“IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.”

This according to writer Janet Rae-Dupree for The NY Times in a piece at the turn of the year.

If your taking the newest edition of 365 days that we’ve been given and evaluating your work, your business and/or your passion then you’re primed for this concept. The article goes on with the idea of ‘zero-gravity thinkers‘ from a Cynthia Barton Rabe book (“Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It”). What the hell does space and gravity have to do with efficiency in the visual media business? In short, the phrase refers to someone outside your own specialty that can clearly see how you work (or don’t).

I read a similar idea recently (unfortunately forgot where), wherein the writer worked as a photo consultant or teacher in the industry. With his students he’d ask them to come up with seven words that describe their work and the direction they’re headed. Then make seven prints to highlight this. From there  they would show the prints to friends, colleagues, etc and ask them to come up with seven words regarding emotions and concepts of the images. They rarely, if ever, matched up.

The bottomline - stay uncomfortable. If one’s uncomfortable, particularly in one’s own profession, then they are highly motivated to master the technique at hand, the problem immediately in front of them. Once that skill is absorbed into the repertoire there are always new problems that appear and function to keep moving one’s innovation forward. Otherwise, one simply relies on the same set of constraints to apply to a world of evolving challenges.

The Times piece goes on to touch on a book by well named brothers Chip and Dan Heath titled “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”. In his own words the discrepancy between our vision of ourselves (and our work) and the reality of what others see can be summed up as,

“I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

So get ignorant, stay uncomfortable and ditch the remote altogether.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 6:14 pm and is filed under business, creativity, people. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.