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Where Good Ideas Come From: Germinating Innovation

I picked this book off my bookshelf to see if it would help me with some background for an idea generation workshop I was planning. In the interest of “I don’t know enough,” I thought that if I knew “Where Good Ideas Come From,” I could design a workshop around those concepts.

Steven Johnson wrote the kind of book I love. One where I can learn some fun facts that I store in my brain and bring out as a kind of party trick, like the air conditioner was invented by a guy named Carrier who was commissioned to help a newspaper control the humidity in their printing room (pg 280) or that with only four molecules (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water) and electricity, the building blocks for life (sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids) can be created (pg 49).

Great for a party, but how is this useful for a workshop?

This book gave me some great back story for moving innovation forward, like McGyver-ing is entertaining and can allow for an eclectic assemblage of disparate parts only when a problem is staring you in the face. As the video illustrates, in attempting to have individuals create ideas, I discovered that connecting the participants in an open environment where ideas can flourish in unregulated channels encourages dynamic patterns of innovation through liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity and noise (pg 232). I am excited to play around in the muck of idea generation.

As an aside, I am fascinated by the Charles Darwin quote that, as Johnson states show Darwin “oscillates between two structuring metaphors that govern all his work: the complex interdependencies of the tangled bank, and the war of nature; the symbiotic connections of an ecosystem and the survival of the fittest.” (pg 238)

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life…

Pg 238, Steven Johnson,
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Ehrengard: Strongly Feminine

Some books arrive on my book shelf by mysterious means. I suspect I picked this one up to discover the magic of Isak Dinesen’s writing. She is also known as Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame. Ehrengard is called a fairy tale on the back of book blurb. There is a stunning princess and handsome prince. This story, though, uses them as a setting for the real tale of Ehrengard.

The narrator is a court painter who sees the world with Dinesen’s painterly eye:

“Imagine to yourself that you be quietly stepping into a painting by Claude Lorrain, and that the landscape around you becomes alive with balsamic breezes wafting and violets turning the mountain sided into long gentle waves of blue…

The Goddess of Love, the Lady Venus herself, has entrusted me with the work, and I have only followed her instructions.”

pg 32 – Ehrengard

In this story, we follow Herr Cazotte around as he creates a scene where he is attempting to seduce the princess’s fair handmaiden.

I wonder, what would she be thinking as all this plays out.

Ehrengard is the only daughter from a strong military family bred in the mountains of northern Europe. Several times Herr Cazotte refers to her as an Amazon. In this scene, though, that descriptive was probably not what came to his mind because, even in the third person narration, his feelings shine through:

The great artist was gentle and courteous, if a little impersonal, in his manner with the highborn maiden. From his rich treasury of knowledge he took out for her benefit strange tales of ancient times, theories of art and life and fancies of his own on the phenomena of existence. He entertained her, too, with narrations of his own eventful life, dwelling on the days when he was a poor boy in shabby clothes, or slightly touching on his triumphs at academic and courts, and sprinkling his talk with accounts of the life of outcasts in dark streets or with bits of scandal from sublime places.

He found that the girl has read little and lent her books from his exclusive library or read out to her in the shade of the big trees. Poetry, new to her, puzzled and fascinated her. Herr Cazotte had a voice made for reciting poetry and had often been asked to read by princesses and beaux-esprits. At times he would lower the book with a finger in it and go on reciting with his eyes in the tree crowns.

On a very lovely evening he had been reading to her in the garden and was slowly accompanying her back to the house, when he stopped and made her stop with him by a foundation representing Leda and the swan and repeated a stanza from the poem they had last read together. He was silent for a while, the girl was silent with him, and as he turned toward her he found her young face very still.

“A penny for your thoughts, my Lady Ehrengard,” he said.

She looked at him, and for a moment a very slight blush slid over her face.

“I was not,” after a pause she answered him slowly and gravely, “really thinking of anything at all.”

He had no doubt that here, as ever, she was speaking the truth.

pg 52 – Ehrengard

What was she thinking? Besides, finally silence.

Herr Cazotte seems to make the assumption that she is an uneducated country maiden. Even if the girls were left to needlepoint, they were also taught the management of the household. Ehrengard would have, also, would have learned a lot from the antics of her four brothers. Much can be gleaned from watching and listening. Women have learned that well over the years. Outside of her duties, she seems quite meditative. Herr Cazotte sees her as simple. I can see her as strong, feminine and not interested in playing demeaning flirting games. I can see her statuesque figure enjoying a pastoral view when she is interrupted by a flea that she has no desire to acknowledge or to give platitudes.

I was concerned that this book would not be relevant in the age of #metoo. If we stand in Ehrengard’s character, we wee a woman who understands the world and walks her own path. It is a fairy tale where the happily ever after comes from being true to oneself.

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Five Lessons I Learned Not Dying

I have not thought of my life as one of an experience of “not dying.” I sometimes joke with my husband that he has given God plenty of opportunities to kill him, and he is still here. He must not be done with him yet. Have I the same privilege? In reading Maggie O’Farrell’s new memoir, I am I am I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, that is the understanding that I have. I have not died yet. I am not done.

I am fortunate–I can truly say that–that I have not experienced any near-death events. I suppose my brushes with death are more figurative. They are there.

There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realising it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realises that a dosage ought to be checked one final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.” (pg 31-32)

I could be trite and say that the lessons I have learned from not dying are, like:

  • live everyday as if it is your last
  • be grateful for what you have
  • enjoy the journey

But, I don’t live my life like that, all the time (I am grateful for a close parking spot during Christmas shopping).

What I do know is this:

  1. Life does go on.
    In the moment, something can loom large and I don’t see a way out of its shadow. There is and I do. And, the angst I felt finding a boyfriend in bed with someone else when I was 25, doesn’t even register now that I am 55.
  2. Small moments need to be savoured.
    Most days my family rolls their eyes when I present one more sunrise picture from the bridge. Each sunrise is special even as I am anticipating the next one, and even if it does happen everyday.
  3. Time passes differently for everyone.
    Time passes in a flash for my husband. Thirty doesn’t seem that long ago for him and eighty doesn’t seem so far away. Time stretches languidly in both directions for me. I like that I feel like life saunters. Our two perspectives means that we treat time differently, and I haven’t been able to teach my husband to flip to my way of viewing time. Maybe I don’t need to.
  4. Healthy is better than wealthy.
    There is joy in taking care of yourself and others. Preparing a delicious meal or relishing a deer stretch in yoga are simple pleasures that help me to feel life deeply.
  5. Nurture family altruism.
    I was helping my daughter with her philosophy homework reading an article by Steven Pinker about altruism and social contract. He referred to nepotistic altruism as the act of doing something good so that our genes survive. I don’t think I would reduce what I do with and for my family down to such scientific rational. And I would do anything to help my genes survive (even read Plato and Hume). Perhaps that is the evolutionary argument for love. Families are like a petri dish for the world. We learn about ourselves and how to treat others in each of our family experiments. As it is in the microcosm, so it is in the macrocosm.

I have had the blessed fortune not to die. I must ensure that I live.

I consider myself steeped in luck, in good fortune… I have been showered with shamrocks, my pockets filled with rabbits feet, found the crock of gold at the end of every rainbow. I could not have asked for more from life, to have been spared with might have been. (page 241)

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The Colour of Compassion

Sipping blueberry lemonade tea on a sunny afternoon has me reflecting on the colour of compassion. The tea is not the purple hue of blueberries, nor is it the bright sunshine of lemons. It is somewhere in between. That in between is where compassion might lie.

Timber Hawkeye in Buddhist Boot Camp likes gray. We don’t live in a black and white world:

“When you’re not standing at either end, but hanging out in the middle instead, nothing can offend you.

Compassion and deep understanding towards others are significantly easier to access when nobody is far away from where you are.” (pg. 81)

Timber stands firmly in the middle ground. That does not mean that we need to be accepting of what is harmful. Having a moral code can help us define what is harmful and…

“you don’t have to agree with, only learn to live peacefully with, other people’s freedom of choice…No matter how certain we are of our version of the truth, we must humbly accept the possibility that someone who believes the exact opposite could also be right (according to their time, place and circumstance). This is the key to forgiveness, patience, and understanding.

That said, tolerance does NOT mean accepting what is harmful. Often times the lesson we are to learn is when to say “no,” the right time to walk away, and when to remove ourselves from the very cause of anguish. After all, we are the ones who create the environment we live in. (pg 65)”

Imagine if we create an environment of patience, compassion and understanding in our little corner of the world. And your neighbour creates their little plot of altruism. Our community would become little plots of peace that would leak on to one another. Is that too much to ask? Just fix up your little plot of peace and I will worry about mine.

Then we would…

“Never judge anyone for the choices that they make, and always remember that the opposite of what you know is also true. Every other person’s perspective on reality is as valid as your own, no matter how certain you are that what you are doing is the “right thing,” you must humbly accept the possibility that even someone doing the exact opposite might be doing the “right thing” as well.

Everything is subject to time, place, and circumstance. There are not “shoulds” in compassionate thinking.” (pg 136)

What is the colour of your compassion?