that failure is a required part of any great success.
Amazon, Space and the Long Now
Sam Frentzel-Beyme | DC. Amazon, Space and the Long Now. A great article by Wired on Jeff Bezos' sometimes counter-intuitive approach at Amazon, his passion for making space travel accessible, and his belief that we'd approach the world a lot differently if we expanded our time frames. The full article is worth the read, but here is a quick preview of things I thought were interesting.
On how Amazon is able to be such a sought after partner in web services:
“We really obsess over small defects. That’s what drive’s up costs. Because the most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We can afford to focus on smaller and smaller defects and eliminate them at their root. That reduces cost, because things just work.”
On customer service:
“Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants.”
On thinking about time:
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”