Thursday, March 13, 2008

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.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

that is a lovely post - profound insights there -

Also, I think there is humility in saying "I dont know"

Saurabh Sharma said...

Thanks for reading and sharing your kind feedback.

Rahul Sethi said...

really insightful. Wikipedia i think is a great example of an aggregator that has relied on the power of collaboration. It really is quite outstanding. Their Wikia Search i think now falls into your paradigm of 'selectively social'. It really is quite a fascinating story.


I really enjoy reading your material. To a large extent because you are simply superb at putting into perspective what most of us might already know. Your writing forms visual mindmaps atleast for me. Its a great gift - your penchant for coherent communication opens the doors in a lot of people's minds i am sure. The ideal planner? :)

Saurabh Sharma said...

Thanks for reading Harshil and also taking out time to write your
kind feedback.
Before going into the more important part I will quickly react to the part about this way of thinking being a good quality for a planner.
Trust me, I believe this that planning is way to small a field to
practice this approach to work (and life). In fact I have seen that the most successful and happy people, do this in their everyday life. I believe that this way to life can actually make us a better person, which I believe is more vital than being a good professional. Real education, after all, is about becoming conscious of how little we know the world around us.
Moving on to the more important thing that I wanted to share with you - in the past few weeks, I have been toying with a related observation to this set of thoughts that I posted. It is a little fuzzy and I have not uploaded it yet, and perhaps would not do it after all, for the fear of making the readers wonder what I really want to say. However when you mentioned 'mental maps' I thought you might be the appropriate to share it with.
I refer to this observation as 'formlessness'.
To use fewest and simplest words I believe it is about the natural law
of every form having one common destiny - deforming. The only way to rise above this natural reality is to acquire formlessness. That’s where comes the point about canalizing the energies from different forms around one self. By energies, I am making special reference to cerebral energies. Internet is the digital fingerprint of this underlying
principle; Network thinking is the organic fingerprint.

In other words the people, principles, concepts etc who/that can really rise above the rest ‘durably’ are the ones who can rightly deploy the power of open source in the organic/physical world.
When we do not try and give a ‘form’ (“I think so” or “this is ‘my’ concept”, “you belong to me”, “I own this” etc..) to the ‘content’ (the idea, insight, observation, inspiration, concept, philosophy, beauty, feelings, even relationships) we end up increasing the longevity of the
form.

I am sorry if I am not being clear and just mixing things up.

Thanks for reading and keep creating.

Rahul Sethi said...

Hey Saurabh,

True, very true - your first part about following it as a philosophy to life. Questioning and collating and interpreting and analysing and learning more every moment is what life is all about anyway i guess. Actually its more than that but the above mentioned things form a large chunk of a lot of people's life - or atleast i hope!


i like the idea of formlessness - according to me, you are taking forward the idea of a collaborator to another level - is that correct? And yes so your open source analogy fits in perfectly there. So its about creating platforms agnostic of ownership where ideas can blossom and the ideas are a result of the collective wisdom of crowds. So an individual does not own it. We all collectively own it - the "we" are the co creators.

Again i cant help but think that Wikipedia is a perfect example. Just listen to Jimmy Wales speak and i think he sort of pinpoints what you communicated in your comment. Also to add to your idea of 'no ownership' - one often sees that the name of wikipedia authors does not appear. So it's truly collaborative.

To execute such a platform for ideation is a huge challenge. Wikipedia has a purpose - ideation too has a purpose but to fragment it for specificity is difficult.


There's a lot to share with respect to this topic. And i do think you should post this - its extremely interesting to explore further collectively with your readers.


I have a video of an interview that i had done with Mr. Jimmy Wales - you can watch it here - Jimmy Wales Video


There's an article too - Jimmy Wales at the IIT TechFest


Please do carry this forward.

Rahul Sethi said...

.