Nobody knows it all – be nobody

I was sitting at the Changchun airport (North East China) a few weeks back when one of our colleagues from another office opened his notebook and started asking our other colleagues about what we all thought were the key developments in Asia Pacific that could influence the fate of consumer markets in the next few years. He started slow but at the end of it he had more than 25 points to save before the last boarding call.

Recently I wrote a point of view on Amazon Kindle and shared with a group of friends and I realized that what I added to the original piece after the feedback from my friends was perhaps as rich, if not more, than the original piece that I had penned.

Amazing experiences both of these. They just reminded me how group think was turbo charging knowledge and creativity.

To me, it seems that the meaning of a creator is morphing to stand for a group than just an individual. Or should I say – a carefully chosen group that has the potential to quadruple the output.

Here are some personality-approaches that I believe seem to be working in this new world of accelerated group thinking:

Aggregator: Most (not all) of the things are already there – just gets them at one place and then tries to derive connections and contradictions.

Collaborator: Realizes there are way too many bright people out there – opens up and prepares to learn from them. Does not fight forces, leverages them.

Spontaneous Communicator: Realizes that people do not know what others are thinking – motivates/provokes them to talk in the hope that may be some of them have another thought that can be built upon.

Social (selectively and liberally both – do not ask how!): Believes there is no one way of being social, however thinks that being ‘selectively social’ and yet ‘open to random connections’ helps in forming a network of minds that stoke creativity.

Is his own ego slayer: Nicholas Taleb wrote in his outstanding book ‘Fooled by randomness’, - “I consider it my primary job to attack people, who take the quality of their knowledge rather too seriously”. I believe real knowledge and education is about understanding that we do not know enough. We need to strike a dynamic balance between confidence in our knowledge and yet a firm belief that there is a lot out there we do not have any clue about and thus we must learn to say, “I do not know” – trust me, there is nothing wrong in saying that.

Our Ego Slayer swallows his experience ego, ignores knowledge ego and always thinks that he is to young for the age ego.

In the end there is no one center. No one knows everything. No one is best. No one is complete. All of us are just sparks. Some are initiation sparks, some are early sparks, some are late sparks, some are question sparks, some are answer sparks and some are just different sparks.

Not just at individual level, even at organizational level – it helps to acknowledge that network thinking can really help. No wonder leading edge research in large and respectable organizations is moving from the Laboratory model to what some of them like IBM call, the Collaboratories. IBM is trying to shift from the Brick-and- operations to more collaborative outreach programs. For starters it is partnering with Saudi Arabia focusing on Nanotechnology (perhaps the Saudi answer to ‘what after the oil runs out!’).
IBM as quoted in Businessweek recently –acknowledge that the nature of research is changing and great ideas are springing up everywhere. Only a distributed thinking model and do full justice to this new approach to innovation.

Tomorrow is residing in billions of networked minds; nobody knows it all, better be nobody.