Our time cries for a new level of innovation from leaders. Fresh science says it’s there, but beyond the whiteboard.
A client of mine said something profound recently:
“I want to be an aspen more.” (shared with her permission)
She was referring to a nearby stand of aspens and the experience she has standing amongst them. She described it as an elevated state of expansiveness, openness, and wonder. The last word made me smile, as this is a globally renowned experience designer who unites leaders with wonder to spark new levels of heart, expansiveness, and innovation — she sent me a video of her experience so I could be an aspen as well. It was good.
In alignment with her work, her consciousness had collaborated with a group of trees, the wind, color, sound, mountain, and leaves, to generate an experiential state elevated from the mechanistic day-to-day. A state where bigger thoughts are birthed. Much bigger.
It turns out her wisdom is in great alignment with the latest science. Recent research done at Harvard, Brown, U of Penn, Columbia, Drexel, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hopkins — not exactly hotbeds of new age mish-mosh (links to studies at bottom)— is voraciously pointing to a state of consciousness that the industrial age and its collective ego chose to purposely ignore. Why this sudden focus by the most respected academic institutions of our time? Perhaps they are seeing an urgency in our world and enterprise to have truly new and expansive ideas emerging, and want to develop predictive modeling and codify how. Perhaps they are recognizing what physicist David Bohm illuminated years ago — there is a difference between truly new innovative thought, and simply reorganized permutations of old permutations. As the man who called Bohm his “spiritual son”, Albert Einstein, said, “One cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created it.”
These new studies go as deep as you can get, deeper than a scalpel — they are fMRI studies done with active brains in the process of solving problems and developing new ideas.
The studies identify clusters of neural activity given names like Default Network, Salience Network, Executive Network, and Focused Mode and Diffuse Mode. I will dare to be perhaps too simple in order to respect the reader’s time, knowing links to the papers are included below:
It appears that contrary to previous assumptions and society’s tropes on “genius”, truly creative thinking is not a product of one network or mode being hugely mastered and applied. Big innovation is a process of broad collaboration within the brain and between neural networks. When we leave the screen or whiteboard and stand amongst the aspens, we gain access to the introspection and generative nature of the Default Network which can then connect to the discernment and selection intelligence of the Salience Network, to then hand off to the Executive Network for actualization.
Put in Dr. Barbara Oakley’s model: while we’re at the whiteboard or screen we are in Focused Mode — concentrated, conscious, sequential, predictable — less collaboration between brain sectors. But if we dare to step away, still in the goal of big and new ideas, and go stand in an aspen grove for instance, we can move into Diffuse Mode — relaxed, subconscious, neurally collaborative, making new connections between concepts, innovation.
The collaborative nature of this mode, between various brain networks, has an effect not unlike the collaboration my client summoned between those seeming disparate elements of nature around her. Each alone, not bad, but in literal concert with each other, something beyond logic emerges as new revelatory ideas and experiences. And then, in service to actualization, it makes sense to return to Focused Mode, as detail and sequence matter more now.
Another client’s activity to gain access to the innovation of Default/Diffuse states is a one iron. Within ten minutes from his office is a driving range. He knew that he’d begin to see big thoughts and unlikely connections very shortly after a couple swings. He just had never given himself permission to own that truth and to actually incorporate an hour hitting balls into his workdays — even though he knew it was likely to advance his business in quantum leaps (250yds at a time on a good day). Until one day, in our work together, he dared to actually put it in his schedule as a repeating event, and now the outcomes have him never looking back.
In both cases the insight is not that this magical state for innovation actually exists, we all kinda knew that — the oft heralded “shower moment”. And we know its impact on historical innovation: Archimedes Principle, Newton’s Law of Gravity, Einstein’s Relativity, Kekule’s Benzene Ring, Tesla’s Alternating Current, etc. — all from non-focus states.
The insight is that very real science may now give leaders, CEOs, L&D leads, and creators, the courage to have teams incorporate these states (and the experiences that birth them) into the paradigm of “work” and innovation.
Whether that be as a daily occurrence in workforce calendars or as specially curated L&D experiences with a group like Barb Groth’s “Nomadic School of Wonder”. And not as a “nice/fun perk”, but as a strategic and competitive-minded foundational element in leadership teams actualization and product innovation — anywhere that creativity may improve an outcome.
And isn’t it timely that AI is basically taking care of all the permutation level solves so we can all move into the kind of creation that AI can’t touch — one that is so much more wonder and awe-filled? What a perfect 21st century collaborative pod for next-level impact: AI + Human + Aspens. Crazy cool.
And now I have to raise the stakes.
Look around the world. How are all the “new” permutations of old code working? Einstein again: how is it working to try and solve new challenges with the same mechanistic level of consciousness that created them?
New science is pointing to the power of harnessing easily generated states and experiences to birth truly new and transcendent ideas.
Given where they can be applied in our world today, through enterprise and beyond, don’t leaders have a responsibility to act on that science and bring it into the world? Not as some whimsical notion, but as a positive impact imperative?
Maybe we go knock a few balls and/or hang with some aspens and think about it?
+++++++++++++++
