Sketching is Seeing

Illustration: Photo of entrance to Sketching Room at the National Gallery of Art (April 2016)

As the university semester comes to an end, the focus in our class is on tying  strands of inquiry together in an in-class simulation exercise. This week the students received a one-page scenario “sketch.” Scenario practice typically involves multiple (completely contrasting and credulity-stretching) stories or sketches for the purposes of ‘rehearsing the future,”  increasing agility of thinking and planning today, and enhancing readiness for the unexpected.   We do this because our course focuses on unconventional problems which in turn require unconventional approaches to problem-solving, examined earlier on this blog as in here, here, and here.  (The current relevance attached in some circles to the importance of becoming more aware of our decision-making processes, and impediments to solving the complex problems of today, can be seen in projects and events such as this upcoming presentation, “Missing the Slow Train:  How Gradual Change Undermines Public Policy and Collective Action”  at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.)

But, our  classroom process differs from standard scenario practice, though the goals remain similar. Having just considered case studies in the importance of “reframing the question” in order to design more effective problem-solving approaches to complex challenges, the students (who come from all over the world) have been given an intentionally unbounded rapidly-unfolding crisis situation in the form of a very sketchy sketch.  This scenario is ambiguous in terms of ‘ownership’ or national or jurisdictional boundaries or  even the exact facts on the ground  (simulating reality).  The students must even decide “who” they are in this simulation, in devising their plans by next week. Time is short, the situation completely unfamiliar, and two subgroups are working, respectively, in pre-crisis and post-crisis modes.  Within these groups people must work together outside of their usual lanes and routines. There is no one in charge, at least initially.  Usually the results are pretty impressive, surprising, and it’s a fun, albeit serious, way to end the semester.  We all learn something in the process.

Sketching something imaginary?

We naturally start with sketches whether we are contemplating building a new deck on the house, designing a new organizational initiative, imagining something which we don’t see, or drawing a cartoon. Sketching has a role in seeing, as emphasized quite dramatically this very week (!) by a whole room devoted to sketching (complete with free sketchbooks and pencils) at the entrance to the National Gallery of the Art in Washington, D.C. So sketches can be something we draw, or practice (as on a stage,) or simulate in a classroom or a video game.

Photo: U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. taken by Black Elephant Blog author

Meanwhile a gorgeous Spring has provided the perfect palette to practice sketching in different media.

Illustration: Photo by Black Elephant Blog author

Toggling between so many sketch-able things has produced many “works-in-progress” and aspirations to finish them!

Illustration: Work -in-progress pastel sketch by Black Elephant Blog author

But each one is a step in a path towards hopefully something more polished.  Sketching is also good for incubating ideas, sometimes over a period of many years, in notes, notebooks, doodles, and …sketches… awaiting a moment perhaps involving serendipity when well-honed ideas can finally be implemented.  (Most of us know of people in history who, for various reasons (like survival) kept their own ideas and sketches hidden, like “The Origin of Species” written in the early 19th century, for a quarter of a century or more.)

Illustration: Work-in-progress watercolor by Black Elephant Blog author

It turns out, as many teachers have said over the past year, process matters if we are to make progress on tough challenges (whether in art, education, public health, or security matters) and create better outcomes.  Complacency and routines can be deadly in this regard.

How curiously different is the world of artists from the world of those in many other professions.  Artists must be original in order to have a chance at being successful, much as Georgia O’Keeffe was in adopting her various styles.  But so many other professions discourage originality in part because it’s impossible to manage traditionally. As  more and more challenges at the level of cities, regions, nations, and the world at large demand originality and creativity, traditional organizations are stumbling, although some are trying to adapt.  It’s a tall order for most of them, but necessary.  Would we better off  if creativity and originality were emphasized, rather than stifled, beginning in primary school?  One wonders.  Meanwhile, it’s  no wonder sketching is catching on like wildfire:  sketch away!

Bridge Over Colored Water

Spring is finally here. This sketch made just yesterday in a bright and glorious sun is of a bridge with its destination obscured.

Illustration: Watercolor by Black Elephant Blog author

In other developments, experimenting now with Strathmore Aquarius II paper, converted into an accordian sketchbook, per instructions generously provided by urban sketcher Marc Taro Holmes on his blog, Citizen Sketcher; the sketchbook is for an upcoming trip out West later this week and will be featured here in the future.

Learning from the Urban Sketching Masters: Anton Pieck

While at a dinner party over the holidays, the gentleman next to me, who was originally from the Netherlands, told me that the illustrations of Anton Pieck, a Dutch artist (1895-1987), had made a big impression on him as a boy growing up in Holland.

Illustration: Graphic of “Christmas market” by Anton Pieck (Source: Wikipedia)

Pieck’s illustrations were in his childhood books, he said, and everyone knew about his work then.  Pieck was an urban sketcher before people used the term, said the dinner guest. When I later looked up the work of Anton Pieck, what I found was something fantastic, inspiring, and somewhat familiar–surely I have seen some of these illustrations before. But what a “Master” to inspire the urban sketchers of today!

There is enormous detail in the work of Anton Pieck, sensitivity, and cheerfulness. In his illustrations, he recreates the feeling of the towns and cities of Holland in the 19th century and still keeps a fairytale atmosphere throughout his work. Pouring through his drawings, you will find whimsical details on both the architecture and in the market baskets people carry with them shopping. No subject escapes his notice, it seems. In the 1950s, after spending much of his professional life so far teaching and illustrating, Pieck was asked to help design a new theme park in the Netherlands called “Efteling.” This became his focus for the next 22 years.  Throughout this time, he was responsible for almost all the fairytale aspects of the park, which is still popular today but I’ve not heard of it before now.

Illustration: Tekenaar Anton Pieck 85 jaar; Anton Pieck in zijn werkkamer *18 april 1980 – Source: Wikipedia

There is much to learn from in the work of Anton Pieck, of course, and to immerse oneself in some fairytale worlds is tempting, (especially given the deeply disturbing nature what passes for news in the news these days).

So, while immobilized by some sort of bug going around, I opened my sketchbook to do these practice pieces of excerpts of Pieck’s work.

Illustration: Practice sketch (in watercolor, bistre and platinum carbon pen and ink, and Micron pen in a Stillman  & Birn “Epsilon” series sketchbook) by Black Elephant Blog author of excerpt of watercolor by Anton Pieck called “Christmas market”

It surely would be like a fairytale to be able to adopt some of his style to sketch the modern  street scenes of today–perhaps a “stretch goal” to work towards in 2016!

Illustration: Practice sketch by Black Elephant Blog author (using bistre ink and wash, and a limited palette of watercolors) after an excerpt of a painting by Anton Pieck

 

Carousel Study

The fall’s been spectacular here, with nearly every day too nice to spend inside. Between meetings, a fantastic opportunity to see original John Singer Sargent watercolors up close, and driving from point A to point B, however, it’s been tough to get a sketch in.

But here’s an attempt this week to capture the twilight and the fading but still beautiful fall colors as a carousel made its last rounds of the year opposite the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Illustration: Watercolor and pen and ink study by Black Elephant Blog author

Next up on this blog, coverage of an excellent in-town and in-home salon event this week–an event that gathered attendees from diverse fields including the military, art, the media, consulting, energy research, and psychology–featuring the author of a new book on Strategic Intelligence: Conceptual Tools for Leading Change, Michael Maccoby, (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Sketching and Frame Innovation

Anyone who sketches or attempts to create anything new is attempting to create a new way of seeing something, even if just for themselves, in their own sketchbooks, or–as I did last night–on the back of an envelope.  They are, to varying degrees, storytellers.   Urban sketchers certainly are storytellers or, if you will, citizen reporters, and “plein aire” artists, drawing and coloring what they see! Those who tell stories about their sketches, their sculptures, their jewelry-making projects, their workshops, or other sorts of creative endeavor are providing narratives to put a frame around the effort.  So sketching leads straight to frame innovation…which is getting serious attention in some business and academic circles.

Illustration: Watercolor, gouache, and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

It appears that artists have a lot to teach those of us who have depended primarily (so far…) on our analytic brains to carry us forward. And who, after all, isn’t an artist, given a chance? What happens when our analytic brains are simply not up to the challenges (some of which may be “black elephants”) ahead?  A few posts back began to look at a book on this subject published by MIT Press recently.

This post thus will segue back into the discussion of frame innovation raised a few weeks ago here on this blog (and to which there may be a few more unanswered questions by now).  One question so far raised, for instance, is whether the ideas behind “frame innovation” are, in fact, anything new?  The next few posts will consider this and related issues.

Charleston Doodles

Charleston, South Carolina is a city with something for everyone, especially doodlers and sketchers.  Drop into any downtown art supply store and the people there will be happy to share with you their favorite sketching places. This city is known as the “Holy City” due to its many churches; the skyline is dominated by steeples. From expansive beaches to cobblestone streets, graceful buildings, breezy balconies, and beautiful flower boxes and fountains, there is so much to see that it can be overwhelming.  It’s best to try to soak in the sights from many vantage points.

Illustration: Pen and ink and watercolor by Black Elephant Blog author

The Art of Looking Ahead

As the semester draws to a close, students in my course are considering a “super wicked problem,” meaning a highly complex crisis, in the form of a single scenario.  They are working separately in two subgroups; one, on a “before-crisis contingency planning” team; and the other, on a “post-crisis rapid response” team.  In our final class, they will present their findings.

Frankly, the challenges they must wrestle with are simply enormous.  Impossibly enormous, but then again when we look around the world today, such impossibly enormous challenges seem to be the “new normal”.  This scenario-based approach is meant to incorporate much of what we’ve been learning this year about complexity and resilience.  Without this experience, there is a danger we might apply old methods of problem-solving to new classes of challenges.

Illustration: Pencil and pen and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

Such thinking requires what some variously call “the art of looking ahead,” “applied forward reasoning,” contingency planning, or–most recently–“frame innovation.”  It turns out that these skills generally are not ones that business schools or other forms of higher education traditionally emphasize.  Are such skills needed in the workplace today?  As luck would have it, some new books are just out on the subject, and this blog will look at them.

First up is a new book called Anticipate:  The Art of Leading Through Looking Ahead (American Management Association, 2015), by Rob-Jan de Jong, who is a faculty member of Wharton’s “Global Strategic Leadership” executive program.  There are useful tips in this book, so it’s worth giving a flavor of them here.

Early in the book, de Jong notes that “leaders need the ability to look ahead [but] there’s very little understanding of how to develop this competence and improve visionary capacity.”  Many people mistakenly believe it takes too much time, or you’re either born with this capacity or you aren’t.  Summing up wide-ranging research in leadership and business strategy, de Jong notes that sensitivity to context (aka “context sensitivity”), or something leadership expert Warren Benning, calls “adaptive capacity,” is essential for leaders.  Companies that had a “strong sense of sensitivity to their environment” outlasted many which did not, according to work by Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company.

“Short-termism” is  more typical in the business world, and it’s a disease, according to de Jong.  It means valuing short-term gains “above long-term, somewhat foreseeable, consequences,” he writes. Unfortunately, according to McKinsey research five years after the 2008 financial crisis, “little of that learning” about the need to keep a “clear future-oriented perspective” has occurred in many companies it studied.  de Jong concludes:  “Short-termism is the biggest enemy of developing visionary capacity for both the organization and the individual leader.”  So what can be done? de Jong says it starts with “personal vision.”  This matters, he writes, because without vision, there is no hope.

The Elements of Vision include that it is “future-oriented.”  Many people find it difficult to exercise imagination about the future and to promote beliefs that “cannot be backed up by factual experiences, research, and other quantifiable data.”

Yet, a powerful vision moves “beyond the obvious into the unknown,” according to de Jong. It also challenges the status quo and “breaks through existing paradigms.”  de Jong cites IKEA’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad, as an example; Kamprad built the IKEA empire on the idea that “design furniture should not only be accessible to the happy few.”  A vision also energizes and mobilizes.   According to management and leadership expert, Abraham Zaleznik, whose work de Jong cites, managerial leadership–as of the time he wrote his article in 1977 on the difference been leaders and managers–does “not necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises.”  de Jong proceeds to investigate the qualities of “visionary leaders.”

First, it is necessary to enhance one’s ability to “tap the imagination,” and de Jong cites, with examples, the work of world-renown creativity guru and expert on “lateral thinking,” Edward de Bono, in this section.  The needed imagination depends on “perceptual capacity.”  When we are too busy to notice changes in our surroundings, we can be said to be living in the “permanent present,” de Jong writes, which was the state of man in the earliest stage of human evolution.  Fortunately the development of the “frontal lobe” over time enabled more reflective (and strategic) thinking capacities (so the basic equipment is there).

Based on his own extensive research and interviews with hundreds of senior leaders, de Jong has concluded there are two critical developmental dimensions for growing your “visionary capacity.”  They are:

1) Your ability to see things early–those “faint warning signals” often “at the periphery of our attention.”

2) Your ability to “connect the dots” and to create “coherence in the future you face and turn it into a ‘bigger picture’ story”.

de Jong quotes Alan Mulally, a former CEO of Ford:  “The first thing a leader does is to facilitate connections between the organization and the outside world.”  Mullaly, as CEO, took steps to institutionalize the process of “context scanning” through the creation of a weekly Business Plan Review meeting.

The second step of connecting the dots involves more than detecting things that might be changing. It involves connecting and integrating these signs into a larger coherent context of future possibilities. “Trend hoppers” are different from “visionary leaders,” de Jong explains, and “historians” and “followers” are also different in important ways.  There are, moreover some real dangers in “over-reliance on the past,” he writes, in a section that deserves a lot of attention these days.

de Jong notes that making sense of the weak signals in the noise is harder because “the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes of content” and 100,000 words of information in a single day.” He continues:

“Without specific effort, you will only be able to identify events that were early manifestations of change in retrospect.  But that’s usually when it’s too late.”  Therefore, the effort to “connect the dots” must be focused on the implications of changing  realities for one’s business or other professional or life endeavor.

It is necessary to have “context intelligence” to identify and make sense of early signals of change, de Jong writes. The people who do this with the highest levels of adaptive capacity are called “first-class noticers” by leadership and management experts he cites, including Warren Bennis.  Strategic advantage depends on this adaptive capacity.

Developing our ability to notice novelties or things we typically filter out takes effort, even training.  There are many methods for this, and de Jong has created some of his own.  In general, however, he recommends methods for envisioning future facts, and discusses the power of scenario planning, as developed by Pierre Wack and Kees van der Heijden, as central to promoting strategic conversation and awareness. He identifies the psychological obstacles to strategic capacity as including “frame blindness,” or a loss of peripheral vision.  Overconfidence is another culprit.  “Mindlessness” occurs when we “are trapped by categories,” run on “automatic behavior” or operate from a single perspective, according to Harvard psychologist, Ellen Langer, whose work de Jong cites. Such mindlessness can occur–indeed, might be more likely to occur–when we are fully focused and aware of what we are doing.

Clearly, the art of looking ahead requires some practice but is indispensable in tumultuous times.  Next, this blog will look at another new book: Frame Innovation:  Create New Thinking by Design.

Urban Sketching in Richmond, VA

Image: On the lawn behind the Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Yesterday a group of us spent pleasant hours sketching on the exquisitely beautiful lawn behind the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, Virginia–as part of the “Urban Sketchers – Richmond” course.

It was clear at the start of the course that most of us have much to learn about “loose” drawing.  That’s why we are here, after all. While each sketcher develops his or her own style–and there are few hard-and-fast rules–in general urban sketching involves lots of squiggly lines depicting buildings, trees, and people followed by applications of ink and possibly watercolor.  This training is particularly good for appreciating differences in “tone” or shades, to the point that the distinctions can be made with no more than a pen or pencil.  By the end of the first day, it was clear we were learning a lot from this course.

Earlier today we were on Monument Avenue which, as its name suggests, has many monuments, especially at traffic circles. As cars zipped by in both directions, some of us sketchers chose to sit under the shade of beautiful trees in the ample (at least 30 foot-wide) median area next to one such traffic circle. Other sketchers were scattered about in shady spots along the sidewalk to one side of the avenue.  All around us were stately mansions, no two alike and each with all sorts of architectural flair.  Urban sketching, while it certainly can be done solo, is the type of activity that benefits from having company.  Fortunately, there are urban sketcher groups all over the world.

Illustration: Pen and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

The weather’s been great and so are the restaurants! Sketchers have come in from far afield but some, it turns out, live practically next door back home. Architects are part of our sketching group, and know the professional lingo for–and can certainly draw!!–the architectural details we’re seeing.

Illustration: Pen and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

Now that we’re all heading back home, hopefully, loose, squiggly drawings–combining ink and watercolor–will be ready for this blog before too long!  (The teacher’s work is much, much better–which is why his book and his courses are so popular with urban sketchers.) These sketches from the weekend have sketchers sketching in them– live action images of urban sketchers at work!

Framing the Global

Illustration: Watercolor and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

With the rise of global studies and institutes, a new book has come along that features the research of diverse experts into differences between “global” and “international” studies. Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research (2014, Indiana University Press), edited by Hilary Kahn, Director of the Center for the Study of Global Change at Indiana University, includes a foreword by Saskia Sassen,  a specialist on globalization and human migration issues and Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.

Each of its 14 chapters presents research that represents a different “entry point” into global studies.  These entry points are different slices of the reality of global interactions, much as traditional slices, such as economics, political science, and military affairs, have characterized distinct disciplinary approaches to “international studies” (or the studies of relations between nations).

The main point of this work seems to be that traditional disciplines and analytic methodologies do not produce global studies, though specialized regional and functional knowledge are necessary ingredients.  Major inherited categories of analysis can “veil or distort…our epoch…,” according to Sassen.  “The challenge is to make new categories that help us theorize the current conditions,” she writes.  “This book can then be read as an experiment in expanding the analytic terrain for understanding and representing what we have come to name globalization.”

Indeed, writes editor Kahn, global studies “does not have a master concept around which theory and method can take shape, like sociology has in society, or political science has in politics.” The emerging discipline of global studies “is a commitment to empirical research and search for previously unrecognized arrangements, patterns, and productive connections and disconnections,” writes Kahn. Such patterns and connections form the “entry points” for global research. Each heads up a different chapter, including “affect,” “displacement,” “forms,” “frames”, “genealogies,” “land,” “location,” “materiality,” “the particular,” “rights,” “rules, “scale,” etc.

Interestingly and perhaps overdue, this text challenges the methodological sufficiency of state-centric approaches to social sciences and analysis generally.  The concept of “global” as something which lies outside the “framing” of national issues is not accurate, according to Sassen:

“Many of our major current categories [of research and analysis] have inherited their status from a time and place when they emerged out of analytic work…My concern here with particularly with some of the major categories we use in the social sciences–economy, polity, society, justice, inequality, state, globalization, immigration.  They are all powerful in that they are widely used to explain the realities they represent.  Yet those realities are mutants…,” according to Sassen.

The “entry points” in subsequent chapters “have emerged in the course of each contributor’s engagement with existing approaches to global studies…,” according to Kahn.  These offer a “conceptual toolkit for global research in the twenty-first century” while investigating a wide range of themes, including global financial gold markets, transnational labor migration, public art in China, and the global significance of 1968.  Kahn emphasizes that the contributors to the book move beyond comparative approaches to “probe the complex interplay among locales, practices, policies, and people.”  “Relational comparisons” emphasize how entities are formed in relation to one another as well as vis-a-vis broader contexts.  “This shifts the focus from isolated units of inquiry to the transactions and relations in which they are constituted,” according to Kahn.

In a sense, these different entry points constitute alternative ontological frames, or ways of looking at the world.  The chapter on “Reframing Oceania” is particularly interesting for its reframing of the study of the Pacific, including the 28 nation-states considered to make up that region.  All of the chapters reveal sensitivity to issues of scale, flow, and subnational interconnectivity. All in all, there are at least 14 different ways to re-imagine the globe in this unique book.  It is not hard to imagine a whole new field of global scholarship emerging, one that references but does not depend upon traditional international relations concepts for its categories and “units” of analysis.  The entry points approach of this book, as Kahn notes, “slice reality differently, opening up new modes of understanding.”  Much to explore here!

AntiFragility in a World of Disorder

In today’s class, we discussed the topic of forced or “distressed” migration in connection with environmental stresses or shocks and–whether or not related to environmental issues–violent conflict.  We quickly discovered there is almost no issue which is not connected to this issue of distressed migration.  From food security to public health, and drought to early childhood education, a complex web of factors must be considered.  (Indeed, even recent findings in neuroscience on the relationship between cognitive development in children and poverty had a place in our discussion.)  The students concluded that even very local issues have global consequences. They debated ways to soundly approach the complexity of the issues involved.

Sketch: Pencil and ink by Black Elephant Blog author

The relevance of the topic, given news headlines these days, was obvious.  Some students emphasized the importance of adaptability, or resilience, in home countries for dealing with stresses and disasters.  Sometimes, however ,the stresses are too large, too many, and too frequent–and the basic functioning of the country too weak–for needed adaptation. It is mainly in such cases, when few other options exist, that people take the step of leaving their homes in search of a better future.  (These issues, said the students, include internally displaced people who must move elsewhere inside their country and exiles or migrants who are forced to leave, and who may even face the prospect of being “stateless.”)

Whether these people are called exiles, migrants, or refugees–or something else–sometimes depends on what international law covers, or not.  But, labels aside, these are people, said the students today, who probably would not be leaving their homes if they did not have to.  With more frequent and extreme weather events alone, however, freedom of mobility and opportunities for migration are poised to become larger issues around the world, observed some in the class today.

In connection with the issues of “anti fragility” or resilience, one might say that distressed migration occurs when countries become vulnerable and overextended.  While, in class, we consulted the work of known experts on human migration issues, outside of class literature unrelated to that specialized area can help reframe the issues involved.

For instance, the emerging concepts of “fragility” and “anti fragility,” as applied by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book Antifragile, can help consider issues of migration (not the subject of his book) in different lights.  According to Taleb, systems such as societies and economies sometimes become fragile because “top-down” approaches make them so.  He writes: ” If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks anti fragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder.  The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on anti fragile tinkering, aggressive risk-bearing rather than formal education.”  In other words, highly static societies–even seemly highly stable ones–can be highly fragile, or subject to breakdowns.

Following such logic, it appears that nation-states can become more fragile due to policies imposed on them either by internal or external actors.  According to Taleb, in heavily top-down systems, this fragility sometimes can be masked, sometimes for a long time.  Some societal systems, he writes, “become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm.”  The masking of this fragility equates to what he calls “blow-up risks,” writing:

“…as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs.”  In his view, a few are benefiting from “anti fragility at the expense of the fragility of others.”

He also says that the “rare events” or “black swans”–(that are, in part, the subject of this blog)–paradoxically are increasing largely due to the increase of more complex man-made systems.  While technological know-how may be increasing, these same advances are “making things a lot more unpredictable.”  Modernity itself “makes us build Black Swan-vulnerable systems,” he writes.  And societal tendencies to focus on things we can estimate and measure encourage us to mistakenly think that we can calculate the risks and probabilities of shocks and rare events.  As he explains, we can’t but that doesn’t stop people (and entire industries) from convincing themselves and others that we can.

As the book, Antifragile, itself is composed of seven books, there is little point in trying to capture all of its key points in a blog post.  For purposes of this blog, the main thought in the book to explore further has to do with the interactions of complex systems leading to an increasing number of “rare events,” also known as unpredictable “Black Swans.”  Taleb writes: “The odds of rare events are simply not computable.  We know a lot less about hundred-year floods than five-year floods–model error swells when it comes to small probabilities.”

The students today were considering what makes countries more, or less, adaptable (or, to approximate what Taleb is addressing, “anti-fragile”) on the assumption that forced migration does not occur if solutions to problems are readily found at home.   Understanding how societies become and remain adaptive–particularly in a world of more frequent “rare events”–seems fundamental to finding more effective ways to deal with issues related to forced, or distressed, migration.  The real-life urgency of these issues for many people close by and far away is clear. In class, we will continue to grapple with the concepts involved and consider where things might be headed under different scenarios.

The Health of Nations

Image Source: UNICEF Pacific/AFPGetty Images

The strong cyclone that swept through the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu yesterday occurred at the same time that government representatives, including the President of Vanuatu and the head of Vanuatu’s National Disaster Management Office, were meeting at a UN conference in Japan to devise a new global plan to reduce the risk of disasters such as this one.  According to media reports, Vanuatu has prepared for cyclones but not for one of this intensity.  There are reports that even the National Disaster Management Office’s emergency communications systems have been disrupted by the storm.  In a statement today, Oxfam Australia said that up to 90% of the housing in the capital of Port Vila  had reportedly been seriously damaged.  An Oxfam official said that this “is likely to be one of the worst disasters ever seen in the Pacific.”

Although communications reportedly have been reestablished in the capital city, the extent of the devastation in Vanuatu, a country of 267,000 people spread out across 65 low-lying islands, is not yet clear, according to media reports.  The convergence of the cyclone and the UN conference on disaster risk reduction in the same weekend seems to underscore both a growing global reality of more frequent extreme weather events and increasing global recognition of the need for formal mechanisms to help societies prepare for the unexpected–whether from extreme weather events, disease outbreaks, or conflicts.

Illustration: Conte crayon by Black Elephant Blog author modeled upon “Rider and Fallen Foe” by Titian

As we have seen when regions undergo recurrent stresses and shocks, the health and well-being (or security) of any people’s “homeland” must unavoidably concern us all.  It turns out that resilience is a local issue with global consequences–with effects that eventually come home to roost. Ignoring what is happening on the other side of the world is not a viable option. Taking a larger view of the challenges is necessary–and may help with acquiring a larger perspective on possible responses.  We have much material and experience, as well as creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness to draw into the viewfinders.  The UN Secretary General has similarly observed that the rebuilding effort of Sendai, Japan, four years after it was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, is a reminder that “we must turn all of the painful lessons of disasters into new policies for a better future.”

What the officials at the UN meeting in Sendai, Japan have concluded is that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, powerful storms in the Asia-Pacific region and ongoing conflicts around the world are compelling reminders that “health and stronger health system capacities must be central to the new framework for managing disaster risk,” as reported by U.N. health agency officials today.  Public health is interconnected with, and a foundational requirement for, the ability to withstand disasters of all kinds. In whatever language it is conveyed, this message is relevant to all people of the world…  Threats and unwelcome surprises come in many forms; traditional means of defense, including walls and barricades, may no longer suffice. Different thinking and relationships may be needed.

Illustration: Graphite on paper by Black Elephant Blog author after “Group of Figures” sketch by Luca Cambiaso circa 1560s

As we have just completed a session on “Resilience” in the class I am co-teaching, for which we relied on some excellent materials from varied sources, my next blog post will assemble some notes in one place regarding some of the latest thinking and practices related to “resilience,” including what it is, and some of its characteristics.  How is resilience different from other sorts of preparedness and who needs to be involved?  How do we know when we are “resilient” enough in an age of high-impact, unknown probability risks?  Perhaps these notes–which draw from, among other sources, the helpful new book by Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, The Resilience Dividend–will be as useful to someone else as they have been to me recently!  As our class continues to explore:  Understanding more about resilience is important not only for island nations but for the health of nations generally.

Positively Negative Spaces

Illustration: Sharpie pen with black ink by Black Elephant Blog author

To continue on the theme of basic concepts in art–as I am learning about in my basic drawing class–we come now to the concept of “negative space.”    This doesn’t sound too good until you learn that the “negative” in the phrase simply refers to the space around and between the subjects of an image, as also explained here in Wikipedia.  For those who have made it through graduate school and perhaps even an entire career without coming across this concept, this idea is quite exciting…and positive.  (However, “positive space” is something different.  The world of art has its own language, like every other endeavor, with words like “tooth,” “value,” and “wash” meaning quite different things to artists.)

Negative space sometimes means drawing with space to produce a silhouette of the subject.  To produce this effect, we students used a homemade viewfinder (two L-shaped strips of cardboard taped together to form a small rectangle) and chose the composition we’d like to create with negative space.  Note that objects overlapping each other in real life viewing simply become part of the same silhouette, as in the image above.

What is remarkable about this exercise in seeing and thinking is that it focuses on the context in order to define the subject. Just as in Drawing the Light, sharpening our attention to what is around and affecting the subject is important. Just one slip of the pen and we’ve completely changed the look of the subject, and possibly even ruined it altogether.  Context really matters! 🙂

Illustration: Watercolor, gouache, ink, pencil, and white charcoal by Black Elephant Blog author, after the 1916 watercolor “Green Dancer” by Charles Demuth at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Seasoned artists often give their images a multidimensional appearance and sometimes even an impression of movement by using light, shadows, and contours.  Every teacher  I’ve had so far in this new venture has said it is important to draw what surrounds the subject at the same time as we focus on drawing the subject. In other words it is a rookie mistake to focus single-mindedly on drawing a subject without considering the context.  This simple advice is stunningly important with so many applications in life, and not just to art.

How can we understand the seemingly sudden emergence of new threats, challenges, or risks without widening the “viewfinder” to see what might be the context around them?  Could one “slip” or failure in the “negative space” to anticipate a requirement have consequences for subjects, or “positive space,” in real life? Alternatively, is there more positive “negative space” shaping that can be done to influence the subject?  The list of relevant applications for the negative space idea seems simply endless…  What would happen if we played with the concept of “negative space,” and  reframed the key issues of the day through our “viewfinders?”  Without context, mistaken analysis, lost opportunities, and unforeseen surprises are inevitable.  Particularly for those instances in real life where the consequences of failing to see repercussions could be worse than a ruined piece of paper, learning to think and see differently about “negative space” seems valuable.

Drawing the Light

Illustration: Pastel pencil and white charcoal by Black Elephant Blog author

During a recent art class, the teacher encouraged the students to “draw the light.” With black sheets of paper and a few xeroxed black and white images fished out of a pile to serve as models, we tried seeing the opposite of what we have been trained to expect. Instead of trying to represent the external reality of someone or something in terms of its casing or flesh and bones, we were to draw the light reflected from the surfaces. This was a fascinating exercise for those of us who hadn’t tried it before.

In drawing the light, at least for the first time, you can almost feel a different part of your brain working, and see an image emerge on paper that you know you didn’t draw in a standard way.  Out of total blackness and emptiness emerges a figure, an expression, and new possibilities previously unimagined.

While many an effort doesn’t work out exactly as originally hoped, sometimes the outcome is surprising simply because we didn’t expect it.  Drawing in search of such surprises seems to have parallels in methods for thinking strategically. If we applied similar counterintuitive reasoning strategies to some of the world’s greatest problems–drawing the light instead of (or at least in addition to) reacting always to the darkness we can see more readily–what could be the result? How much of what happens is driven by our expectations, as low as they might be for some issues?

Art can help reset the mind to realize that by learning to see differently we can open up different possibilities. Indeed, could persisting in traditional ways of seeing actually be dangerous in  a world so obviously transformed and transforming by the hour, if not the minute? Might we more inevitably face more dangerous surprises by persisting in unproductive ways of thinking (or working, or organizing, measuring, or valuing)?  Alternatively, by embracing more surprising thinking ourselves, might there be a way to gain strategic advantage?  Isn’t this already recognized in business as identifying ‘niche’ opportunities or fostering innovation?  In any case, by trying to draw an image again and again, it is possible to see how much went unseen before.

Image: Poster of child’s drawing displayed on the Paseo de la Reforma, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City as part of program focused on preserving the Lacandon Jungle

It seems that artists, including children, have much to teach us about different ways of seeing the modern world.  Without fully exploring these “adjacent possible” spaces, to use the phrase coined by Stephen Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, how many opportunities do we miss?  The recent lesson in drawing the light was a powerful reminder of how much innate capacity remains untapped in most traditional approaches to challenges!

Creating the Future

Illustration: Graphite crayon and pencil by Black Elephant Blog author

My new class on “Climate Change and Security”–which I am co-teaching this Spring at a local university–has proceeded with supersonic speed due primarily to the students in it.  In one week’s time, they have demonstrated impressive capacities for agile thinking and reframing new concepts.  This is a good thing as, whatever your optics on the world, surely it’s clear that seizing and shaping the future(s) we face requires all kinds of agility today.  Our course alone requires us to move across disciplines as diverse as geology, biodiversity, land management policies, and international law.  (Due to the diversity of knowledge required for this topic–a diversity exceeding most people’s cognitive capacity–we always are on the lookout for guest speakers!)

At the outset, our class covers the science of environmental changes right down to the molecular level, and then–in a way that could be dizzying to some–moves rapidly into broad subjects related to concepts of national, global, and human security.   We zoom in close on a careful consideration of the chemistry and geophysical interaction of the biosphere and then, often in the same class session, zoom right out into the worlds created by man. Together we examine the evolution of international security studies and quickly weave in newer work on global risks, resilience, and broader notions of security.   This year, the World Economic Forum’s report, Global Risks 2014, is featured early in the reading assignments.

Looking at the larger context of global risks helps us see  right from the get-go that environmental security issues have much in common with–and are interconnected to–other global risks and challenges. Having people from around the world in the class always makes for richer discussions!  The discussions this past week have stuck in my mind, so perhaps jotting down a few notes here will make some ideas easily recoverable for later projects, links, posts, and so forth…

While this blog left off with a post last week on the notion of serial innovators (and their innate capacities for valuing the “whole”, including the whole team, the whole organization, etc.), the discussions in our brand-new class last week were a powerful reminder of the importance of cooperative (and iterative, “nonlinear”) sense-making abilities across disciplinary, national, and even generational boundaries.  Serial collaboration skills are coming into vogue, involving the abilities to rapidly form teams and networks able to leverage geographically dispersed expertise, technologies, and data. There is simply too much to know, or wonder about, for one individual, organization or even a single nation! In so many ways, our responses, organizationally, may need to mimic the nature of the challenges:  interdependent, diverse, flexible, and combining a bifocal capacity for short-term and long-term sensibilities.  “Progressive” lenses, that’s what we need! 🙂

So far the class has discussed how “security,” the concept, means different things to different people, primarily due to diverse contexts and values.  We had a presentation from one student based on the assigned readings, which highlighted that concepts of security are linked to given values, such as job security, cyber security, and national security.  The bottom line, as he saw it, is that the definition of security relies entirely on the environment in which it is presented.  Students’ short papers also emphasized, based on assigned readings, that prevailing views of security are out of step with emerging realities.  One suggested that a main challenge today is “our inability to change our way of thinking and reform institutions at a pace fast enough to deal with reality.”

Students have identified that a strictly state-centric perspective in security discourse can be a limiting factor, in the context of environmental security issues, and needs to change.  The concept of human security, already 20 years in the making, may offer a way to “shift to people and societies in discussions and discourses on security,” wrote one student.  This shift will be crucial to designing appropriate responses to the emerging challenges related to climate change.  In many ways, dealing with environmental security challenges requires “a longer-term, more complicated, and integrated response,” said a student.

Up to now, security studies have emphasized external threats to states and so, as some of the experts whose work we are consulting in the class, such as Simon Dalby of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Ontario, Canada, the very concept of security sometimes may be a detriment to providing it.  One student pointed out that security generally implies protection of the status quo and against change.

The students are grappling with the conflicting conclusions of the IPCC assessment reports regarding the link between climate change and security.  They also are reading about the fact that climate change threatens to “exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities on an international scale” as, according to one student’s paper, “the poorest populations are simultaneously the most vulnerable and least able to adapt to climate-induced impacts.”

Among the remarks made in the discussion were that effective responses require international cooperation, not rivalry. Participants in the class wondered whether this “security” challenge is like other global threats, such as the Ebola crisis, where required responses involve more than the military.  In addition, the discussion surfaced issues of risk assessment and perception, communication strategies, and public engagement.  Clearly it is going to be a busy semester! I am glad I just have one class! 🙂

Why Serial Innovators Matter

Image: Photo taken by Black Elephant Blog author.

A trip to the historic landmarks of Philadelphia reminds one why serial innovators matter.  The list of Ben Franklin’s (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) accomplishments alone testifies to this: how one person could pioneer so many new initiatives in one lifetime is amazing!  (According to Wikipedia, Franklin was a polymath, a person whose areas of expertise span many domains.) But it took commitment, courage, curiosity, collegiality, and a large team composed of diverse skills, perspectives, experiences, and relationships to forge a Declaration of Independence and a new Constitution, as well as a new flag, for a new country.  These were just a few of the innovations occurring in Philadelphia in the late 18th century.  Those involved took enormous risks.

Unforgettably well-informed and  eloquent guides (who clearly cared about what they were doing) from the U.S. National Park Service remind visitors to Independence Hall that the leaders who signed those founding documents could not know ahead of time if their efforts would succeed. We tend to forget, said the guides, the risks they were taking because we have the benefit of hindsight.  But, at the time, Ben Franklin famously said, “If we don’t hang together, we will hang separately.”  It was definitely not business-as-usual.

But not all of the otherwise clearly remarkable founders of the United States were “serial” innovators, as exceptional as they each probably were as individuals.  So, what is a “serial innovator,” why do serial innovators matter, and what kinds of conditions enable them to succeed?  Would Ben Franklin have been as productive as an employee making his way up through the ranks of a modern multinational corporation or public sector institution today?  What would it be like to be the manager of Ben Franklin?

Fortunately, many of these questions are addressed directly or indirectly in the careful research presented in the book, Serial Innovators:  How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms by Abbie Griffin, Raymond Price, and Bruce A. Vojak (Stanford Business Books, 2012).   Griffin holds a Chair in Marketing at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business; Price holds a Chair of Human Behavior in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the Co-Director of the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education; and Vojak is Associate Dean for Administration in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering.

The authors interviewed over fifty serial innovators (providing examples and case studies from these interviews) and a larger number of their coworkers, managers, and human resource managers to develop their research findings.  The organizations studied for this research were firms with substantial R&D programs, like Proctor & Gamble.

This book provides some answers and guidelines for organizations, managers, and “serial innovators” that would be useful anywhere where traditional approaches might not be sustainable or standard ways of doing things may no longer meet new requirements. According to the authors, such serial innovators exist in many organizations–although in small overall numbers–and have an impact “that greatly exceeds the frequency with which they appear.” Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, Proctor&Gamble and Alberto-Culver have made hundreds of millions of dollars of profit from the products that four serial innovators named in this book have invented and commercialized.

Managing these innovators requires special skills, conclude the authors. Because “the Serial Innovator’s interpretations usually contradict how the majority view the same data, paradigm changes are more challenging and more likely to produce significant conflict in the organization,” write the authors.

According to the authors, serial innovators are “individuals who have conceived ideas that solve important problems for people and organizations, have developed those ideas into breakthrough new products and services, inventing new technologies to do so as needed, and then have guided those products and services through the corporation’s commercialization processes and into the market.”

Serial innovators are important to corporations because “they can generate millions of dollars of revenue” and their products frequently “change the lives of millions of people for the better.”  While some serial innovators, such as those in the “creative arts” (like Paul McCartney, say the authors), innovate independently or with a friend, the focus of this book is on serial innovators who work in large mature firms.

• Different types of innovation include:  innovating to support the ongoing business; moving firms into new competitive space; and creating breakthrough innovation.
• Different roles of innovators require different and complementary skill sets; inventors, champions, and implementers need to have different degrees of technical savvy, market insight, “political” savvy, and project facilitation knowledge.

One of the defining personality characteristics of serial innovators is that they are “systems thinkers,” according to the authors.  “For them, the whole is much more than just the sum of the parts.”  They tend as well to have a blended perspective that is both “business-oriented and idealistic.”  They have a high motivation to create, and “it is a strong and interacting combination of external and internal forces that motivates” them.

Serial innovators’ processes are:  1) highly-dynamic across domains; 2) nonlinear, with much more overlap, iteration, and feedback “than is found in a firm’s typical linear product development process”; and 3) “are more far-reaching” than typical processes.  These processes are the subject of close study by the authors who share the results of their research in several chapters in the book, placing it within the context of mainstream technological innovation and personnel management issues.

In the “nature” versus “nurture” debate, the authors found that “the characteristics associated with personality are those that align most closely with nature.”  The qualities of serial innovators tend to be “inherent rather than cultivated.”   These include:

Curiosity:   These type of innovators “naturally need to understand ‘why.'”  They have a broad range of interests and an ability to dive deeply into subjects when their interest is piqued, write the authors.

Intuition:   They have “an informed or expert understanding of something based on experience, deep knowledge in a domain, and a keen sense of ‘what might happen'”, write the authors. This intuition enables the innovators to develop “hunches about what ideas to pursue.”

Creativity:  Serial innovators  “generate many ideas and [can] contribute from different viewpoints or domains.”  They tend to “reframe” or redefine the problem.  Almost every Serial Innovator the authors interviewed “did some type of reframing to approach a problem from a new angle, which enabled them to create an unconventional solution.

Systems thinking:  Serial innovators “focus on ‘making sense’ of complex situations,” write the authors.  They also are invested in the “greater good,” typically trying the balance the needs of all interested parties.

These serial innovators truly value the contributions others can make and their “positive perspectives about people enable [them] to get others to join them on challenging, difficult projects,” write the authors.

The nature of breakthrough innovation “requires a long-term perspective,” write the authors.  Those who care about staying ahead in a topsy-turvy world of change will want to read this book for its well-researched tips on what it takes to manage a serial innovator in an established organization. As one might expect, it isn’t easy for anyone, not least the serial innovators themselves.

Future posts on this blog will return to these issues as this book’s findings implicitly raise important questions about other endeavors in a world of nonlinear systems.

Seeing What Others Don’t

Illustration: Watercolor, gouache, ink and gesso

Where we left off, in the previous post, “Little Dancer Coincidences,”  was with the notion that “discontinuous discoveries” can result in a shift in our core beliefs. This notion comes from the book, Seeing What Others Don’t:  The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, by Gary Klein who, as mentioned previously, is a research psychologist specialized in “adaptative decision-making.” Klein studied 120 cases, drawn from the media, books, and interviews, involving stories of how people “unexpectedly made radical shifts in their stories and beliefs about how things work.”   From these cases, Klein was able to organize his research into five different strategies for how people gain insights, including: Connections Coincidences Curiosities Contradictions, and Creative Desperation According to Klein, all of the 120 cases he examined fit one of these strategies, but most relied on more than one.

Image: New York Times

Klein begins with the strategy of connections, and before proceeding with several fascinating examples, recalls the story told earlier in the book of Martin Chalfie, a biologist at Columbia University who–by virtue of attending a seminar on a topic unrelated to his work–ends up getting the idea for a natural flashlight that would let researchers look inside living organisms to watch their biological processes in action.  At the time he attended the seminar, Chalfie was studying the nervous system of worms.  The seminar covered topics that didn’t interest Chalfie initially, according to Klein; suddenly the seminar speaker described how jellyfish can produce visible light and are capable of bioluminescence.  This led to Chalfie’s insight applicable to his own field.  His insight led to an invention “akin to the invention of the microscope,” writes Klein, because it enabled researchers to see what had previously been invisible.  For his work, Chalfie (seen in the photo to the left above) received a Nobel Prize in 2008.

Image: Wikipedia

Like Chalfie, certain people make connections between unrelated matters that their close colleagues don’t.  Klein also tells the story of how the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (April 4, 1884- April 18, 1943) saw the implications of the British attack on the First Squadron of the Italian Navy early in World War II–before the United States had entered the conflict–then sheltered in the Bay of Taranto.  Since the bay was only 40 feet deep, the Italians believed their fleet was safe from airborne torpedoes.  The British, however, had devised adjustments to their torpedoes, including adding wooden fins to them, so that they wouldn’t dive so deeply once they entered the water.  For Yamamoto, the successful British attack at Taranto produced the “insight that the American naval fleet “safely” anchored at Pearl Harbor might also be a sitting duck,” writes Klein.  Yamamoto refined his ideas until “they became the blueprint for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941” (although he himself was opposed to Japan’s decision to go to war with the U.S.); ironically, his other insight was that Japan would lose the war with the United States. Yamamoto studied in the U.S., and had two postings in Washington, D.C. as naval attache; he had insights about the U.S. that his colleagues did not. He was resented by his more militaristic colleagues for his views.

Organizations generally block the pathways of connections (and other strategies) needed for such insights to occur, according to Klein.  This is because organizations are primarily concerned with avoiding errors.  Ironically, this risk-aversion makes people inside organizations reluctant to speak up about their concerns, leading organizations to “miss early warning signals and a chance to head off problems.”  Such problems are common in many fields, including science, according to Klein. Promoting forces that can countervail risk-aversion sometimes requires designating “insight advocates,” writes Klein, even though he admits he is dubious that any organization would sustain them or “any other attempt” to strengthen the forces for insight creation.  Another method he suggests is to create an alternative reporting channel so that people can publish work that doesn’t go “through routine editing” and thus would “escape the filters.”  But, he thinks this method “may work better in theory than in practice.”

A key problem for many organizations is not related to having or noticing insights, but instead it is “about acting on them.” Organizations that are less innovative because they are stifling insights, he says, “should be less successful” than they could be.    The deleterious effect of the defect-exposing Six Sigma program on U.S. corporations is an example of how an all-out focus on eliminating errors gets in the way of innovation, says Klein.  Clearly it is not a simple matter to balance the needs for efficiency and innovation within the same organization, particularly a “mature” organization. Klein concludes that the examples he gives are, for him, a “collective celebration of our capacity for gaining insights; a corrective to the gloomy picture offered by the heuristics-and-biases-community.”  He continues: “Insights help us escape the confinements of perfection, which traps us in a compulsion to avoid errors and in a fixation on the original plan or vision.”

Klein ends up recommending “habits of mind that lead to insights” and help us spot connections and coincidences, curiosities and inconsistencies.  The more successful we perceive ourselves being because of our beliefs, “the harder it is to give them {our beliefs} up.”  The habits of mind Klein has covered in his book may “combat mental rigidity,” he writes. “They are forces for making discoveries that take us beyond our comfortable beliefs.  They disrupt our thinking.” There is a “magic” that occurs when we have an insight, Klein concludes, and it “stems from the force for noticing connections, coincidences, and curiosities; the force for detecting contradictions; and the force of creativity unleashed by desperation.” So, while there is no blueprint for insight creation in Klein’s book, the many examples he cites are compelling reminders of the crucial role that insights play in stimulating new directions in any endeavor.

It seems, then, that insights can be both the source of surprises as well as help spur readiness for surprises.  They can be the needed “black swans” to deal with inevitable “black swan events.”  A take-away from this book:  There may be no ten-step  list to creating insights but understanding how to create favorable conditions to disrupt our thinking–so as to stimulate new connections and ideas–seems like useful knowledge in a world of inevitable surprises. Ostriches with their heads in the sand may not do as well as those who see what others don’t.

Black Elephants and the Magic of Insights

Illustration: Watercolor, gouache, ink, gesso and coffee grounds by Black Elephant Blog author

If you’ve had a chance to see the new film, “The Imitation Game”, about the brilliant but sadly socially outcast British mathematician Alan Turing, you’ve probably been powerfully reminded–through its artistic rendering of a true story–of the critical roles which serendipity, hunches, and chance encounters have played in devising solutions to the most challenging problems of any age.  (Spoiler alert:  If you haven’t seen the movie, and wish to be surprised when you do see  it, perhaps it is best not to read further.)

In the film, Turing and his teammates–a collection of unusually gifted mathematicians, including one woman– at Bletchley Park in England literally were racing against the clock to figure out how to decode German wartime communications during World War II.  Their efforts centered on the invention by Turing of a decoding machine (basically a prototype computer) but, despite hours of hard work and all their smarts, the team was about to be shut down by uncomprehending bosses under pressure to deliver results.  (The film has received mixed reviews–such as this one–due to its mix of imagined and actual events, and its alleged failure to convey that the Turing effort was part of a much larger effort underway at Bletchley.)

Image: Allstar/The Economist

Without giving away the storyline (the general outline of which is, however, a matter of historical record), it is in a moment of relaxation away from their secret laboratory,  bantering with friends who were supporting the war effort themselves but not privy to any of the Turing team’s information, that a chain of interactions leads to a breakthrough insight.  In the film, a casual comment by someone who is not on the Turing team has an instantaneous effect.  Her hunch becomes Turing’s insight and he and the rest of the team, up to then stymied in their task, had to act immediately.

This insight turns out be the what the team needed to successfully break the Enigma code.  Their success is credited by historians with turning around Britain’s fortunes in the war.  They also estimate that the code-breakers helped shorten the war by two years and saved approximately 14 million lives.

This film subtly highlights  some of the necessary ingredients of breakthrough thinking:  talent, expertise, hard work, team work,  intensity, diversity, false starts, time pressures, clear purpose, and random encounters with ideas from disparate sources outside the immediate field of inquiry.  While perhaps failing to give sufficient credit to Turing’s bosses (per some of the critics), the film also hints at why so many traditional organizations are so poor at facilitating this sort of thinking.  Whatever the gap between the historical reality and the movie, it is worth pondering:  What are some of the implications of a mismatch between the outsized global issues of our time and the incapacity of most organizations to nurture the modern equivalents of Bletchley Parks?  How can talent and good judgment be assembled most effectively to deal with the important, as well as urgent, “Black Elephants” of our times?

Most of us by now have heard of the Black Swan concept but the Black Elephant concept is not well known.  For this writer, it came into being when encountered in an op-ed by New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, in late 2014.  As he explains, a “black elephant” is a “cross between a ‘black swan’ (an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications) and the ‘elephant in the room’ (a problem that is visible to everyone, yet no one still wants to address it) even though we know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

At a time of mounting challenges (including but extending well beyond the environmental issues cited in the Friedman piece) that are too big to fit into anyone’s inbox, or even anyone’s organization–where speed, as in the case of Bletchley Park, is of essence and stakes are high–the concept of black elephants seems a timely one.

The focus here on the roots of surprise inquires into how insights and breakthroughs come about.  The current age is no different from past ones, such as the example illustrated in The Imitation Game, in needing to aggregate, cull, and distill insights that can be acted upon in a timely way.  With more challenges filled with potential for highly improbable (but, therefore, according to Dr. Hand’s “laws of improbability,” practically inevitable) outcomes, however, the need for insights may be multiplied in present circumstances.

With high stakes involved in multiple arenas, this blog’s inquiry into the roots of surprise will next explore the findings of experimental psychologist and expert in “adaptive decision-making,” Dr. Gary Klein, in his fairly new book, Seeing What Others Don’t:  The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (2013).  Klein notes that generally we know very little about how insights are formed or what blocks them.  He too thinks it’s important to know more about where insights come from, so his book is meant to fill some of our knowledge gaps about the magic of insights.  In an upcoming post, I’ll feature some highlights from this book, and link to related material as I come across it.