Useful Lunacy:
Thinking about thinking, creativity and the power of ideas.

Yesterday, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association hosted a “social media crisis” simulation. (We’ll be posting video soon.) The premise: You walk into work and your brand is on fire — what do you do? While the session we saw was condensed, the emotions were real and the impact was apparent. I asked the audience how many of their firms had written, distributed and trained employees on how to handle a crisis. Three hands went up, out of over a hundred. Seems like there’s an opportunity here. What kinds of ideas can help reduce the hurdles and friction towards being prepared inside your company?

This Friday evening we’re hosting the second annual Intern Game. It’s part matchmaking exercise, part career fair and awfully entertaining — thanks to our host, WCCO’s Jason DeRusha. If you’re looking for youthful enthusiasm, and a fresh perspective on talent and careers, this event supplies both. And it’s free. I encourage you to attend.

One of the books that continues to inspire me is Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation. Published in 1990, before mass email, before so many of today’s creative/technical expressions, the book unearths pithy and often difficult insights on all aspects of being an idea person.

In a chapter on The Politics of Innovation, Grudin advises innovators to:

“…accept the fact that no… proof of genius will ever wholly defuse the shock of a new thought. Without suppressing or corrupting their own thought, [innovators] must learn to understand… the way others think.”

“Moreover they should, so to speak, bend their minds to reassess their own ideas from outside: from the surprised perspective of people who have been accustomed to the old. Understanding the outside perspective may enable innovators to express their ideas effectively.”

So, how might we best retain the valuable of surprise in presenting and nurturing a new idea, yet not wholly overwhelm its value by the weight of being unsettling? Often, the answer is political. It is in the value of relationships. It rests in patience. But, as Grudin notes, the successful adoption of new thought often benefits from listening first — from understanding and interpreting what is — then expressing what’s new in ways that don’t totally imperil the old context.