Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age

✏️ Highlights

CONTENTS

A crisis of happiness

Wanted: Metaskills

Congratulations, you’re a designer

The uses of beauty

MODEST PROPOSAL Epilogue 1. Shut down the factory 2. Change the subjects 3. Flip the classroom 4. Stop talking, start making 5. Engage the learning drive 6. Advance beyond degrees 7. Shape the future

This is a book about personal mastery in a time of radical change.

Unfortunately, our educational system has all but ruled out genius. Instead of teaching us to create, it’s taught us to copy, memorize, obey, and keep score. Pretty much the same qualities we look for in machines. And now the machines are taking our jobs.

put our swirl of societal problems into some semblance of perspective, and suggest a new set of skills to address them. While the problems we face today can be a source of hand-wringing, they can also be a source of energy.

There’s no going back, no secret exit, no chance of stopping the clock. The only way out is forward.

I’ve divided the book into seven parts. The first is about the mandate for change. The next five are the metaskills you’ll need to make a difference in the postindustrial workplace, including feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning.

As you read about the metaskills, take comfort in the knowledge that no one needs to be strong in all five. It only takes one or two talents to create a genius. —Marty Neumeier

for about ten thousand years our ancestors enshrined their thanksgiving in hundreds of caves, from Africa to Australia, to remind us of who we are and where we came from.

Watson was programmed not to hit the buzzer unless it had a confidence level of at least 50 percent. To reach that level, various algorithms working across multiple processors returned hundreds of hypothetical answers.

the destructive path of war.

If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.” Our common enemy is entropy;

Entropy is the force that causes energy in a system to decrease over time. It’s a tendency for things to become disorderly, lose their purposeful integrity, and finally die or simply become meaningless.

“tiny synthetic minds no bigger than an ant’s know where on Earth they are and how to get back to your home (GPS); they remember the names of your friends and translate foreign languages [and] unlike the billions of minds in the wild, the best of these technological minds are getting smarter by the year.”

that the resolution and bandwidth of brain scanning have been doubling in accordance with Moore’s Law. He predicts that in a couple of decades we’ll be able to reverse-engineer the brain and apply its principles to machines, and maybe even use machines to alter the brain.

the human brain is evolving on its own. By studying mutations in our DNA, researchers have concluded that our genes are evolving considerably faster than they were in preagricultural times.

“We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds.”

Kurzweil believes that the future will be far more surprising than most of us realize, because we haven’t internalized the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

“There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine and between physical and virtual reality.

Is this really our future? Not neccessarily, says Joel Garreau. He lays out three possible scenarios, each with its own poster child. The first is the heaven scenario, in which we become godlike through the continuing evolution

Finally, the prevail scenario says that humanity is not a slave to growth curves, and somehow we’ll muddle through. The poster child for this scenario is virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget.

Lanier’s view of the future. It suggests that we shouldn’t (and probably won’t) drive recklessly at ever-accelerating speeds; that we shouldn’t (and probably won’t) drive at ten miles an hour with the brakes on; and that we shouldn’t (but probably will) drive slightly faster than the speed limit, gripping the wheel nervously as we glance at the accident on the side of the

It suggests that there are limits to exponential growth that we simply have yet to encounter. We can only hope they’re not the catastrophic kind.

Economic gloom. Dwindling resources. Growing pollution. Failing schools. Why do we have so many huge, hairy problems? Are these the natural by-products of exponential change?

While an explosion of information is certainly a key driver of change today, we could also say that petroleum was a key driver in the Industrial Age.

magnificent mass production was both palpable

Our shared vision of machinery, factories, and magnificent mass production was both palpable and inclusive.

addressed, can turn into threats. The company

opportunities, if not addressed, can turn into threats. The company that ignores the struggling startup with a different idea can suddenly find its customers deserting in droves.

Innovation is the discipline that decides which it will be. In a time of rapid change, success favors those who can make big leaps of imagination, courage, and effort.

With innovation, people and institutions have the means to escape a dying past and make it safely to the other side.

Without it, they can lose their momentum, abandon their uniqueness, and wander off course as they drift back to the status quo.

Innovation is the antidote to entropy: If we stop breathing we’ll die.

In the Robotic Age, the drumbeat of innovation will only grow louder.

Whenever a paradigm shifts, three kinds of people emerge: 1) those who resist change because they’ve been so successful with the previous paradigm; 2) those who embrace change because they haven’t been successful with the previous paradigm; and 3) those who embrace change despite their success with the previous paradigm.

This third group is the serial innovators, the entrepreneurs, the iconoclasts who embody the principle of creative destruction.

Creative destruction was a term popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s. It refers to a process of radical innovation in which new business models destroy old ones by changing the entire basis for their success. This applies to products, services, processes, and technologies.

Only companies who get good at creation and destruction can consistently turn discontinuity to their advantage.

The Doblin Group, a think tank in Chicago, has identified ten areas where innovation can deliver an advantage to companies:

The Doblin Group, a think tank in Chicago, has identified ten areas where innovation can deliver an advantage to companies: 1. The business model, or how the enterprise makes money. 2. Networking, including organizational structure, the value chain, and partnerships. 3. Enabling processes, or the capabilities the company buys from others. 4. Core processes, or the proprietary methods that add value. 5. Product performance, including features and functionality. 6. Product systems, meaning the extended system that supports the product. 7. Service, or how the company treats customers. 8. Channels, or how the company connects its offerings to its customers. 9. Branding, or how the company builds its reputation. 10. Customer experience, including the touchpoints where customers encounter the brand. In each of these areas, innovation can be employed as a booster rocket to leave competitors in the dust. Business leaders are beginning to see, sometimes through the dust of market changers, the wealth-generating power of originality. They’re learning what Rudyard Kipling knew a century earlier: They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind. So I left ’em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind. Almost everything can be copied these days, given enough time and motivation. The only thing that can’t be copied is originality.

the “trickle-down theory” of job creation. It goes like this: If we make the right people rich enough, they’ll give us jobs. Conversely, if we fail to make them rich, they’ll lose interest in building big companies, and jobs will disappear.

horse-and-sparrow theory, a concept from the 1890s. If you fed a horse enough oats, it went, some would surely pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Concepts like these have considerable appeal at the top of the food chain, as you might imagine. But the feudal system of the Middle Ages was abandoned for a reason—it didn’t work for the serfs.

the feudal system is always lurking in the wings, ready to sweep back onto history’s

By 2007 financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of corporate profits and nearly as much of corporate pay, up from 10 percent during the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1997.

Today we have the flip side. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

members of the middle class are being squeezed downward into the ranks of the poor, creating what Citigroup calls the “consumer hourglass effect,” in which there are only two worthwhile markets left, the highest income and the lowest income.

Now the top one percent of Americans takes home 25 percent of total income.

the top one percent controls 40 percent of the total.

a lot of growth in developed countries has come from information-based businesses, which have created enormous shareholder wealth, but relatively few jobs.

software giant SAP reported revenues of $16 billion, but only 53,000 employees. Google is now a $29 billion company, but only employs 29,000 people. Facebook has revenues of $4 billion with only 2,000 people.

Starving the middle class to feed the upper class hasn’t been good for anyone. Instead, it’s led to the Great Recession—an economic cul-de-sac in which the middle and the bottom no longer have the financial means to support the top.

Any marketing strategy that targets the top and the bottom of the hourglass and ignores the middle is not a solution but an act of desperation.

According to Reich’s figures, the average hourly pay of Americans has risen only 6 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1985.

Germans, whose average pay has risen nearly 30 percent. At the same time, the top one percent of German households takes home 11 percent of total income, while the top one percent of American households takes 25 percent of the pie. Germany has managed to avoid the hourglass effect by supporting manufacturing and education.

The job market is more than willing to shell out good money for original thinking and unique skills. But because business is competitive, creative processes tend to become routinized, moving step by step from original work down to skilled work, from skilled work down to rote work, and from rote work down to robotic work. At each step along the way, the value and the price decrease, with the value staying higher than the price.

At the top of the Robot Curve is creative work, where there’s less routine and a lot of experimentation. Since this work is fairly original, maybe even unique, the cost is high and so is the value, as long as the work addresses a significant need.

Creative work might include scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, new business ideas, product invention, organizational leadership, and all manner of creativity in the arts and entertainment fields.

One step down is skilled work, which includes the work of professionals. The techniques used by skilled workers and professionals were once original, but have now become best practices. There’s still an element of creativity, but much of the expertise is shared by other professionals in the same discipline.

degree of interchangeability in the people they hire, albeit on a sliding scale of talent.

I may not know which heart surgeon is the best, but I can at least be confident that my own doctor has a modicum of training and experience.

The professional photograph that once would have cost $4,000 and two days’ time can now be rented instantly online for $25.

Writing a decision-tree script for a phone operator requires the creativity and experience of a skilled worker. But it standardizes the work so employees don’t need the same high level of experience or education. The cost goes down, the value stays higher than the cost, and the work can be scaled

The welding operation that was once done by a human worker can now be done even better by a robotic arm. The professional photograph that once would have cost $4,000 and two days’ time can now be rented instantly online for $25.

While automation puts people out of work, it also opens up new opportunities at the top of the curve for the originators and professionals who invent and manage these systems.

As the 21st century deepens, robots and algorithms will move into every area of our lives, and even into our bodies and brains.

The current obsession with drugs and plastic surgery shows a willingness—even eagerness—to alter our biology with technological interventions.

Today, the company that doesn’t get ahead of the curve is the one that’s stranded on the wrong side of the innovation gap.

The lower you are on the curve, the less autonomy you have, the less money you make, and the less adaptable you are when the marketplace demands new skills. In the jargon of the jobs world, lower-level skills are “brittle.”

Every time a new idea becomes a professional practice, or a professional practice becomes a rote procedure, or a rote procedure becomes a robotic operation, there’s a chance for someone to profit.

“Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz-show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

If we can’t find valuable work, it’s not because we’re in a recession; we’re in a recession because we can’t find valuable work.

We’re still trying to apply Industrial Age ideas to Robotic Age realities, and the result has been a creative and economic vortex.

even when we worry that twenty million jobs are missing, three million jobs are going unfilled.

One in three employers around the world say they can’t find skilled workers to fill their jobs.

Today, you need to do that, but also know how to inspect for quality, understand lean business principles, be able to do repairs, and be willing to continuously improve your processes and keep on learning.” In other words, workers who offer more than clock time.

Giving rich people more money will not produce the jobs we need. Instead, the best jobs will come from creative people—rich or not—who put societal contribution ahead of salary and stock options.

Employers in the Robotic Age don’t want employees to be robots. They have robots. What they want are people who think for themselves, use their imagination, communicate well and can work in teams, and who can adapt to continuous change.

GDP measures in dollars the market value of all products and services produced during a given period, and it soon became the yardstick for the national “standard of living.”

the nation could simply focus on making money, and happiness would follow like day follows night.

the voice of Thomas Jefferson, who, in developing the constitutional Bill of Rights, replaced the right to “property” with a right to the “pursuit of happiness.” But since happiness is hard to measure, we use GDP.

Unfortunately, not only is there little correlation between happiness and a nation’s total throughput of goods and services, there may be an inverse relationship.

Today, GDP could be seen as a significant driver of unhappiness.

why don’t we try harder to measure happiness itself? This is exactly what the people of Bhutan have been doing since 1972. Gross National Happiness, as they call it, has set off a global effort to adapt the measurement for international use.

Gallup has phoned a minimum of one thousand adults at random to inquire about indicators such as eating habits, stress levels, wellness records, emotional states, and job satisfaction. They estimate that disengaged workers are costing the country a whopping $300 billion each year in productivity losses. They found that American workers are increasingly unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their companies, and disengaged from their work.

California District 14, otherwise known as Silicon Valley, a well-known bastion of workaholism. A not-uncommon workweek in District 14 is 80 hours, and it’s mostly voluntary.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” said Steve Jobs. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”

1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It was based on a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. He theorized that human beings tend to work their way from physiological needs, such as air, food, and water at the bottom of the pyramid, up to self-actualization, including spontaneity and creativity, at the top of the pyramid.

1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It was based on a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. He theorized that human beings tend to work their way from physiological needs, such as air, food, and water at the bottom of the pyramid, up to self-actualization, including spontaneity and creativity, at the top of the pyramid. Self-actualization is a privilege that must be earned,

When eudaimonia is blocked, either by companies or society, human creativity goes underground.

In the headlong pursuit of productivity, the Industrial Age managed to take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business,

In the headlong pursuit of productivity, the Industrial Age managed to take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business, and the beauty out of everyday life.

The demands of the assembly line produced not only uniform products, but uniform people as well. There was virtually one kind of education, one sort of social behavior, one basic religion, one acceptable gender orientation, and one view of work.

The operating metaphor of the 20th century was the factory, so it follows that the goal of education was to assemble graduates as efficiently as Ford assembled cars.

Education today is now a streamlined process based on maximum throughput (the highest number of graduates), extreme efficiency (the fewest number of instructors), and reliable metrics (easy-to-grade standardized tests).

Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of hard-to-measure areas such as creativity, interpersonal abilities, emotional maturity, and resilience, which have been de-prioritized in the interests of efficiency.

Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised if we’ve created a society of oddly unimaginative and uncultured people.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with fact-based knowledge and rote skills. These are useful and necessary tools for success. But in an era of massive change and daunting challenges, we need more than rote skills. We need the ability to think and act in new ways to ensure

As researchers are quick to point out, it’s precisely these hard-to-measure areas of intelligence that make for great leaders and successful human beings.

‘I bought a bus and it sank.’”

Ammon had an argument with the god Theuth about the new invention of writing, saying it would destroy society. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by a means of external marks.” This, he said, “will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.”

the spread of literacy has clearly reduced our reliance on memory.

If you could easily pull a farmer’s almanac down from your shelf, you didn’t have to remember the exact rainfall probabilities for June. If you could walk to the public library, you could borrow a book on the Peloponnesian War rather than tracking down an expert who had memorized every battle.

The amount of knowledge we’ve accumulated since the invention of writing is too big to fit in a biological brain. We need Google and Wikipedia and other organizations to collect, store, and organize our knowledge, not only to access it, but just to make sense of it.

Psychologist Carl Jung proposed the collective unconscious as a way to understand our inherited, unconscious memory of human experience.

Today the Internet seems to be creating a collective conscious, a shared memory that exists outside of our physical brains. It might be even argued that the collective conscious is a fourth brain that we’re adding on top of the three brains we already have.

Today the Internet seems to be creating a collective conscious, a shared memory that exists outside of our physical brains.

might be even argued that the collective conscious is a fourth brain that we’re adding on top of the three brains we already have.

Paul McLean in the early 1990s. He theorized that evolution equipped us with three brains, one grown over the other, which he labeled the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex.

reptilian brain, or “lizard brain,” first appeared in fish about 500 million years ago, and reached its apex in reptiles about 150 milllion years ago. It works well at a simple level, but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive.

the limbic brain, or “dog brain.” This is the seat of value judgments, mostly unconscious and emotional, that have a powerful say over how we behave.

the neocortex or “human brain.” The neocortex showed up in primates two or three millions years ago, and gave us the flexible learning abilities that allowed the building of sophisticated technologies and complex cultures.

Evolution moves too slowly for us. So we’re taking evolution into our own hands, so to speak, building ourselves a shared artificial brain. And just as our hands had been freed to make tools when we emerged from the trees, our minds are now being freed to think in more creative ways

This higher-level understanding is the realm of metacognitive skills, or metaskills for short. They act more like guiding principles than specific steps, so they can be transferred from one situation to another without losing their effectiveness.

Metaskills determine the how to, not the what to. They form the basis of what Americans call know-how, and what the French call savoir-faire, “to know to do.”

by nature, skills are harder to measure than academic knowledge. It’s easier to check the correctness of math answers, for example, than the quality of thought that went into them. It’s as if we believe metaskills enter the body by osmosis. “You may never use calculus,” the argument goes, “but the experience will teach you how to solve logical problems.”

The world doesn’t want human robots. It wants creative people with exceptional imagination and vision—and standardized testing won’t get us there.

If problem solving is important, why not teach it as a metasubject, and use calculus, statistics, philosophy, physics, debate, and other subjects as expressions of it?

The Institute of the Future, on behalf of the Apollo Research Institute, took a long look at the workplace of tomorrow. They issued a document called “Future Work Skills 2020,” which identified these six drivers of change: 1. Extreme longevity. Medical advances are steadily increasing the human lifespan, which will change the nature of work and learning. People will work longer and change jobs more often, requiring lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning. 2. The rise of smart machines and systems. Automation is nudging human workers out of jobs that are based on rote, repetitive tasks. 3. Computational world. Massive increases in the number and variety of sensors and processors will turn the world into a programmable system. As the amount of data increases exponentially, many new roles will need computational thinking skills. 4. New media ecology. New communication tools are requiring media literacies beyond writing. Knowledge workers will be asked to design presentations, make models, and tell stories using video and interactivity.

The Institute of the Future, on behalf of the Apollo Research Institute, took a long look at the workplace of tomorrow. They issued a document called “Future Work Skills 2020,” which identified these six drivers of change:

Extreme longevity. Medical advances are steadily increasing the human lifespan, which will change the nature of work and learning. People will work longer and change jobs more often, requiring lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning.

2. The rise of smart machines and systems. Automation is nudging human workers out of jobs that are based on rote, repetitive tasks.

3. Computational world. Massive increases in the number and variety of sensors and processors will turn the world into a programmable system. As the amount of data increases exponentially, many new roles will need computational thinking skills.

4. New media ecology. New communication tools are requiring media literacies beyond writing. Knowledge workers will be asked to design presentations, make models, and tell stories using video and interactivity.

5. Superstructed organizations. Social technologies are driving new forms of production and value creation. Superstructing means working at the extreme opposites of scale, either at very large scales or at very small scales.

6. Globally connected world. Increased interconnectivity is putting diversity and adaptability at the center of organizational operations. People who can work in different cultures, and work virtually, will deliver extra value to companies.

metaskills such as sense-making, determining the deeper meaning of what is being expressed;

future scenarios will demand metaskills such as sense-making, determining the deeper meaning of what is being expressed; social intelligence, the ability to connect with others; adaptive thinking, the ability to imagine solutions beyond the rote; a design mindset, the ability to prototype innovative outcomes; and cognitive load management, the ability to filter out nonessential information and focus on the essential problem at hand.

In Florence during the Renaissance, the archetype of l’uomo universale, the universal man, was born. The “Renaissance Man” was a person well-versed in all branches of knowledge, and capable of innovation in most of them.

There’s a growing recognition that the great advances of the future will come not from a single man or woman, but from the concentrated effort of a group.

“None of us are as smart as all of us.”

“None of us are as smart as all of us.” Yet to activate the creativity of a group—whether it’s a team, a company, a community, or a nation—we’ll need to bring our best selves to the party.

We’ll need to come with our skills, our metaskills, and our full humanity. In the postindustrial era, success will no longer hinge on promotion or job titles or advanced degrees. It will hinge on mastery.

What metaskills do is democratize creativity, spreading the responsibility for change more evenly and building a stronger middle class—the best-known

What metaskills do is democratize creativity, spreading the responsibility for change more evenly and building a stronger middle class—the best-known engine for economic growth.

A few creative specialists stashed here and there in the back rooms of our organizations won’t be enough to crack complex problems like environmental responsibility, sustainable energy, or food production for seven billion people.

These are called “wicked problems.” A wicked problem is any puzzle so persistent, pervasive, or slippery that it can seem insoluble. You can never really “solve” a wicked problem. You can only work through it.

Design as a distinct profession emerged only in the 20th century. It came out of the divide-and-conquer approach to production, in which one broke a complex process into its constituent parts so that each part could be studied and streamlined. Before that, designing was part of a general activity that included problem solving, form giving, and execution. When it finally became a discipline in its own right, with its own professional organizations and special history, design became more detached from the industrial world that spawned it.

If you want to innovate, you have to design. Design and design thinking—as opposed to business thinking—is the core process that must be mastered to build a culture of nonstop innovation.

The problem with traditional business thinking is that it has only two steps—knowing and doing. You “know” something, either from past experience or business theory, then you do something. You put your knowledge directly into practice. Yet if you limit yourself to what you already know, your maneuver will necessarily be timid or imitative. Traditional business thinking has no way of de-risking bold ideas, so it simply avoids them. This is not a recipe for innovation but for sameness.

between knowing and doing called making. Making is the process of imagining and prototyping solutions that weren’t on the table before. While this concept is easy to grasp, it’s difficult to practice.

since true innovation is not a best practice, it sets off alarm bells in the boardroom: “If no one has done this before,” the executive asks, “why should we take a chance? Why not just wait until someone else tries it, then jump on board if it works?”

Of course you can, if your goal is to follow. But if your goal is to lead, you have to embrace design.

A designer is simply someone who doesn’t take yes for an answer—a person who searches for better and better solutions to what could be, when others are satisfied with what

A designer is simply someone who doesn’t take yes for an answer—a person who searches for better and better solutions to what could be, when others are satisfied with what is.

Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, “A designer is anyone who works to change an existing situation into a preferred one.”

“Designers are in the miracle business,” says Dr. Carl Hodges, founder of the Seawater Foundation. He’s not intimidated by what is. He’s an innovative scientist who’s using the rise in sea level caused by global warming to turn coastal deserts into agricultural Edens.

“Design can bring back value where it has been sucked completely dry by commoditization.”

It wasn’t just knowing that brought us to this stage of our evolution—it was making. Our ability to make and use tools, starting with simple hammers and axes, and moving to spears, brushes, needles, grinding stones, and horticultural tools, came from a two-way conversation between our brains and our hands.

our hands made our brains as much as our brains controlled our hands.

Language unleashed a torrent of creativity, including the invention of new tools, music, art, and mythmaking, plus enough survival and navigational skills to migrate thousands of miles from Africa to Europe and Australia. Without language, it seems, our culture would have been constrained to very slow progress indeed.

the two millennia since Plato, and especially during the last 500 years after the Renaissance, academic education in the West has been successful in separating the hand from the brain. We’ve decided that making things is less valuable than knowing things, and therefore making has a less exalted place in the classroom. This is not only wrong, but it denies the very evolutionary advantage that makes us human.

our knowing muscles seem overdeveloped while our making muscles seem atrophied.

These are the five talents—the metaskills—that I believe will serve us best in an age of nonstop innovation: Feeling, including intuition, empathy, and social intelligence.

Seeing, or the ability to think whole thoughts, also known as systems thinking.

Dreaming, the metaskill of applied imagination.

Making, or mastering the design process, including skills for devising prototypes.

Learning, the autodidactic ability to learn new skills at will. Learning is the opposable thumb of the five talents, since it can be used in combination with the other four.

The bright thread that weaves through all five metaskills is aesthetics, a set of sensory-based principles that can stitch together the new and the beautiful.

One advantage of computers is that they never get emotional. They’re not misled by their dreams or desires.

evolution equipped us to think like computers?

If the ability to make fast, accurate calculations is so valuable, why hasn’t evolution equipped us to think like computers?

amazing feats of mathematical savants like Daniel Tammet. Tammet can do cube roots quicker than a computer and recite pi out to 22,514 decimal places. He can multiply any number by any number, and learn languages as easily as others learn capital cities. He can read two books simultaneously, one with each eye, and recall the details of all 7,600 books he’s read so far.

“Savants usually have had some kind of brain damage.” However, he says, “I think it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities.”

We have to consider the possibility that computerlike thinking is not central to our success on Earth;

Even today, if you inject your feelings into a business conversation, you can almost watch your credibility leaving the room. This is too bad, since we now know that our emotions are far smarter than our rational brain for handling complex tasks.

Sigmund Freud likened the ego and the id—the emotional brain and the rational brain—to a horse and rider. “The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it.”

Freud often advised his patients to “hold their horses” rather than “give free rein” to their emotions. Scientists have long speculated on

Freud often advised his patients to “hold their horses” rather than “give free rein” to their emotions.

Scientists have long speculated on why a particular area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is larger in humans than in other primates. Freud might have guessed that its purpose was to protect us from the animal instincts of our emotions. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, however, we can see that the purpose of the OFC is actually the opposite—its job is to connect us with our emotions. It turns out that the more evolved a species is, the more emotional it is.

Our feelings are central to our learning, our intuition, and our empathy. They allow us to make sense of rich data sets that our rational brains are not equipped to comprehend.

Emotion was less than welcome on the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. But in the creative labs of the Robotic Age it’s essential. Feeling is a prerequisite for the process

Emotion was less than welcome on the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. But in the creative labs of the Robotic Age it’s essential.

learning as the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, or habits.

Whenever we get a jolt of joy, fear, happiness, or sadness, our brain rewires itself, building neurological pathways that connect the emotion back to the sensory signal.

we’re learning how to make predictions about ourselves and the world.

emotions are so smart is that they’ve evolved to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

Errors create emotional events that the brain can easily remember.

failure triggers an emotion that we remember as knowledge.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with intuition: It takes many hours of trial and error before we can trust it, yet if we don’t trust it we’ll never develop

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with intuition: It takes many hours of trial and error before we can trust it, yet if we don’t trust it we’ll never develop it.

Industrial Age has been particularly hard on intuition, rewarding people who stick to the script over those who “waste time”

These are the nonlogical processes that help us to “know,” not through reasoning, but through judgment, decision, or action. Learning expert Donald Schön called this process “reflection in action,” because this type of knowledge doesn’t come from books but from the conversational back and forth of doing.

Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, he and his team noticed that the neurons needed for a given task would automatically fire in the brain of one monkey as it observed another monkey performing the same task.

This gave rise to speculation about a “monkey see, monkey do” gene in humans. Whenever we see someone else smile, our mirror neurons light up as if we ourselves were smiling.

When empathy breaks down, actual war becomes possible as we redefine our enemies as less human than ourselves.

The behavior-mirroring part of the brain may be largely responsible for our ability to interpret the thoughts and feelings of others. We call this ability empathy. In a world with seven billion people, empathy has become a valuable commodity. It lets us work together to achieve results we couldn’t achieve separately.

And it allows us to live together in relative peace, based on mutual respect for one another.

Our ancestors may not have agreed on the ethics of eating someone else’s dinner, but they most certainly knew you didn’t push your best friend from the top of a tree.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer pointed out that psychopaths aren’t the ones who can’t manage to behave rationally. They’re the ones who can only behave rationally. Their emotional brains have been damaged.

Here’s a research question taken from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, revealing the limitations of intuition:

Linda is single, outspoken, and very bright. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. Which is more probable? 1) Linda is a bank teller. Or 2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Number two, you say? If so, your intuition is working perfectly. But your conclusion is perfectly wrong. There’s no way that number two could be more probable, because it’s more limiting. If Linda happens to be active in the feminist movement, she fits description number one as well as number two.

But if Linda is not active in the feminist movement, she’s eliminated from number two. Don’t feel bad if you blew it. A full 85% of Stanford business students, steeped in probabilities, were tricked by this question. This is merely

But if Linda is not active in the feminist movement, she’s eliminated from number two. Don’t feel bad if you blew it. A full 85% of Stanford business students, steeped in probabilities, were tricked by this question.

one variety of cognitive bias, a large category of logical pitfalls that play havoc with our intuition. Other traps include negativity bias, in which bad is perceived to be stronger than good;

the gambler’s fallacy, or believing in “streaks” or in “being due” when no such possibilities exist;

hindsight bias, the illusion that we “knew it all along”;

anchoring effect, causing us to weigh a single piece of evidence far too heavily; belief bias, in which we evaluate an argument based on the believability of its conclusion; and the availability heuristic, which causes us to estimate the likelihood of something according to what is more available in memory, favoring events that are vivid or emotionally charged.

She proves it by asking her students to clip cartoons out of magazines. She then has them separate the captions from the pictures, making one pile of captions and one of pictures. When the students connect the captions and pictures randomly, they’re surprised to find that at least half of them are still funny.

“Creating meaning is an automatic process.”

A common example of this is how we manage to drive to work while thinking about what to say at the morning meeting. When we get to work we can barely remember our commute.

Your dopamine cells have been trained to recognize words more easily than colors, and only a superhuman effort by your pre-frontal cortex can contradict the training of your emotional brain.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor whose Hungarian name is more fun to pronounce than it seems (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee). He’s a founder of positive psychology and author of a series of books on flow,

work. The second is Tor Nørretranders, Denmark’s leading science writer, whose book The User Illusion

Your mind is part of your intellect. Intellect is a conscious ability to understand things, or to reach conclusions about what is true or real in the world.

But in reality your intellect is a seamless integration of your conscious mind, your physical body, and your environment.

Western philosophy has tended to separate intellect from behavior, as if your mind and body were two separate entities.

Psychologist Howard Gardner defines it as “a biopsychological potential to process information,”

a way to solve problems or create products in a cultural setting. Creativity, the subject of this book, is a special quality of your intellect. Where the real mystery is, however, is consciousness. Generally speaking, consciousness is the subjective experience of being awake and aware.

The fact is, most of the brain is engaged in unglamorous but crucial work like bodily metabolism, glandular functions, muscle control, and the sensations we get from touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, and motion.

According to psychologists, we can only hold a maximum of four “items”—thoughts or sensations—in our conscious mind at the same time.

the gambler’s fallacy, or believing in “streaks” or in “being due” when no such possibilities exist;

hindsight bias, the illusion that we “knew it all along”;

anchoring effect, causing us to weigh a single piece of evidence far too heavily; belief bias, in which we evaluate an argument based on the believability of its conclusion; and the availability heuristic, which causes us to estimate the likelihood of something according to what is more available in memory, favoring events that are vivid or emotionally charged.

She proves it by asking her students to clip cartoons out of magazines. She then has them separate the captions from the pictures, making one pile of captions and one of pictures. When the students connect the captions and pictures randomly, they’re surprised to find that at least half of them are still funny.

“Creating meaning is an automatic process.”

A common example of this is how we manage to drive to work while thinking about what to say at the morning meeting. When we get to work we can barely remember our commute.

Your dopamine cells have been trained to recognize words more easily than colors, and only a superhuman effort by your pre-frontal cortex can contradict the training of your emotional brain.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor whose Hungarian name is more fun to pronounce than it seems (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee). He’s a founder of positive psychology and author of a series of books on flow,

work. The second is Tor Nørretranders, Denmark’s leading science writer, whose book The User Illusion

Your mind is part of your intellect. Intellect is a conscious ability to understand things, or to reach conclusions about what is true or real in the world.

But in reality your intellect is a seamless integration of your conscious mind, your physical body, and your environment.

Western philosophy has tended to separate intellect from behavior, as if your mind and body were two separate entities.

Psychologist Howard Gardner defines it as “a biopsychological potential to process information,”

a way to solve problems or create products in a cultural setting. Creativity, the subject of this book, is a special quality of your intellect. Where the real mystery is, however, is consciousness. Generally speaking, consciousness is the subjective experience of being awake and aware.

The fact is, most of the brain is engaged in unglamorous but crucial work like bodily metabolism, glandular functions, muscle control, and the sensations we get from touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, and motion.

According to psychologists, we can only hold a maximum of four “items”—thoughts or sensations—in our conscious mind at the same time.

He tackles the mechanics of water with detailed drawings of how rivers flow around rocks and other obstacles, adding recommendations on how to build bridges and deal with erosion.

So now we place science and art in separate categories. We want science to explain the truth of things, and art to express the experience of things. Put another way, science carefully excludes feelings, while art draws them out.

intended, and revealed his secrets to the nascent

Yet during the ascendance of Newtonian science after the Renaissance, something more happened. Educated people began believing that science was the only source of truth.

Sperienza—or experience—was the starting point for Leonardo’s knowledge. In making drawings of the objects and movements of nature, he was able to experience them as heightened reality, to own them in ways that merely looking doesn’t allow.

There’s something special that happens between the hand and the brain in drawing—and between the body and the brain by moving through space—that creates meaning.

“The infant immediately starts exploring the world, looking, feeling, touching, smelling,” he says. “Sensation alone is not enough; it must be combined with movement, with emotion, with action. Movement and sensation together become the antecedent of meaning.”

What captivated Leonardo’s interest was the dynamics of nature—the way water swirls or wind travels, the way sound moves through air, how organic forms unfold and grow.

Fritjof Capra, in his book The Science of Leonardo, notes that the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics, also known as complexity theory, may just be that tool. Meanwhile, we have a chance to reunite science and art through the discipline of design. Modern science is already forging ahead with synthetic biology,

They’re like church members who make hefty donations so they can feel more spiritual. If you listen to exchanges between art collectors and art dealers, you’re unlikely to hear any conversations about craft, meaning, or purpose. Instead, you’ll hear endless gossip about who knows whom or what someone paid or who’s showing where.

There’s very little talk about the beauty of an algorithm, the rapture of an architectural space, or the elegance of a phrase.

in James’s time, industrial America was busy creating just that kind of world for factory workers. The ideal employee was one with no emotional response, an automaton who could be satisfied with the soul-deadening repetition of a command-and-control business structure.

world—we’re still struggling to escape their legacy. Billboards, strip malls, traffic jams, factory farms, landfills, and housing projects are either concepts or consequences of a mass-production mindset.

If that’s ugliness, what’s beauty? Can beauty be defined? Or is analysis impossible, like cutting a kitten in half to see why it’s cute?

While we can certainly encounter an object or have an experience that gives us mild satisfaction—say, a nicely sculpted vase or a well-crafted melody—true beauty has something more going for it: memorability. Memorability is almost always the result of sudden emotion—the jarring pop of disrupted expectations. The pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction that follows this pop can be experienced as a warm glow, a slowly spreading smile, or the hair standing up on our arms.

to align with its purpose. If the purpose of a carafe is to pour liquid cleanly into a glass, then “rightness” may demand a certain shape of spout, a certain type and position of handle, and a certain proportion of interior space for the liquid.

You might think after ten thousand years of making carafes we would have this down, but we don’t. Many of the carafes, pitchers, and measuring cups on the market still pour badly, sloshing out their contents or dripping liquid down the sides.

Organizations can also suffer from a lack of rightness. Either they’re missing a clear, compelling purpose, or they haven’t aligned their activities with their purpose,

Inelegance plus a lack of rightness, when taken to an extreme, is the essence of kitsch.

Elegance, the third component of beauty, has been subverted by the fashion industry to mean luxury or overdecoration. Yet it really means the opposite.

An elegant dress, in this definition, would be the simplest dress that achieves the purpose of flattering one’s figure, or bringing out one’s personality, or signaling a certain position in a social setting. Any extra elements or unneeded decoration would be examples of inelegance.

Inelegance plus a lack of rightness, when taken to an extreme, is the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is delightful in its way, because it usually contains surprise. We’re delighted to find a table lamp made from a stuffed iguana, or a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pietá that doubles as an alarm clock. But beauty it ain’t. So most kitsch ends up in attics and landfills after the original surprise has faded.

Rightness and elegance, by contrast, require a little work to appreciate. And they last much longer and tend to retain their value. The original Pietá, sans clock, is more likely to stand the test of time than the kitschy copy.

Beauty can be experienced in almost any aspect of human life—a nail driven perfectly into wood, onions sautéed to perfection, dancing in perfect synchronization to music. Optimal closure gives an object or an activity its greatest power, for

Beauty can be experienced in almost any aspect of human life—a nail driven perfectly into wood, onions sautéed to perfection, dancing in perfect synchronization to music. Optimal closure gives an object or an activity its greatest power, for it admits of no extraneous perceptions.”

Another example is the software I used to write this book. Microsoft Word is the standard for word processing, but it falls short on all three counts. It doesn’t offer surprise along any particular dimension. It also lacks rightness, since its features are not well aligned with its basic purpose of helping me convey my thoughts in text. And it’s devoid of elegance, since there are far more features than I’ll ever need, including overeager ones that try to “correct” my writing, requiring me to correct the corrections as I go.

In the Industrial Age, beauty might have mattered less than it does today, since people were often thrilled just to have the basic item at a price they could afford. But now that customers have more

In the Industrial Age, beauty might have mattered less than it does today, since people were often thrilled just to have the basic item at a price they could afford. But now that customers have more choices, beauty has become the tiebreaker in many categories. BMW’S Mini Cooper is not beautiful in the traditional automotive sense of sleek or luxurious, but it’s beautiful in the surprise-rightness-elegance sense. It’s surprisingly small in a market dominated by hulking SUVS; it has rightness, focusing its features and communications like a laser on providing a fun experience; and it accomplishes all this with an elegant, low-cost design.

My own definition of aesthetics is this: the study of sensory and emotive values for the purpose of appreciating and creating beauty.

Using aesthetic tools just to use them is aimless—like using kitchen tools just because you find them in the drawer.

When content and form are well matched, the combination can seem iconic, a marriage made in heaven.

the cake may remind you of happy birthdays from your childhood, giving you the warm glow that comes from feeling loved. Or it may impart a feeling of wistfulness, because it happens to be your birthday, and after thirty years of struggling you had hoped to achieve more with your life. These are the associations the cake is triggering—influencing the meanings you take from it and the reason it matters to you.

Does that mean we can dispense with formal beauty and just create things that people can connect with on a meaning level? Sure. We do it all the time. We produce cartloads of kitsch, floods of fashion, torrents of tribal identifiers such as logo products, lot-filling “luxury” homes, me-too tattoos, derivative genre music, and trendy personal electronics that help us fit into the groups of our choice. But the satisfaction we get from these objects is often shallow and fleeting, and eventually we wonder if there might be something more.

We can marvel at everyday things, like the asymmetrical placement of an upper story window, or the roughness of chipped paint on a child’s toy, or the sound of a delicate cymbal floating over a gruff bass line.

We start to demand more from the things we buy, the people we take up with, the experiences we give ourselves.

Using aesthetics, we learn to separate the authentic from the fake, the pure from the polluted, the courageous from the timid.

Good taste is the promise and the payoff of aesthetics. And like beauty, good taste can’t be bought.

Good taste has long been considered a quality that existed mostly in the eye of the beholder.

The Romans had a saying for it: “De gustibus non est disputandum,” or “About taste there’s no argument.” But this isn’t completely true. While there’s a wide range of what might be considered good taste, it doesn’t stretch on forever. There’s such a thing as bad taste, too, and most of us know it when we see

The education of the eye and other senses is what separates those with good taste from those with ordinary or bad taste. This is not snobbishness. It’s a recognition that you have to work to develop good taste, and it’s mostly in the area of understanding formal principles.

Howard Gardner writes about it in his book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: “All young people will acquire and exhibit aesthetic preferences. But only those who are exposed to a range of works of art, who observe how these works of art are produced, who understand something about the artist behind the works, and who encounter thoughtful discussion of issues of craft and taste are likely to develop an aesthetic sense that goes beyond schlock or transcends what happens to be most popular among peers at the moment.”

In other words, good taste is learned through conscious effort.

Without an educated sense of aesthetics, your appreciation of beauty is likely to fall nearer the left side, toward objects that are high in associative meaning, but low in formal excellence.

This favors “tribal aesthetics,” or a preference for the symbols that identify people with a certain group. For example, the Harley-Davidson trademark does not contain truly beautiful formal qualities, but its associations make it beautiful to members of the Harley tribe.

Those with a greater degree of aesthetic education can more easily separate the formal elements from their personal associations, so that the formal elements can be appreciated—to

ability of some graphic designers to appreciate the formal properties of the Nazi flag, with its bold shapes and strong colors, while still being horrified by its associations.

The primary illusion of music is time, unfolding moment by moment in a rhythmic sequence of notes, melodies, and movements.

the primary illusion of storytelling is memory, as if the past can be perfectly reproduced in the present.

It’s important to remember that in any artistic pursuit—whether painting, playing music, writing software, building a business, or constructing a scientific theory—aesthetic choices are never right or wrong, just better or

It’s important to remember that in any artistic pursuit—whether painting, playing music, writing software, building a business, or constructing a scientific theory—aesthetic choices are never right or wrong, just better or worse.

the fact that aesthetics is approximate doesn’t mean that artistic knowing is less important than scientific knowing.

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality. Lately it’s been

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality. Lately it’s been fashionable to suggest that aesthetic judgment comes preloaded into the

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality.

Later, as adults, people seem to prefer faces that are regular rather than those that are asymmetrical or unusual. They also seem to prefer scenes of nature to abstract art. (My dentist would be happy to hear it.)

What science should question instead is why so many adults can’t see aesthetic differences and don’t have an adequate framework for critiquing beauty.

My wife and I got hooked on a TV series called House Hunters International. Maybe you’ve seen it. In each half-hour program, would-be expats choose among three properties based on a wish list they’ve given to their agents (which is always bigger than their budget).

There are no parameters concerning the quality of the light, the authenticity of the materials, or the relationship of the house to its surroundings.

Yet in the end, it’s obvious that the buyers base their decisions mostly on their feelings. If all that mattered was the size of the rooms, they could just bring a measuring tape.

What actually matters, beyond basics such as price, is the beauty that they believe will give meaning to their lives. It’s just that they don’t have the vocabulary to express it.

Question: If average people aren’t conversant with beauty or the qualities that determine it, why should designers and other professionals bother with aesthetics? Answer: Because average people are deeply affected by beauty, whether of not they’re conscious of

What’s the solution: reduce technology, or give up brand share? Neither. The solution is to use empathy—the ability to recognize how other people feel—to design technologies,

Europe-based Ryanair has defined its competitive advantage solely in terms of low price (or at least the illusion of low price). Every decision the company makes is aimed at reducing costs while keeping as much of the profit as possible. The prices of their flights are low—sometimes as low as one penny for a return ticket—but there are hidden costs, including fairly high emotional costs.

The seats are closer together than the usual “pitch” of other airline seating, and they don’t recline, so your knees are pushing into the hard plastic back of the seat in front of you. Maybe it simply feels more cramped,

The seats are closer together than the usual “pitch” of other airline seating, and they don’t recline, so your knees are pushing into the hard plastic back of the seat in front of you. Maybe it simply feels more cramped, because the tops of all the seat backs are shiny yellow plastic, creating a visual foreshortening as if the seatbacks were a garish deck of cards standing on edge.

the plastic safety card is right in front of you, glued to the back of the seat (to save on cleaning and replacement costs).

President Michael O’Leary has suggested getting rid of two toilets to make room for six more seats; redesigning the planes so passengers can fly standing up; charging extra for overweight passengers; and asking passengers to carry their checked-in bags to the plane themselves. “Just kidding,” he said. But he would like to charge admission for the toilets. It’s part of Ryanair’s commitment to low prices.

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques. A few years ago my wife and I inherited a Nespresso machine

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques. A few years ago my wife and I inherited a Nespresso machine as part of a house purchase in France.

Swiss food giant Nestlé has tapped into a different kind of emotion with its sleek Nespresso coffee-brewing system. The idea is simple: a home appliance that brews espresso from single-serving “pods” of ground coffee.

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques.

product displays, and packaging had more in common with Tiffany’s than Starbucks. Multihued coffee capsules glowed like jewels against dark wood paneling. Catalogs with the production values of coffee table books were positioned in soft pools of light. Clearly, this was a company that had a vision for its brand.

Why wouldn’t they simply buy one of the competing offerings from Sara Lee, Kraft, or Mars? The secret, once again, is empathy. The Nespresso designers were able to “feel” what it might be like join an exclusive Nespresso tribe. Instead of putting costs first, they put customer delight first, then engineered the pricing model to fit customer expectations.

True, the capsules are costly. But customers are buying much more than coffee. They’re buying something that can’t be measured, counted, or even described. Thanks to a well-crafted experience and a slew of patents to keep competitors out, the Nespresso brand has logged sales increases of 30% per year over a ten-year period. Those patents, however, are expiring, and customers are free to buy cut-rate capsules from a number of other sources. Will some of them defect? Sure, because money matters. But the most valuable segment of customers, the Nespresso loyalists, will continue to support the company because of the emotional benefits that come with membership in the original tribe.

In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun has correctly noted that innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their technical specs. Instead, they’re rejected because of how they make people feel.

One of the last century’s leading architects, Le Corbusier, made a colossal error of judgment when he set out to design a new approach to public housing. Instead of using his emotional brain to focus on the feelings of inhabitants, he used his rational brain to focus on the possibilities of the buildings. He envisioned people as interchangeable parts in a system, inputs to a “machine for living.”

Informed by a rigid Modernist ideology, the theories were bracing but the results appalling: geometric clusters of identical stacked cells, devoid of emotional benefits such as individuality, historical reference, or a connection to nature. Most of these projects ended up as “dirty towers on windswept lots,” as critic Tom Lacayo put it, “the kinds of places we have been critiquing in recent years with dynamite.”

Contrast this with the Katrina Cottages designed by Marianne Cusato. In response to the emergency housing needs of Hurricane Katrina victims, she developed plans for small traditional-style houses that can be built quickly for the cost of an emergency trailer. The 300-square-foot interiors feel surprisingly spacious (this is a nice size room), thanks to their nine-foot ceilings and thoughtful floor plans.

Their front porches encourage interaction with neighbors, and the original structures can be expanded when the owners’ insurance money comes in. There’s no emotional sacrifice to be made with these houses, since they tap into deep associations with family, community, and tradition. And on a strictly formal level, their proportions are sensible and satisfying. As a result, some people who could afford custom architecture are using the Katrina plans to build their vacation homes and guest houses. The success of the Katrina Cottages has led Cusato to design a 1700-square-foot version, called a New Economy Home, in the same traditional style. She sees it as an antidote to the “McMansion,” the feature-laden but inauthentic architecture of the 1990s that exudes all the charm of a checklist.

In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun has correctly noted that innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their technical specs. Instead, they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. “If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.” This applies equally to coffee brands, airlines, and online shoe stores. It also applies to residential architecture. One of the last century’s leading architects, Le Corbusier, made a colossal error of judgment when he set out to design a new approach to public housing. Instead of using his emotional brain to focus on the feelings of inhabitants, he used his rational brain to focus on the possibilities of the buildings. He envisioned people as interchangeable parts in a system, inputs to a “machine for living.”

Cusato hopes to remedy this situation by promoting an alternative vision for living, one that gets people out of the house and into the neighborhood. Would you really need your own cinema, exercise room, lavish kitchen, and large yard if you had theaters, gyms, restaurants, and parks all within walking distance?

Empathy, like morality and responsibility, spirals outward as it grows. It starts with caring for oneself, expands to include one’s family, then friends, then community, then region, then nation, then the world and all of nature.

The highest level of empathy takes all these circles into consideration.

The metaskill of feeling, the ability to draw on human emotion for intuition, aesthetics, and empathy, is a talent that’s becoming more and more vital as we move into the Robotic Age.

Naturally, there will always be home buyers who measure taste by the square foot, and developers and architects willing to cater to them. Knowing what buyers want does take a certain level of empathy, but it’s a fairly narrow definition of the concept. What a buyer wants may not be what the community wants, or even what the buyer needs.

technical skills are merely an entry-level requirement for most jobs. What lifts some people to the status of stars are their social skills.

A UC Berkeley study followed a group of PhD students in science and technology over a 40-year period. It turned out that EI abilities “were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige by the end of their careers.”

You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you can’t connect with people, you’ll be relegated to the sidelines.

our technology needs to come from a place of empathy and not from a place of fear, greed, or laziness. It has to make personal interactions more personal, not less.

Confirmation bias is a tendency to prefer evidence that fits what we already believe, blocking out any “inconvenient truths” with a mechanism known as perceptual defense.

So our view of reality is not so much a product of what we can perceive, but of what we do perceive.

Our emotional brain is happy with this state of affairs, because it prefers to make decisions that feel right. They feel right because we’ve trained our brain through constant repetition, like training a dog to sit, come, or heel.

Culture produces stories that bind people together, allowing them to function as a team, a family, a group, a company, a community, or a nation. Stories are helpful when they make our lives easier, but harmful when they keep us from the truth.

Once we identify with a culture or an ideology, our rationality can easily become a liability, allowing us to justify almost any belief.

The artist Goya fretted that “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” meaning that unchecked emotions can lead to nightmare behaviors. Yet the sleep of emotion also produces monsters.

We think of sociopaths as people who can’t control their emotions, but it’s actually the opposite. Sociopaths are people with damaged emotional brains.

language of Western culture, and are right up front in the philosophies of Eastern culture. In the simplest sense, systems thinking is the ability to contemplate the whole, not just the parts. It’s the metaskill I call seeing. Seeing let’s you hold your beliefs lightly as you seek deeper truths about the world and how it works. For PhDs: The

When it’s important to get things right, we try to replace our beliefs with actual knowledge.” To replace beliefs with

When it’s important to get things right, we try to replace our beliefs with actual knowledge.”

The only path to profound knowledge, the kind of knowledge you’ll need to make a difference in the Robotic Age, is proficiency with systems thinking.

Most people can’t draw what they see. When they use a pencil to transfer an object or a scene onto a sheet of paper, they tend to draw not what they see but what they know. Or at least what they think they know. So a sketch of a face ends up looking like a Cubist sculpture, and a drawing of a street scene looks like primitive folk art.

The mind likes simple choices, and it loves a choice between opposites. “Either/or” propositions are so prevalent we hardly question them. But we should. Our preference for simplistic either/or propositions—good or bad, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, friend or foe, us or them—blinds us to the deeper questions we need to address if we’re to survive beyond the 21st century.

In many developed countries, including the United States, either/or is baked into the political voting system through a simple choice between opposing parties. It’s a direct extension

In many developed countries, including the United States, either/or is baked into the political voting system through a simple choice between opposing parties. It’s a direct extension of popular sports, in which two opponents battle for supremacy, and fans choose sides based on beliefs, feelings, and allegiances. In the two-party system of government, winning becomes a substitute for progress.

Sociobiologist Rebecca Costa observes that, from a historical perspective, civilizations based on opposition eventually face gridlock, and finally collapse.

She explains that choosing between two extreme options doesn’t work for highly complex problems such as global recession, poverty, war, failing education, or the depletion of natural resources, since it forces the brain into choosing which instead of what.

A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy in which a situation seems to have only two alternatives, when in reality others are possible.

Those of us who accept false dichotomies can easily be manipulated by unscrupulous leaders in government, business, religion, and other institutions.

When two sides attack a problem, the problem is no longer the problem. The problem is the sides.

With dichotomous decisions, there are only three possible outcomes: win-lose, lose-win, or compromise. None of these is optimal, and all can lead to gridlock.

Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into separate pieces and work on them one by one. Instead, they see the entire architecture of the problem—how the various parts fit together, and how one decision affects another.

Reject the tyranny of or and embrace the genius of and. Leave the sides behind. Look for a third narrative based on common ground instead of compromise.

Drawing a picture in a visually realistic way is not really a drawing problem. It’s a seeing problem. Until we can clearly see what’s in front of us, free of misleading beliefs and partial knowledge, our picture will necessarily be distorted or fragmented. Painter Robert Irwin said, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen.” As soon as we label something,

Leonardo da Vinci epitomized this relationship between seeing and thinking, as amply illustrated in his notes. His scientific insights came straight from his passion for drawing; he drew things to understand them.

He was trying to see how things are connected, and the way nature continually transforms itself.

The ideal of the Renaissance Man doesn’t suggest that we learn everything about everything, but that we see the world as an interconnected system of systems, instead of separate parts.

On a good day, this is exactly what designers do. They observe a situation—a product, service, experience, process, a communication, or business model—then devise new components, new relationships, new interactions that reshape the situation into something better.

Their metaskill of visualization—of seeing how to see—makes this transformation possible.

Since the peephole of consciousness is so small, most people find it easier to focus on a single tree than a whole forest.

We forget that the world isn’t linear. It’s full of arcs and loops and spirals. It often seems more like a Rube Goldberg contraption than Newtonian equation. We can pull a lever here and get an unintended consequence over there.

We send aid to foreign countries to fight poverty, only to find we’re feeding corruption instead.

We develop pollution-free nuclear energy, only to end up with a nuclear waste problem that could haunt us for ten thousand years.

Trying to turn a nonlinear world into a linear world for our emotional comfort is usually a bad idea, because linear planning only works with problems that can’t resist our plans.

By focusing on narrow problems, we’ve learned how to move large weights over long distances, increase our production of food, eradicate a whole raft of diseases, transport people through the air, communicate instantly around the world, and perform any number of miraculous feats. Yet to the extent we’ve been thinking in fragments instead of whole thoughts, our solutions have only created bigger problems that are now beyond our comprehension.

“Always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is not a clear one.” In other words, think in whole thoughts instead of fragments.

systems thinking, adaptive thinking, cybernetics,

Like an artist composing a canvas, a systems thinker squints at a problem to see the complete picture instead of the components.

How systems work A system is a set of interconnected elements organized to achieve a purpose. For example, the plumbing in your

How systems work A system is a set of interconnected elements organized to achieve a purpose. For example, the plumbing in your house is a system organized to deliver clean water and flush waste water away.

The structure of a system includes three types of components: elements, interconnections, and a purpose.

The feedback mechanisms in most systems are subject to something called latency, a delay between cause and effect, or between cause and feedback, in which crucial information arrives too late to act upon.

By the time she gets the numbers, the situation is a fait accompli. Any straightforward response based on the late information is likely to be inadequate, ineffective, or wrong.

In systems theory, any change that reinforces an original change is called reinforcing or positive feedback. Any change that dampens the original change is called balancing or negative feedback.

let’s get back to the problem of latency. Every change to a system takes a little time to show up.

This is best illustrated by the classic story of the “unfamiliar shower.”

the delay between cause and effect—between adjusting the taps and achieving the right temperature—deprived you of the information you needed to make appropriate changes

A mother is concerned that her children may be exposed to danger if they’re allowed to roam the neighborhood freely, so she keeps them close and controls their interactions with friends. At first this keeps them safe, but as they grow older they suffer from impaired judgment in their interactions with the broader world.

other examples of system delays:

A student feels that his education is taking too long, so he drops out of college and joins the workplace. He makes good money while his college friends struggle to pay their bills. Over time, his lack of formal education puts a cap on his income while his friends continue up the ladder.

A bigger child learns that she can bully the other children in school. At first this feels empowering, but over time she finds she’s excluded from friendships with other children she admires.

Our emotional brains are hardwired to overvalue the short term and undervalue the long term. When there’s no short-term threat, there’s no change to our body chemistry to trigger fight or flight. If you pulled back your bedsheet one night and found a big, black spider, your brain would light up like a Christmas tree. But if you were told that the world’s population will be decimated by rising ocean waters before the year 2030, your brain would barely react.

We have to exert ourselves to override our automatic responses when we realize they’re not optimal. In this way, systems thinking isn’t only about seeing the big picture. It’s about seeing the long picture. It’s more like a movie than a snapshot.

after viewing the first few minutes. How?

My wife can predict the ending of a movie with uncanny accuracy after viewing the first few minutes. How? Through a rich understanding of plot patterns and symbolism, acquired over years of watching films and reading fiction,

she understands the system of storytelling.

2. Addiction, or “when the cure is worse than the disease.” Whenever we use a short-term fix for a long-term problem, we’re in danger of addiction, because we begin to depend on the temporary fix instead of solving the root problem.

This helps in the short term, but by the afternoon you’re even more tired, so you toss down a venti latte in lieu of lunch. At night you’re wired from the caffeine, so you calm your nerves with a couple of glasses of wine and wander off to bed. You go to sleep right away, but by three in the morning you’re tossing and turning. You struggle up the next morning and repeat the whole process, hooked on a downward cycle of quick fixes while the root problem grows worse.

the feedback delay in this system? It’s between drinking the coffee or wine and seeing the results. A jolt of caffeine works quite well in the first two hours, but later makes us feel more tired.

then the long-term solution is to address the root cause of insomnia. It may be anxiety, stress, sleep apnea, or alcoholism (especially if it’s more than two glasses of wine),

3. Eroding goals, or “lowering the bar.” We’ve seen this phenomenon in school, where a teacher gives up measuring students against a broader standard and begins “grading on the curve.”

The US and the USSR lived through forty years of escalation, caught in a mindless competition to build the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, a whole generation learned that life could end any moment in a fiery mushroom cloud, and that planning for the future was futile. The best one could hope for was to live for the moment—a recipe for suboptimization if there ever was one.

The best way to exit an escalation trap is to find a way for both sides to win. It’s not about compromise so much as common ground. By using empathy to understand the needs of the other side, you can design a third solution that changes the original positions for mutual benefit.

5. The tragedy of the commons, or “don’t be selfish—take turns!”

A commons can be any shared resource that becomes endangered by overuse. A highway is a commons that can accommodate only so many cars before it becomes gridlocked. A park is a commons that can become trampled by too many picnickers. A company home page is a commons that becomes less effective with every inessential item that’s added to it. A fishing area is a commons that benefits no one after it’s fished out.

Garrett Hardin. In it he told the story of a village with a publicly owned pasture on which herdsmen were encouraged to graze their animals. Since the privilege was free and the pasture was large, each herdsman in the village began to think, What harm could there be in adding more animals to the pasture?

The American highway system is a frustrating experience for many drivers, not because of the quality or capacity of the roads, but because of the mental models people use for driving them.

European drivers avoid this problem by using a different mental model. Instead of a slow lane and a fast lane, they conceive of them as a driving lane and a passing lane. They stay in the driving lane until they need to pass, then move into the passing lane, then immediately back into the driving lane,

While European highways certainly have speed limits, there’s little need for police enforcement since accidents are rare. If we Americans want more freedom on the road, we could do worse than learn from the European system.

The problem is that everyone does do it, so the effect is multiplied by the number of people in the system. When the system becomes damaged enough to cause concern, the finger of blame is often pointed at the moral character of the participants.

the computerized speed traps that result in hefty traffic fines could be altered to reward safe driving as well, tracking cars in order to bestow “responsibility points” on their owners. The points could then be used to lower their insurance premiums.

“You’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

7. Limits to growth, or “what goes up must come down.” Every form of growth eventually encounters limits. A wildfire that runs out of trees to burn, a city that runs out of buildable land, a virus that runs out of victims, and a business that runs out of customers are all examples of bumping up against limits.

As success feeds upon success, the growth line soars and the company keeps it accelerating by hiring more staff, opening new offices, launching subbrands, and layering complexity upon complexity.

In 1990, IBM knew that the market for large computers would eventually desert them, while Kodak could see that digital cameras would soon replace film cameras. IBM radically transformed itself from a seller of “big iron” into a consulting company that also sold computer systems. Kodak, on the other hand, tried to preserve its profitable film business too long, starving their digital investments in the process. There’s still meaning in the Kodak brand, but little momentum in the business.

Entropy causes fast-moving things to slow down, and order to collapse into chaos. There’s a price to pay for maintaining any kind of difference or individuality. When you see the limits approaching, getting around them is theoretically straightforward: If it ain’t broke, fix it. What’s not so straightforward is convincing others to follow.

Competitive Exclusion Principle. It says that two species can’t continue to live in the same habitat and compete for the same resource. Eventually, one species will win a larger share of the resource, giving it an advantage in future competition, until it becomes impossible for the other species to compete.

Finally, the winner takes all, and the habitat suffers from a lack of variety.

This is the situation the US finds itself in now. The moneyed have become increasingly powerful by virtue of their wealth, which has allowed them to rewrite the rules in their favor. As the rich have gotten richer, more of the middle class has joined the working class, and now the wealthiest are feeling the economic pinch of a consumer population that can no longer afford the products that their investments depend on.

The way out of the success trap is by leveling the playing field.

Other possible techniques are closing income tax loopholes, launching social programs, and limiting the power of lobbyists. Perhaps the most sensible rule is simply to match the power of the public sector to the power of the private sector.

The well-intentioned goal of the No Child Left Behind Act was to improve the quality of US education by making sure students performed well on a standardized test. Sounds logical, right? But when the government made test scores a prerequisite for funding, the de facto goal became good test scores, not good education. Many schools immediately diverted their attention from teaching to testing.

Others ignored subjects not on the test. Still others focused on the midlevel students who were most likely to make a difference, giving less help to struggling students who were likely to fail, or gifted students who were likely to pass on their own. Funding was the all-glittering prize. In the process, the best teachers lost interest in teaching, since there was little room left in the system for individuality.

The purpose of a leaf is to turn sunlight into energy. The purpose of a bicycle is to turn walking into riding.

The organizing purpose of a company can be defined as the reason it exists beyond making money. Beyond making money? Isn’t a company in business to make money? Yes, but if profits are primary, it may have trouble keeping customers, attracting talent, and building a culture that can sustain the business. Management expert Peter Drucker famously said that the only realistic definition of a business purpose was to create a customer.

The stated purpose of Apple is “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” The purpose of security-software maker Symantec is “to create confidence in a connected world.” The purpose of Patagonia, a maker of outdoor clothing, is “to inspire and implement solutions to an environment in crisis.” Now contrast these three statements with the following three. The purpose of Chevron is “to achieve superior financial results for our stockholders, the owners of our business.” The purpose of Office Depot is “to be the most successful office products company in the world.” The purpose of Ametek is “to achieve enhanced, long-term shareholder value by building a strong operating company serving diversified markets to earn a superior return on assets and to generate growth in cash flow.”

“Systems, like the three wishes in a fairy tale,” says Meadows, “have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce.”

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide you’re a cowboy.”

Toyota’s purpose is “to sustain profitable growth by providing the best customer experience and dealer support.” Were the executives simply sacrificing the how to get the what? A better purpose statement for Toyota might be “to bring the highest quality cars to the most people at the lowest price.”

Comedian Eddie Izzard said that the American Dream is to work hard and buy a home, while the European Dream is to hardly work and own a motor scooter.

Scientists have talked about a “dangerous flaw built into the brain” that causes a preference for instant gratification. Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of quick rewards, but we’re shortsighted when it comes to consequences.

My bad behavior was initially good behavior—but only for me and only for the moment.

A working definition of sin, therefore, is any act that values selfish, short-term good over unselfish, long-term good.

Your ability to think whole thoughts—to see how one thing leads to another over time—is a crucial skill in the Robotic Age, given technology’s scope for producing large-scale unintended consequences.

freedom you should be accorded. The more parsimonious

History shows that giving broad freedoms to irresponsible people is a recipe for mayhem. This is especially true for rights that call for a high degree of responsibility, such as gun ownership.

Economist Steven Landsburg, in The Big Questions, shares his own rule for good behavior: “Don’t leave the world worse off than you found it.” Unfortunately, simply living in the 21st century means you’re doing damage to the planet. If you drive a car, buy groceries, use a computer, wear manufactured clothing, have children, own a home, fly to meetings, or read a newspaper, you’re doing damage to the planet.

Apalled by the atrocities of World War II, German sociologist Dr. Robert S. Hartman set about creating a new “science of value,” which he hoped would organize goodness as efficiently as the Nazis had organized evil. He called his science axiology.

study the values of ethics and aesthetics—ethics being the study of right and good, and aesthetics being the study of beauty and harmony—so they had a fighting chance against more fleeting values

We live in an “exaggerated present,” says Donella Meadows. In other words, we pay too much attention to the now, and too little to the before and the after, giving us a warped view of what’s important.

The world is now too complex to be guided by ten simplistic commandments.

A driver whose car skids on an icy road is more likely to turn the wheel the wrong way than the right way, simply because the right way is counter-intuitive. A CEO whose company suffers from sagging profits is likely to focus on costcutting instead of innovation, simply because the rewards are more direct and immediate.

It wasn’t long before productivity became the Holy Grail for the entire society, replacing the previous goal of happiness with one that’s more easily measured.

Economist Victor Lebow introduced the term “conspicuous consumption” in the 1950s, complaining that we’d already begun to ritualize the purchase of goods in search of spiritual satisfaction. “We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

The result has not been happiness, nor spirituality, nor economic health, but a national shopping jones that’s turning our birthright into a landfill. Too harsh? We’ll see.

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors behind the events? What are the long-term costs and benefits? We shouldn’t become too discouraged if at first we don’t succeed. It took nature 13 billion years to create the systems around us, and they still don’t always work perfectly.

Let’s say, for example, we think clean drinking water will soon be in short supply, and we’d like to solve the problem before it becomes a global disaster. We could start by framing it four simple ways: 1) How can we create an affordable product that will purify water at the household level? (Small and conventional); 2) How can we build large water purification plants that can serve millions of households through existing plumbing systems? (Large and conventional); 3) How can we “manufacture” drinking water at the local level? (Small and unconventional); 4) How can we “manufacture” drinking water on a global scale? (Large and unconventional). The small-conventional solution might be something like the filtration products Brita already sells, but for less money or with smarter materials. The large-conventional solution might be similar to our existing water plants, but with better purification systems or better distribution methods.

the large-unconventional solution, to imagine one example, might be to use rising sea levels to flood coastal deserts, turning them into marshlands that remove salt and produce clean water, as the Seawater Foundation proposes.

Yves Behar would design a computer so simple, so durable, and so portable that children in underdeveloped countries could have access to the same educational resources as children in advanced countries. They called their initiative One Laptop Per Child. They succeeded admirably within their frame, but eventually learned that they had drawn it too small. They had neglected to solve the problems outside the problem, such as how to build a barrier to competition, how to navigate government bureaucracies, and how to change entrenched views about education. It was one of the most heartrending bellyflops of the digital age, due to the wrong choice of frame. Of

We’ve been trained by Industrial Age marketers to believe anything good is already on the shelf.

When Einstein was asked which part of the Theory of Relativity gave him the most fits, he said: “Figuring out how to think about the problem.” In another interview he said that if he knew a fiery comet was certain to destroy the earth in an hour, and it was his job to head it off, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it.

John Dewey had famously said that “a problem well defined is half solved.” Einstein apparently believed it was more than 90% solved.

Seeing a problem from your own viewpoint comes naturally, of course. Putting yourself in the shoes of other people is more difficult. And getting outside the system to view it objectively takes a conscious effort.

In 1990, IBM knew that the market for large computers would eventually desert them, while Kodak could see that digital cameras would soon replace film cameras. IBM radically transformed itself from a seller of “big iron” into a consulting company that also sold computer systems. Kodak, on the other hand, tried to preserve its profitable film business too long, starving their digital investments in the process. There’s still meaning in the Kodak brand, but little momentum in the business.

Entropy causes fast-moving things to slow down, and order to collapse into chaos. There’s a price to pay for maintaining any kind of difference or individuality. When you see the limits approaching, getting around them is theoretically straightforward: If it ain’t broke, fix it. What’s not so straightforward is convincing others to follow.

Competitive Exclusion Principle. It says that two species can’t continue to live in the same habitat and compete for the same resource. Eventually, one species will win a larger share of the resource, giving it an advantage in future competition, until it becomes impossible for the other species to compete.

Finally, the winner takes all, and the habitat suffers from a lack of variety.

This is the situation the US finds itself in now. The moneyed have become increasingly powerful by virtue of their wealth, which has allowed them to rewrite the rules in their favor. As the rich have gotten richer, more of the middle class has joined the working class, and now the wealthiest are feeling the economic pinch of a consumer population that can no longer afford the products that their investments depend on.

The way out of the success trap is by leveling the playing field.

Other possible techniques are closing income tax loopholes, launching social programs, and limiting the power of lobbyists. Perhaps the most sensible rule is simply to match the power of the public sector to the power of the private sector.

The well-intentioned goal of the No Child Left Behind Act was to improve the quality of US education by making sure students performed well on a standardized test. Sounds logical, right? But when the government made test scores a prerequisite for funding, the de facto goal became good test scores, not good education. Many schools immediately diverted their attention from teaching to testing.

Others ignored subjects not on the test. Still others focused on the midlevel students who were most likely to make a difference, giving less help to struggling students who were likely to fail, or gifted students who were likely to pass on their own. Funding was the all-glittering prize. In the process, the best teachers lost interest in teaching, since there was little room left in the system for individuality.

The purpose of a leaf is to turn sunlight into energy. The purpose of a bicycle is to turn walking into riding.

The organizing purpose of a company can be defined as the reason it exists beyond making money. Beyond making money? Isn’t a company in business to make money? Yes, but if profits are primary, it may have trouble keeping customers, attracting talent, and building a culture that can sustain the business. Management expert Peter Drucker famously said that the only realistic definition of a business purpose was to create a customer.

The stated purpose of Apple is “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” The purpose of security-software maker Symantec is “to create confidence in a connected world.” The purpose of Patagonia, a maker of outdoor clothing, is “to inspire and implement solutions to an environment in crisis.” Now contrast these three statements with the following three. The purpose of Chevron is “to achieve superior financial results for our stockholders, the owners of our business.” The purpose of Office Depot is “to be the most successful office products company in the world.” The purpose of Ametek is “to achieve enhanced, long-term shareholder value by building a strong operating company serving diversified markets to earn a superior return on assets and to generate growth in cash flow.”

“Systems, like the three wishes in a fairy tale,” says Meadows, “have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce.”

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide you’re a cowboy.”

Toyota’s purpose is “to sustain profitable growth by providing the best customer experience and dealer support.” Were the executives simply sacrificing the how to get the what? A better purpose statement for Toyota might be “to bring the highest quality cars to the most people at the lowest price.”

Comedian Eddie Izzard said that the American Dream is to work hard and buy a home, while the European Dream is to hardly work and own a motor scooter.

Scientists have talked about a “dangerous flaw built into the brain” that causes a preference for instant gratification. Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of quick rewards, but we’re shortsighted when it comes to consequences.

My bad behavior was initially good behavior—but only for me and only for the moment.

A working definition of sin, therefore, is any act that values selfish, short-term good over unselfish, long-term good.

Your ability to think whole thoughts—to see how one thing leads to another over time—is a crucial skill in the Robotic Age, given technology’s scope for producing large-scale unintended consequences.

freedom you should be accorded. The more parsimonious

History shows that giving broad freedoms to irresponsible people is a recipe for mayhem. This is especially true for rights that call for a high degree of responsibility, such as gun ownership.

Economist Steven Landsburg, in The Big Questions, shares his own rule for good behavior: “Don’t leave the world worse off than you found it.” Unfortunately, simply living in the 21st century means you’re doing damage to the planet. If you drive a car, buy groceries, use a computer, wear manufactured clothing, have children, own a home, fly to meetings, or read a newspaper, you’re doing damage to the planet.

Apalled by the atrocities of World War II, German sociologist Dr. Robert S. Hartman set about creating a new “science of value,” which he hoped would organize goodness as efficiently as the Nazis had organized evil. He called his science axiology.

study the values of ethics and aesthetics—ethics being the study of right and good, and aesthetics being the study of beauty and harmony—so they had a fighting chance against more fleeting values

We live in an “exaggerated present,” says Donella Meadows. In other words, we pay too much attention to the now, and too little to the before and the after, giving us a warped view of what’s important.

The world is now too complex to be guided by ten simplistic commandments.

A driver whose car skids on an icy road is more likely to turn the wheel the wrong way than the right way, simply because the right way is counter-intuitive. A CEO whose company suffers from sagging profits is likely to focus on costcutting instead of innovation, simply because the rewards are more direct and immediate.

It wasn’t long before productivity became the Holy Grail for the entire society, replacing the previous goal of happiness with one that’s more easily measured.

Economist Victor Lebow introduced the term “conspicuous consumption” in the 1950s, complaining that we’d already begun to ritualize the purchase of goods in search of spiritual satisfaction. “We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

The result has not been happiness, nor spirituality, nor economic health, but a national shopping jones that’s turning our birthright into a landfill. Too harsh? We’ll see.

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors behind the events? What are the long-term costs and benefits? We shouldn’t become too discouraged if at first we don’t succeed. It took nature 13 billion years to create the systems around us, and they still don’t always work perfectly.

Let’s say, for example, we think clean drinking water will soon be in short supply, and we’d like to solve the problem before it becomes a global disaster. We could start by framing it four simple ways: 1) How can we create an affordable product that will purify water at the household level? (Small and conventional); 2) How can we build large water purification plants that can serve millions of households through existing plumbing systems? (Large and conventional); 3) How can we “manufacture” drinking water at the local level? (Small and unconventional); 4) How can we “manufacture” drinking water on a global scale? (Large and unconventional). The small-conventional solution might be something like the filtration products Brita already sells, but for less money or with smarter materials. The large-conventional solution might be similar to our existing water plants, but with better purification systems or better distribution methods.

the large-unconventional solution, to imagine one example, might be to use rising sea levels to flood coastal deserts, turning them into marshlands that remove salt and produce clean water, as the Seawater Foundation proposes.

Yves Behar would design a computer so simple, so durable, and so portable that children in underdeveloped countries could have access to the same educational resources as children in advanced countries. They called their initiative One Laptop Per Child. They succeeded admirably within their frame, but eventually learned that they had drawn it too small. They had neglected to solve the problems outside the problem, such as how to build a barrier to competition, how to navigate government bureaucracies, and how to change entrenched views about education. It was one of the most heartrending bellyflops of the digital age, due to the wrong choice of frame. Of

We’ve been trained by Industrial Age marketers to believe anything good is already on the shelf.

When Einstein was asked which part of the Theory of Relativity gave him the most fits, he said: “Figuring out how to think about the problem.” In another interview he said that if he knew a fiery comet was certain to destroy the earth in an hour, and it was his job to head it off, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it.

John Dewey had famously said that “a problem well defined is half solved.” Einstein apparently believed it was more than 90% solved.

Seeing a problem from your own viewpoint comes naturally, of course. Putting yourself in the shoes of other people is more difficult. And getting outside the system to view it objectively takes a conscious effort.

Desiderata are secondary objectives that support a goal or a solution.

The desiderata included the budget (small), the hoped-for look (stunning), the number of workspaces (15), the type of workstation privacy (semi-open), and the need for electrical outlets where there were none.

The architects came back with a plan to spend my entire budget on a single element: a large, curving wall of translucent, corrugated plastic that contained interior uplighting and electrical outlets to feed the entire workspace. Inside the wall was a huge logo looming softly over the reception area. In a single move, this simple but inspired solution established the identity for the new firm, separated the client spaces from the working spaces, supplied electricity to the workstations, and created a buzzworthy experience for visitors.

The principle of desiderata can be applied to any number of problems. It’s really as simple as compiling a wish list. Ask yourself this question and fill in the blank: Wouldn’t it be great if ______? When you finish your list, call out the wishes that would create the most compelling outcome.

On one side you’ve got the reality of what is, or what is common, and on the other side you’ve got a vision for what could be, or what could be different. In between lies a battle. For this reason most people are eager to get in, make a decision, and get out. But creative people know they have to stay in the dragon pit because that’s where the ideas are.

If architect Frank Gehry had used logical reasoning as a starting place for his projects, he never could have invented the swooping, shimmering forms of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.

I could hardly wait to meet the man behind the Macintosh. Right from the start it didn’t go well. We argued. I don’t know how this happened, because my only task was to pose questions and record the answers on a pocket tape recorder.

What was it about Jobs that enabled this level of success? Was it his immaculate design sense? His visionary stewardship? His Buddhist leanings? His vegan food preferences? His Sixties idealism? The adoration of his adoptive parents? His belief that he was chosen to “put a dent in the universe”?

He was a prime contrarian. If you said the sky was blue, he said it was wide. If you said a trademark couldn’t be printed in three colors, he would stamp his feet until he got six. As a designer, he was slow to recognize the potential of another person’s idea. But after knocking it around in his head for a while he would often take ownership of it.

A key characteristic of an inventive mind is a strong disbelief system. Einstein and Picasso were dyed-in-the-wool skeptics. Einstein’s physics professor once told him, “You are quite smart, but you have one big failing. You never listen to anybody.”

In science and art, as well as in other fields, innovation is an act of rebellion. You have to reject conformity if

In science and art, as well as in other fields, innovation is an act of rebellion. You have to reject conformity if you’re looking for brilliance.

Real innovators revel in the unknown. They love a mystery. As business advisor David Baker says, “An entrepreneur is someone who dives into an empty swimming pool and invents water on the way down.”

Alignment works well when the world isn’t changing. But of course the world is changing. Rules can be helpful, but some rules are nothing more than scars from a previous bad experience.

Working without knowledge can feel like driving without headlights, but there’s no law that says all the research has to come

Don’t wait for research. Working without knowledge can feel like driving without headlights, but there’s no law that says all the research has to come first. Sometimes it’s better to grope your way toward an answer, then check it against reality when you have a specific hypothesis in hand.

Steve Jobs put it bluntly: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”

The 20th century has been a triumph of quantity over quality, but in the 21st century we need to reverse the trend. “Be a quality detector,” says systems thinker Donella Meadows. “Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality. If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass.”

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them…Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

During the Industrial Age, fun was discouraged. It took time to have fun, and time was the nonrenewable resource that needed to be managed, maximized, and measured. Employees were paid by the hour, the day, or the year. They were paid by number of pieces they could complete. Or they were paid by the predetermined function they performed. They were not paid by the number of new ideas they brought to the table or by the passion they brought to their work.

After the clock came to Europe in 1307, it took less than a century for mechanical time to sweep the continent. With clocks you could agree on the delivery of a shipment, regularize the baking of bread, and estimate the completion of a brick wall.

The ancient Greeks understood that time came in two flavors: objective time, called chronos; and subjective time, called kairos. Chronos could be measured by the sun, the moon, or the seasons. Kairos could not be measured, only judged by the quality of one’s experience.

Today we use the phrase quality time to describe the experience of living in unmeasured time. We find that as soon as we measure or limit quality time, it quickly turns into quantity time.

Yet quality time is the state in which imagination flourishes best. You can’t decide to produce an insight in 30 minutes or have an idea by 3:15. But you can decide to forget about the clock and focus on the challenge, in which case you may well have an idea by 3:15—or even five ideas.

This is the central conflict between the world of business and the world of creativity. They need each other, but can’t seem to understand each other.

Focus on goals, take away the clocks, and start playing as soon as possible. What you’ll find is that generating ideas “out of time” can produce results much faster than holding yourself to a deadline.

innovation requires something more—it requires unmeasured time in the dragon pit.

The best creative thinkers are usually the most prolific thinkers, because innovation, like evolution, depends on variety. In fact, you could say that innovation is really just evolution by design.

In the parlance of creative theory, you’re fluent. When ideas flow, the music of chance plays faster.

“A genius,” he said, “is a person who has two great ideas.” What he meant was that innovation often comes from connecting two thoughts that previously had been unconnected.

or two ideas previously thought to be in conflict, or one old idea plus one new idea. Einstein’s term for this process was combinatory play.

exhibition called “Making Connections,” about midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames, Ralph Caplan described their firm belief in combinatory play—the excitement of connecting disparate materials such as wood and steel, of connecting alien disciplines such as physics and painting, of connecting people like architects and mathematicians or poets and corporate executives.

The importance of connections is also echoed by recent discoveries in neuroscience. The brain forms new ideas when two old ideas suddenly overlap.

the real genius lies not in making interesting combinations, but in separating the great ideas from the merely crazy ones by applying the principles of aesthetics.

Think in metaphors. A metaphor is a way of making a comparison between two unrelated things. “All the world is a stage” is an example.

Thinking about problems metaphorically moves your thinking from the literal to the abstract, so you can move freely on a different plane.

Many people assume Einstein was a logical, left-brain thinker, but he was actually the opposite. Rather than using mathematics or language to crack a tough problem, he preferred to think in pictures and spatial relationships. This is because visual thinking can strip a problem down to its essence, leading to profoundly simple conclusions that ordinary language might not be able to reach.

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

Voltaire said, “originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”

Gutenberg got the idea for the printing press from watching the mechanics of a wine press. This mental connection launched the book industry, and did no harm to winemakers.

What do you get when you cross a bank with an Internet café? A shoe store with a charity? A Broadway show with a circus performance? Adhesive tape with a bookmark? You get successful business models like ING Direct, Tom’s Shoes, Cirque du Soleil, and Post-it Notes.

Now, reverse the assumptions to see what happens. 1. Employees love doing dishes. 2. It’s easy to tell whose dishes are in the sink. 3. The dishes are employee property. 4. Dishes are easier to clean before they soak. 5. Dishes never pile up.

What would it take to make these true? Well, employees might love doing their dishes if they had a great music system at the sink. It would be easy to tell whose dishes were in there if each item were personalized with the employees’ names or initials. Maybe employees could be allowed full kitchen privileges, but only if they agreed to use their own kitchenware. Or maybe you could install a large-capacity dishwasher that makes it just as easy to put dishes there as in the sink.

Give it the third degree. What else is like this, from which you could get an idea? Is there something similar that you could partially copy? What if this were somewhat changed? What can you eliminate? What can you substitute? Is this the cause or the effect? What if you changed the timing?

Be alert for accidents. The great thing about creative play is that mistakes don’t have consequences. You’re free to follow any rabbit down any hole. While most of the time you won’t find what you’re looking for, sometimes you’ll find what you weren’t looking for, and that can be even better.

When mechanic John Hyatt was looking for a substitute for billiard-ball ivory, he accidentally invented celluloid, the plastic used in making movie film and hundreds of other products.

When Percy Spencer was working on radar for the military, he found a melted candy bar in his pocket, thus discovering the working principle for microwave ovens.

Steve Jobs, while trying to design a tablet computer, discovered a great set of features for the iPhone instead. The iPhone became the stepping stone back to the iPad.

There were two flaws in this logic. First, I did forget good musical ideas, and, second, the value of ideas often lies in their ability to trigger better ideas. If you don’t capture them, you can’t build on them. “Ideas never stand alone,”

A cloud of ideas is a wonderful image. But my advice? Don’t try to hold them all in your mind. Write them down. Record them. Get in the habit of taking notes, keeping a diary, carrying a sketchbook, or thinking out loud on a whiteboard.

Dreaming together Personal mastery can only have meaning in the context of group. None of us can succeed alone, even those whose work is mostly solitary.

In the Robotic Age, creative collaboration needs to escape the lab, linking people from top to bottom, beginning to end, across disciplines and over regional boundaries.

The key to brainstorming, believed Osborn, was to foster an atmosphere in which judgment was temporarily suspended.

walls with hundreds of ideas, but then they’d run out of energy before they could sort them and turn them into workable solutions.

Brainstorming groups that followed the rule of suspended judgment could often cover the walls with hundreds of ideas, but then they’d run out of energy before they could sort them and turn them into workable solutions.

When the mission is critical and the time is short, however, what works best is hardball brainstorming, in which participants are experienced, well matched, and focused like a laser on the problem to be solved.

Studies by organizational psychologists have shown that individuals, not groups, tend to be better at divergent thinking, while groups are better at convergent thinking.

groups often default to a herd mentality instead of fighting for divergent ideas. To guard against herd thinking, shared goals should be as bold as possible. They shouldn’t be ordinary or safe. As Howard Schultz said about the challenge of engaging stakeholders at Starbucks, “Who wants a dream that’s near-fetched?” The simplest way to develop bold goals is to start by wishing. When you get the members of a group to start wishing, their dreams can quickly become roadmaps. There’s a reason people tell you to be careful what you wish for. It works. For large design projects, especially those which benefit from multidisciplinary teams, there’s an ongoing search for “T-shaped” people. A T-shaped person is one who has a strong descender (the vertical stroke of the T) and a well-developed crossbar (the horizontal stroke). The descender represents deep experience in a certain discipline, and the crossbar represents the ability to work with people across disciplines.

creative groups need specialists who can contribute something unique to the collaboration. The last thing they need is I-shaped people—specialists who have useful skills but can’t work with others.

both rock bands and creative groups need one more member: an X-shaped person. This is the one whose main role—though not the only role—is to bring the group together and facilitate progress toward a goal. X-shaped people are rare, because they usually have to prove their worth by first mastering a discipline. The leadership gene is an extra gene, a skill on top of a skill. John Lasseter has been a great creative leader for Pixar, but he developed his credibility and his deep-domain expertise by working first as an animator. When X-shaped people attract the right T-shaped people to the mission, magic can happen.

A master’s degree won’t help you. Only mastery itself.

I can honestly say that I’d rather have an epiphany than win the lottery. Okay, the lottery brings money, but it leaves you with the problem of how to turn your money into the kind of transcendent experience that makes life worth living.

It’s much easier to turn epiphanies into money than the other way around. Winning the lottery is like finding a golden egg;

Their subconscious mind has been busy working behind the scenes to sort through the rational complexities that kept the solution hidden. This “dark time” is known as the incubation period,

The solution can only come when the rational mind lets go so the dreaming mind can take over. It can happen during actual dreaming, but it can also show up anytime the rational mind lets down its guard—while taking a shower, driving a car, lying on the beach, or having sex (presumably with one’s muse).

An autofocus camera is a little like your rational mind. It doesn’t like ambiguity, so it will either take the first picture that comes into focus, or else become confused and freeze.

Six tests of originality The goal of dreaming is to produce an original idea. The idea can be new to you, new to your group, or new to the world.

creative judgment comes with practice, maturity, and familiarity with the world of ideas.

1. Is it disorienting? A great idea should be unsettling—not just to you, but to others in your group. Some people may reject it on the spot. This is not always a bad sign, since the potential of a new idea is often inversely proportional to its comfort factor.

Some people believed airplanes would have no military value; that broadcast radio could not become popular; that no one would want a computer at home; and that educated people would never contribute to an encyclopedia without being paid.

2. Does it kill ten birds? A good idea kills two birds with one stone. A great idea kills ten or twenty.

great ideas don’t come from compromise. They come from common ground.

Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold.

3. Does it need to be proved? Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold.

When my design firm was tapped by Apple in 1988 to rethink the packaging for the company’s range of software products, one of the ideas we presented was a retail package with nothing on the front but a simple hand-drawn icon, a product name, a trademark, and a splash of color.

At the time, no self-respecting software package would go out dressed in less than five colors, one or more photos of people using computers, at least three screen shots, and six or seven bullet points explaining its features—and this was just the front panel.

The prevailing mantra was “the more you tell, the more you sell.” The current voice of reason, David Ogilvy, maintained that “people do not buy from clowns.” DDB’S creative teams not only believed they did, but delivered their witty headlines and graphics with stark simplicity.

Does it create affordances? Affordances are the opportunities inherent in a new idea.

An affordance of Twitter, for example, is to enable instant communication in places where communication is controlled, such as the Middle East during the Arab Spring rebellions. An affordance of democracy is that citizens can voice their opinions without the threat of reprisals. An affordance of baking soda is that it can soak up fridge odors in addition to making cakes rise.

Can it be summarized? Every innovation—whether a government, gadget, service, iPhone app, movie plot, or business model—can be reduced to a one-sentence description.

The Pages tablet application lets you be a writer one second and a designer the next.

The measure of a great idea is the number and quality of the affordances it throws

The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple

The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple but because it has a strong internal order,

Complexity without order is an indescribable mess, while complexity with order appears simpler than it is.

The 20th century has made us believe that everything of value can be bought in a store; that the answer to the question lies at the back of the chapter; that design is something only designers do. But now, in the 21st century, we’re being nudged nervously forward—by our customers, by our employers, by our economy, and by the robots nipping at our heels—to be original. To innovate. To make things. Yes, make things.

Leonardo was famous, or perhaps infamous, for taking months to complete a painting—if indeed he did complete it.

He felt that il discorso mentale, the mental conversation, was more important than the actual painting.

He painted to learn.

Originality without craft, to a Renaissance artisan, would have seemed like marriage without sex—lofty but Platonic.

Can we know all about the world without changing it? No, he finally said. Knowledge must come from action if it’s to be deep enough and rich enough to drive lasting change.

We can’t reshape the world without a little trial and error.

Growing up in Denmark, Anders Warming loved to wash and polish his parents cars. He’d trace their subtle curves with his hands, marveling at the seamless progression of forms, one flowing into another, each in perfect harmony with the whole. “I touched them so many times that I could close my eyes and draw them,” he later said.

he would end up designing for BMW in 2011.

Warming doesn’t start a new design by going straight to CAD software. He also steers clear of verbal descriptions and PowerPoint presentations. Instead, he draws. He may make hundreds of sketches before even looking at a screen. “You probably need 90 sketches just to get warm, and after that, you’re really in the flow.

The creative process is one of surrender, not control.”

In design, sketching is the mother of invention. In science it’s the experiment; in business it’s the whiteboard diagram; in writing it’s the rough draft; in acting it’s the run-through;

In design, sketching is the mother of invention. In science it’s the experiment; in business it’s the whiteboard diagram; in writing it’s the rough draft; in acting it’s the run-through; in inventing it’s the prototype;

You go in not knowing so you can come out knowing.

The no-process process There’s a standard model that designers use to describe the creative process, usually with minor variations. Sometimes these are followed by a trademark notice, as if to say, “Hands off! This is my process, invented by me! By the way, did I mention it was mine?” Yet they all conform to the same progression that goes from a state of not knowing to a state of knowing, laid out in 4-10 logical steps.

1) discovery, 2) definition, 3) design, 4) development, and 5) deployment.

Most process diagrams are circular, suggesting that the end of the journey leads you right back to the beginning. There’s only one hitch. A truly creative process bears little resemblance to these models. In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. If it had to be circular, the real process of making things would look more like this: 1) confusion, 2) clutter, 3) chaos, 4) crisis, and 5) catharsis. But if designers presented this process as a diagram, they’d scare the bejeesus out of their bosses and clients. So instead they present the calm, confident progressions of the so-called “rational model.”

creativity doesn’t respond to project management so much as passion management.

By overemphasizing process, you can discourage greatness.

Designers may taxi to the runway with briefings, data, and deadlines, but they reach flying altitude with emotion, empathy, and intuition.

Listen to author Annie Dillard: “Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations.

Whatever place releases the most energy. “It doesn’t matter where you start,” said composer John Cage, “as long as you start.”

A better model for designing is the no-process process,

As a believer in the magic of design, I have three fond wishes. The first is that a greater number of creative people—designers, entrepreneurs, strategists, engineers, scientists—begin to embrace the true process of design, and abandon the comforting models that lead to mediocre outcomes. The second is that educational institutions arrive at a similar understanding, making room for messy thinking and surprising ideas in the classroom. While I doubt I’ll see real paint splattered on the walls of Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, metaphorical splatters would be a start. The third is that the leaders and managers of companies encourage the real process of design in all of its chaotic splendor, trusting, even insisting, that the results be more than efficient—that they be surprising, amazing, and occasionally even world changing.

Every day is Groundhog Day

The protagonist is forced to repeat the same day until he finally gets it right.

When at last he achieves the perfect day, he wins the girl and breaks the endless loop of repetition.

The experience of Groundhog Day is not unlike the experience of creativity. There are two main stages in innovation: 1) getting the right idea (dreaming), and 2) getting the idea right (making). As in Groundhog Day, getting the idea right is an iterative process. It doesn’t happen overnight or in a sudden flash.

how many innovations have managed to succeed temporarily, only to fall by the wayside as competitors out-designed the original idea?

The superior customer experience delivered by these brands is the direct result of design. “The details aren’t the details,” said designer Charles Eames. “They make the product.” Eames’s every creative decision grew from “a tight and painful discipline” that brought him to grips with the most prosaic and minute problems.

“You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them.

The successive drawings, models, and prototypes that designers make are not designed to be perfect solutions. They’re designed to illuminate the problem, and in the process hone their intuition. In fact, the best designers are those who can keep the project liquid—allowing more iterations and more interaction among collaborators.

The discipline of uncluding Many people can include. Even more people can exclude. But very few people know how to unclude. Uncluding is the art of subtracting every element that doesn’t pull its weight. Or, as artist Hans Hofmann said, “eliminating all but the necessary so the necessary may speak.”

We live in a time of unprecedented clutter: visual clutter, verbal clutter, product clutter, feature clutter, conceptual clutter. Clutter is any element that doesn’t contribute to meaning or usefulness—a form of pollution that makes life harder to navigate. If life were a garden, clutter would be the weeds that block our paths or obstruct our views.

We have an urge to build shelters, store food for the winter, add to our knowledge, add to our wealth, and add to our personal power. In some people this addiction devolves into a pathology known as hoarding, causing them to fill their houses to the rafters with old newspapers, used pie tins, odd scraps of plastic, pieces of cardboard—always collecting, never discarding.

maybe we should simply view it as human, only more so. Companies, also, have a tendency toward hoarding. They build up a tangle of products, services, brands, subbrands, features, departments, offices, and the bureaucratic rules to manage them. They only cut them back when the weeds begin to strangle their profits.

there’s a difference between complexity and clutter. Complexity, if well organized, is healthy. Clutter is a sign of dysfunction.

optimum choice, not maximum choice. A technique called conjoint analysis—a way to study the trade-offs customers are willing to make in a purchase decision—has taught researchers that the most number of choices is rarely the best number of choices.

The human brain resists “overchoice”—a word used by Yankelovich Partners to describe the baffling number of options in the marketplace today. They recommend instead that companies offer customers “one-think” shopping as a way to simplify the buying experience.

In an age of extreme clutter, the strongest brands are simplifiers.

When CEO Ken Constable took over Smith & Noble, an online window-covering company, the product team had been adding new styles of woven blinds at an alarming pace. They named every new product after an Asian city. “I knew we were in trouble,” said Constable, “when they told me they were running out of cities.”

Only a warrior like Jobs would insist on total simplicity. While other technology companies loaded up their products with functions and buttons, he treated buttons like blemishes, and had them removed.

Companies are collections of individuals, and individuals can make little decisions that have large cumulative effects.

overblown language, like on the sign next to security at Gatwick Airport: “Passenger shoe repatriation area only.” Put your shoes on here might have been clearer, but not nearly as important sounding.

“We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.” In other words, verbal clutter.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Kill ten birds with one stone. Find the place where several problems line up, then knock them down in a single move.

organize potential solutions into lists of what’s cheap, what’s new, what’s available, what’s different, what’s

organize potential solutions into lists of what’s cheap, what’s new, what’s available, what’s different, what’s compelling, what’s proprietary,

The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but messiness. Likewise, the enemy of complexity isn’t simplicity, but also messiness.

The phrase “To be or not to be” is a simple string of words, and each word in it is equally simple. But the meaning behind the phrase is profoundly complex. Namely, why is life worth living? It’s not only the basis of a great play, but of the world’s great philosophies and religions. Therefore, is “To be or not to be” a simple question, or a complex one?

So, is a MacBook Air a simple product, or a complex one? It may be helpful to think of simplicity and complexity as a combo-concept called simplexity. Simplexity stands in opposition to disorder, to entropy, to the messiness that has no meaning.

actual mess can describe itself. The problem with messes is that one looks a lot like another. One cluttered website looks a

When JetBlue says every passenger flies business class for the price of coach, they’ve encapsulated their entire value proposition in one sentence. But when American Airlines says passengers can fly without putting their lives on hold, they’re unable to find a competitive advantage other than wi-fi.

In systems terminology, I’d be shifting the burden to my reader; in the language of economics, I’d be externalizing the costs of communication. The value of my work would be low.

The amount of meaning that can be easily extracted from a message is called its logical depth. According to IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, the more “calculating time” a sender invests—either in his head or on a computer—the more meaning the receiver will get from it, and the greater its logical depth.

you threw out half the parts in a laptop, you might achieve simplicity, but the product wouldn’t work. To retain the richness of simplexity, you need compression, not reduction.

the other side of the wall. Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.

Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.

Billy Baldwin, one of the last century’s most influential interior designers, believed that nothing was in good taste unless it suited its purpose. “What’s practical is beautiful,” he said.

Is there a key subject, a central theme, or a main benefit to anchor the proposed solution to its purpose? If it seems like it’s trying to satisfy too many goals, or too many people, go back to the drawing board.

If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one. If you please the wrong people while leaving the right ones unmoved, you may wish you had done a little testing before going public. Henry Ford didn’t believe in testing, and found out too late that the 1958 Edsel was a car without a market.

7. Is it courageous? Even testing won’t take all the risk out of innovation.

many bold ideas have managed to attract fanatic followings.

1. Is it surprising?

2. Does it have fitness for duty?

3. Are the underlying assumptions true?

4. Does it have a clear focus?

5. Are the elements in harmony?

6. Will the right people love it?

8. Is it valuable beyond the near and now?

9. Does it have depth? Does it connect on more than one level?

Asymmetrical knowledge—a situation in which one person or group knows less about a subject than another person or group—creates fear in the first group and frustration in the second. This is because appreciating a new idea is a kind of journey. Those who’ve taken the journey, the innovators, forget that the others will need a little more time to catch up.

most people love change until it affects them. Scott Berkun says, “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to change the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”

discounting the integrity of an innovation is like buying an airline ticket halfway to China—you save some money, but you never arrive.

Extreme resistance can be a portent of extreme success.

Fact-laden PowerPoints will not win hearts and minds. Dr. Spencer Silver spent five fruitless years trying to persuade 3M of the value of his adhesive because he couldn’t tell a simple story about what would later become Post-it Notes.

Managers get frustrated when employees say their company has no vision.

“Of course, we have a vision,” the manager sputters. “It’s to be a $5 billion company in five years!” Actually, that’s not a vision. A vision is an image, a picture, a clear illustration of a desired end state.

When you lead people from what is to what could be using a simple story, they can more easily visualize themselves playing a role.

“leaders are high-status superconformists, embodying the group’s most typical characteristics or aspirations.”

Even politicians long for positive change, but the way the political system is set up, they aren’t free to promote unproven ideas. They have to wait until ideas gain traction at the grassroots level before they can embrace them.

Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University, said that a good rule in life is that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.”

To me, launching an innovation is like giving birth: it’s painful, it seems to last forever, and afterwards you don’t get much sleep.

What’s a Goldilocks planet, you ask? Well, it’s one that’s not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. One that’s just right. It’s a planet in the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at the right distance from its sun, with earthlike temperatures, liquid

Recently a group of astronomers in Geneva announced the discovery of a promising Goldilocks planet. What’s a Goldilocks planet, you ask? Well, it’s one that’s not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. One that’s just right. It’s a planet in the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at the right distance from its sun, with earthlike temperatures, liquid water, a rocky surface, and a decent atmosphere.

particular Goldilocks planet (with the endearing name of HD 85512b) is 3.6 times as massive as the earth and circles its sun at about one-fourth of the distance that our own planet does. It takes only 58 days to complete one orbit (so you could celebrate your birthday six times as often). Its sun is orange and only one-eighth as bright as ours. But the good news is this: It’s only 36 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Vela. That means if we could figure out how to travel at the speed of light, then find our way to Vela, we could reach the surface in less than four decades

We could make cities more livable. Researchers predict that 75 percent of the world’s population will live in them by 2050. Cities offer huge advantages, including the sharing of resources, knowledge, and talent. But does that mean we have to give up trees, quiet streets, and clean air?

Let’s get a handle on our food problem. Half of the world is growing obese while the other half is going hungry.

On the subject of pollution, we need to clean up the oceans. The thing that makes our own planet the best possible Goldilocks planet is our water. It’s the envy of the universe.

Wouldn’t it be sad if we poisoned our own atmosphere with fossil fuels, then discovered we didn’t have enough to get us to a Goldilocks planet?

If we’re really smart and determined, we should be able to design our products so they can be recycled instead of downcycled or thrown away.

There is no “away” in a closed system.

Let’s democratize medicine. This is more than a humanitarian cause. As long as medicine doesn’t reach every corner of the planet, the human race is in danger of fast-moving viruses and other contagions. As we become more connected, we become more exposed.

While war is generally on the wane, we need to outgrow it entirely. War is the very essence of entropy. Under the strain of seven billion people, we can no longer afford the wholesale waste that comes from large-scale, mechanized violence. It’s a drain on resources and a drain on the human spirit.

Our school system was built on the belief that education is a form of programming. It presumes people will need to follow standardized modes of thought if they’re to contribute profitably to society.

prediction. They ask themselves, In the near future, which jobs will be most abundant?

I often hear students make statements like, “I guess I’ll be going into social media, since that’s where the money is.” Or, “It looks like economic power is shifting to China, so I'm learning Mandarin.” Or, “Biology is the new black.”

The future doesn’t belong to the present. And we don’t belong to our education. It belongs to us. We need to take responsibility not only for what we learn, but how we learn.

“We need to be able to formulate new questions, and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others.”

Gardner’s view is that even honors students suspect that their knowledge is fragile, which contributes to the uneasy feeling that they—and even the educational institution itself—are somehow fraudulent.

Today’s students are not only rewarded for shallow learning, they’re punished for deep learning. Genuine learning requires going “offroad,” spending as much time as necessary to really understand a subject or a discipline.

Self-directed learning, or autodidacticism, is a powerful practice because it lets you build a new skill on the platform of the last one.

Learning to learn is personal growth squared. It gives you the ability to move laterally from one skill to another by applying deeply understood principles to adjacent disciplines. The faster the world changes, the more fluidly you need to adapt.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,” said Alvin Toffler in Rethinking the Future, “but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Whenever you take on a new subject or skillset, your brain reconfigures itself to accommodate the new knowledge.

Demaine hopes to make the design of synthetic proteins possible. What kind of person does this? “I’m a geek,” he says with a grin. His interests read like the to-do list of a precocious ten-year-old: card magic, juggling, string figures, video games, paper folding, improvisational comedy, and glassblowing.

Does Erik Demaine get time to play because he’s a genius? Or is he a genius because he gets time to play?

they referred to Demaine as “moving readily between the theoretical to the playful” in his effort to coax scientific insights from his personal interests. This is what some would call ludic learning, or learning by playing.

Emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning.

Filmmaker Jane Campion put it this way: “Playing in your work is the way to find your energy.” There’s a reciprocal relationship between playfulness and joyfulness.

You enter a joy zone in which learning accelerates, sometimes by a factor of five or ten. The time seems to fly by, and before you know it you’ve learned something that becomes deeply embedded in your psyche.

Schools would have to become facilitators of passion instead of directors of course material.

individual passion can’t be standardized.

I believe this is exactly the model we’re moving toward. But for many people it’s too late.

They’re either fully occupied in the workforce or just completing their formal education. If this is you, your best bet—which is still a good one—is to take control of your education from here on out. To realize that every day is opportunity to enter the joy zone, the place of autotelic learning, where the thing being learned is its own reward.

When you’re in your element, mastery becomes a simple formula: practice × passion = skill.

If you remove practice from the equation, all you have is aimless enjoyment.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee, remember?). Professor C. is the acknowledged expert on flow, a term he uses to describe the mental state of being truly creative. It’s a state of optimal experience—the feeling of being in control of your actions, master of your fate.

If a task is too easy, what happens? You lose interest. If it’s too hard, what happens? You give up. The space in the middle—where a task is neither too easy nor too hard—is the joy zone.

when competition becomes an end in itself it ceases to be

They can be competitive, but only if the competition is a means to perfect our skills; when competition becomes an end in itself it ceases to be fun.

The optimization of creative experience assumes freedom—the freedom to find the right balance between challenge and personal ability.

We live in a society where competition often determines winners and losers in accordance with the Competitive Exclusion Principle.

According to Professor Csikszentmihalyi, “The age-old riddle—What is the meaning of life?—turns out to be astonishingly simple. The meaning of life is meaning.”

A mission, simply stated, is a plan to fulfill a purpose. Having a mission doesn’t guarantee success, but it does make it more than an accident. A mission isn’t permanent. It can change as you learn more about your discipline, your competition, and who you are in relation to the larger world.

It keeps you from running off in a hundred directions at once in the mistaken belief that more is better. “There is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement,” said Jaron Lanier. “What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.”

The reality is, you can’t know the ultimate shape of your mission. You have to begin the journey someplace and correct course as you go. But it does help to set off with a rough map of the territory.

You may long to be a musician, for example, but the world doesn’t need more musicians. It needs certain kinds of musicians, with certain skills, who can make certain kinds of music, and address certain audiences.

choose a direction that lets you work with your whole heart instead of a divided heart. In today’s fragmented world, wholeheartedness confers a distinct advantage upon those who can offer it, because it turns ordinary work into extraordinary work.

“Good work is excellent,” said Gardner. “It meets the technical standards of the relevant profession or craft. It is personally engaging. Carrying out good work over the long haul proves too difficult unless that work remains inviting and meaningful to the practioner. The third E is ethical,” he said. “The good worker constantly interrogates herself about what it means to be responsible.”

Yet Deming was no bean counter. He was a teacher who understood that the most important things in life couldn’t be measured. Profound knowledge can’t be taught, he said, only learned through experience. While many people would agree that “experience is the best teacher,” he believed that experience by itself teaches nothing. You need to interpret your experience against a theory.

understand what happens, not at the event level, but at the systems level. It helps you answer the question: What

understand what happens, not at the event level, but at the systems level. It helps you answer the question: What does this mean?

Becoming an autodidact requires that you develop your own theory of learning, a personal framework for acquiring new knowledge.

here are 12 timeless principles you can borrow to construct it: Learn by doing.

Find worthy work. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Try not to settle. It’s too hard to work with one hand holding your nose.

Learn strategically. You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything. Read specifically on your subject. Appreciate great ideas with felonious intent. Keep a file of every idea you wish had been yours, and you’ll begin to absorb the lessons of your heroes. Über-restaurateur Reed Hearon said, “If you read two books on a subject written by knowledgeable people, you will know more than 95% of the people in the entire world know about that subject.”

Harness habits. The brain forms habits when routines are shoved from the frontal cortex down to the basal ganglia. They allow you to perform familiar tasks with very little conscious thought,

Focus on your goals. Of the eight conditions for creative flow, five are concerned with focus.

neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to connect new ideas to old ones. “Nerve cells that fire together wire together,”

When someone says he’s had 15 years of experience, you wonder if he’s actually had one year of experience 15 times. Masterful practitioners are those who constantly stretch into new areas, even at the risk of failure.

Dr. Gerald Grow of Florida A&M University offers this list of six metaskills for budding journalists: clarity, compassion, commitment, context, creativity, and centeredness. What are the metaskills that will drive success for you? Feed your desire. I once asked my mentor, painter Robert Overby, what he thought was the secret of creative success. He said, “The Big Want.” It’s the burning desire that can’t be extinguished with failure, lack of sleep, lack of money, or loss of friends. When you want something so bad you’ll never give up, no matter what kind of setbacks you encounter,

Dr. Gerald Grow of Florida A&M University offers this list of six metaskills for budding journalists: clarity, compassion, commitment, context, creativity, and centeredness. What are the metaskills that will drive success for you?

Training a skill involves performing an action over and over, deliberately and mindfully, until it becomes part of your muscle memory.

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” Practice is the scaffolding of magic.

Michelangelo

One way to think about career learning is to conceive it as a bridge that’s built on a series of spreading columns.

Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge, the entry level for your journey upward. From there you acquire disciplinary knowledge, the skillset that qualifies you as a competent professional.

Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge,

Higher up is domain knowledge, a broader understanding of the environment in which you practice your discipline. And at the very top is universal knowledge.

There’s no express elevator to universal knowledge. The only way to reach it is by working your way up from the bottom, tier by tier. Once you get there, however, it’s fairly easy to move across to new domains, where you can drill down into the supporting disciplines and crafts from a position of experience.

I’m always suspicious of job applicants who define themselves as “concept people.” Concepts about what? Based on what? Who’s going to execute these concepts? A concept is only as valuable as the knowledge, experience, and skills behind it.

Bridging, to paraphrase political scientist Robert Putnam, is the process of making friends with like-spirited people, people with different views and skills but similar ethics and goals. Bonding, in contrast, is making friends with like-minded people—people of the same political party, the same religion, the same nationality, the same age group, or the same race. Both kinds of connections, bridging and bonding, are necessary to be successful and happy.

bridging is the activity that brings the highest rewards, and the one that pushes society forward.

Social bridging makes use of what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “weak ties.” He found that weak ties between groups can be stronger than the strong ties within groups.

a clique is a closed system that acts more like a mirror than a window. For example, the workers at Google are a fairly diverse group of people, but they spend a lot of time together at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley, reading the same great books, eating together in the same great cafeterias, working on the same fascinating problems.

The antidote to the clique is to open the window. Connect with groups outside your own.

If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. While this may be flattering to New Yorkers, the opposite is more likely to be true: If you can’t make it somewhere else, you can probably make it in New York.

People who hoard knowledge simply don’t get much knowledge back.

Frank Stephenson, the designer of the BMW Mini and the Fiat 500, is proudest of his work on the McLaren MP4, since the tight-knit design team was able to create a cohesive look for the body styling. “A lot of times when you get a car out there,” he said, “it looks like you had somebody working on the front, somebody working on the sides, and somebody working on the back—and they were all mad at each other.”

We know Apple as a company with thousands of designers on the payroll, but the company’s key products were conceived by a small, intimate team, working

We know Apple as a company with thousands of designers on the payroll, but the company’s key products were conceived by a small, intimate team, working closely in a small space with great tools.

Unplugging To be creative, whether alone or in a group, you need the ability to pay attention. “Paying attention” is the right phrase, because it costs something to focus on a task, or a train of thought, or another person’s words. The price of attention is psychic energy.

As life sped up, our attention spans got shorter. Now we have a situation called continuous partial attention, meaning that our consciousness is so fragmented, so chopped up and balkanized that the pieces are nearly unusable.

We’re left with partial thoughts, partial experiences, and partial understandings. This is the trap of the always-on, always-on-ya culture. Mobile computing offers a built-in escape from sustained focus. At the same time, it provides a ready excuse for avoiding conversation with the strangers, neighbors, and colleagues who might expand our thinking. If we’re always on, then our creative brains are always

A recent New York Times article reported the story of a 14-year-old girl at Woodside High School, in California, who sends and receives 27,000 texts per month, “her fingers clicking at a blistering pace” as she holds up to seven conversations at a time. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else,” she says. Once we get past our admiration for anyone who can develop such arcane skills, we can see this is not so much a skill as an addiction. With her day taken up with texting, it’s unlikely that she has time for focused schoolwork or homework,

In fact, there’s a good chance she’s even uncomfortable being alone with her thoughts. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders even has a new term for it: Internet use disorder. “When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device,” says Sherry Turkle, psychology professor at MIT. “Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure.”

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

“Without solitude,” said Picasso, “no serious work is possible.” Leonardo found the same thing to be true.

Wozniak, designer of the original Macintosh, said that “most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.” You can’t switch off the world. But you can block it out while you work. You can carve out quiet time to work things through by yourself, so that when you return to the world you have something deep and pure to show for it. Working alone doesn’t mean being lonely.

You put in your time, you pass your tests, and ta-da! You’re educated. They slap a diploma on your back and ship you off to work. Yet tomorrow an education will look less like a package and more like journey. It’s estimated that by 2025, the number of Americans over 60 will increase by 70%. This means occupational changes will become more commonplace, requiring new habits of lifelong learning.

The trend toward multiple careers is not lost on what’s been called Generation Flux. GenFluxers are a psychographic group made up mostly—but not entirely—of young people who understand that the race goes not to the swift but to the adaptable. They embrace instability and revel in the challenge of new careers, new business models, and shifting assumptions.

the vast bulk of our institutions—educational, corporate, political—are not built for flux.

Your story becomes your map. What makes us happiest is getting where we want to go. The quality of our attention shapes us, then we in turn shape the world.

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

When you find the joy zone and stay in it, you embark on a journey to the center of yourself. You carry with you the five tools that define your humanness—feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning.

We’re not human beings; we’re human becomings. We’re not the sum of our atoms; we’re the potential of our spirit, our vision, and our talent.

I wrote Metaskills primarily for professionals already in the workplace—those of us whose education didn’t prepare us for the rigors of the Robotic Age.

Anyone born after the year 2000 will face a much different world than we did, and will require a different kind of education. Tellingly, the need for transformation is coming at a time when the cost of traditional schooling is spiraling out of reach, causing students and parents to question the cost-benefit ratio.

all we worry about is what college our kids will get into. In 1972, according to a recent study, high-income families were spending five times as much on education as low-income families. It said that by 2007 the gap had grown to nine to one as spending by upper-end families doubled.

An educational garden replaces replication with imagination, reductive thinking with holistic thinking, passive learning with hands-on learning, and unhealthy competition with joyful collaboration.

Facts are useful when they serve as fuel for the mind, but the problem is that the number of useful facts keeps growing. To accommodate them, schools keep reducing the depth of their teaching. Facts look like towns flashing past on a speeding train, and courses are souvenir decals on a suitcase. “Rome—isn’t that where we had the gelato?”

by the time you need them, 95% of the actual facts are gone, lost in the mists of memory. With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach in school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects—the ones that will matter

by the time you need them, 95% of the actual facts are gone, lost in the mists of memory. With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach in school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects—the ones that will matter in the 21st century—are metaskills.

Students today should be learning social intelligence, systemic logic, creative thinking, how to make things, how to learn.

Flexible pathways through the five metaskills would turn education into a strategic exercise. It would put students in charge of their own learning, allowing them to tap into their own interests and discover who they are. It would leverage emerging technologies, including new repositories of factual knowledge like Wikipedia, and social learning tools like those from Inkling and Pearson,

enable interactive, collaborative learning.

Refocusing education on metaskills means transforming the educational experience.

Changing the course of traditional education is no easy task. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard, once likened the difficulty of reforming a curriculum to the difficulty of moving a cemetery.

Salman Khan may have accidentally started a revolution. In trying to teach his cousin a little math, he stumbled onto the biggest educational idea since the textbook. He began tutoring young Nadia with fairly good results. But when he moved out of town, his only option for continuing to teach her was through online videos. So he asked himself an odd question: “How can an automated cousin be better than a cousin?”

The answer turned out to be the Khan Academy. Founded in 2009, the website now offers thousands of free 10-minute videos, spanning a wide range of educational subjects from math to history and science to English,

His bare-bones tutorials have been watched an average of 20,000 times each by high-school and middle-school

why did the Academy catch on in such a big way? Sure, it’s free, but since when did free education ever inspire such fanaticism? There are four good reasons for Khan’s success, all of them suggestive for the future of education.

1. Sal is a charming presenter.

2. The videos are accessible round the clock,

3. They can learn at their own pace,

At first glance, this looks like the Robot Curve in action—teachers being replaced by videos. But it’s actually an opportunity for instructors to stop being “the sage on the stage” and start being flesh-and-blood mentors and coaches.

A world-famous instructor could only be an asset to a traditional institution.

4. Stop talking, start making

“What they taught us in law school,” said a recent graduate of George Washington University, “is how to graduate from law school.”

Creativity, the process of experimenting with things, ignites knowledge.

“Not letting children learn the hands-on component of science is killing us as a nation,” she said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.”

the brink of giving up, she had an epiphany: Boys learn better on their feet. She hurried down to Lowe’s and bought some wood, glue, nails, paint, and simple hand tools. She laid them out next to a plan to build a birdhouse. The boys were transfixed. They became fascinated with the problem of building their own structures, suddenly paying attention,

Technology innovator Ray Kurzweil thinks it is. “The best way to learn is by doing your own projects,” he says. Project-based learning, also called problem-based learning, has become a hot topic.

I once had a college instructor who would shout, “Shut up and design!”

the cause of most hyperactivity and lack of focus is the nature of our schooling, not an outbreak of neurological difficiencies.

Most students, if offered a choice between the fun of playing a videogame and the fun of designing one, would choose the latter.

In a typical textbook lesson, such as memorizing word pairs or historical events, most students can only recall an average of 10 percent of the material after 3 to 6 days. The other 90 percent goes away. In contrast,

Deep learning comes from the addition of emotional drivers such as imagination, intrinsic rewards, experiential truth,

Deep learning comes from the addition of emotional drivers such as imagination, intrinsic rewards, experiential truth, aesthetics, intuition, passion, and wonder.

A third of students do less than five hours of studying per week and yet manage, on average, to earn Bs.

Finishing a course has come to mean proficiency. And getting a degree has come to mean expertise. Meanwhile, cheating has reached epidemic proportions.

Anyone at the top of his class, according to the principle of flow, is necessarily underchallenged.

real advancement is measured in mastery, not correctness. As you master a topic, a skill, or a discipline, you can feel your confidence grow. The feeling itself is the measurement.

Mastery can’t be reached without guidance and sustained focus. It can’t be assembled from thin, 50-minute classes spaced apart by days.

Quest University in British Columbia has attacked this deficiency head-on. Instead of the usual curriculum of several subjects spread over 16 weeks, Quest uses the “block system.” Students take one course for four weeks straight, no interruptions, before moving on the next one. This means the students are together with their instructor every day for the duration of the course. Instead of juggling, they focus. Instead of grazing, they dive. Instead of piling up credits, they collect skills, knowledge, and experience.

he asked the students why they weren’t more curious, why they didn’t ask more questions. The answers fell into three categories. Answer 1: “There’s so much to learn, and it’s all on Google anyway.” Answer 2: “This is a seminar; asking questions could be a sign of weakness.” Answer 3: “You have to understand, I’m paying for a degree, not an education.” Soon after, Quest University was born.

The old world turned on the axis of knowledge and material goods. The new one will turn on the axis of creativity and social responsibility.

The cold rationality of the assembly line has denied us access to the most human part of ourselves. It made us believe that if a thing can’t be counted, weighed, measured, or memorized,

There’s a theory called cognitive recapitulation

The cold rationality of the assembly line has denied us access to the most human part of ourselves. It made us believe that if a thing can’t be counted, weighed, measured, or memorized, it can’t be important. It caused us to narrow our experience of life, leaving little room for feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, or learning.

In the 21st century it seems as if we’re straining towards a new stage of evolution. Our “fourth brain”—the shared, external brain we’re building in the technology sphere—is rebalancing the load so that our right brain can rejoin our left as an equal partner.

The evolutionary relationship between brain and hand is written in our DNA. It’s living proof that we’re not only Home sapiens but Homo creatis. I make, says the hand on the wall, therefore I am.

CONTENTS

A crisis of happiness

Wanted: Metaskills

Congratulations, you’re a designer

The uses of beauty

MODEST PROPOSAL Epilogue 1. Shut down the factory 2. Change the subjects 3. Flip the classroom 4. Stop talking, start making 5. Engage the learning drive 6. Advance beyond degrees 7. Shape the future

This is a book about personal mastery in a time of radical change.

Unfortunately, our educational system has all but ruled out genius. Instead of teaching us to create, it’s taught us to copy, memorize, obey, and keep score.

Pretty much the same qualities we look for in machines.

Pretty much the same qualities we look for in machines. And now the machines are taking our jobs.

put our swirl of societal problems into some semblance of perspective, and suggest a new set of skills to address them. While the problems we face today can be a source of hand-wringing, they can also be a source of energy.

There’s no going back, no secret exit, no chance of stopping the clock. The only way out is forward.

I’ve divided the book into seven parts. The first is about the mandate for change. The next five are the metaskills you’ll need to make a difference in the postindustrial workplace, including feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning.

As you read about the metaskills, take comfort in the knowledge that no one needs to be strong in all five. It only takes one or two talents to create a genius.

As you read about the metaskills, take comfort in the knowledge that no one needs to be strong in all five. It only takes one or two talents to create a genius. —Marty Neumeier

for about ten thousand years our ancestors enshrined their thanksgiving in hundreds of caves, from Africa to Australia, to remind us of who we are and where we came from.

Watson was programmed not to hit the buzzer unless it had a confidence level of at least 50 percent. To reach that level, various algorithms working across multiple processors returned hundreds of hypothetical answers.

the destructive path of war.

If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.” Our common enemy is entropy;

Entropy is the force that causes energy in a system to decrease over time. It’s a tendency for things to become disorderly, lose their purposeful integrity, and finally die or simply become meaningless.

“tiny synthetic minds no bigger than an ant’s know where on Earth they are and how to get back to your home (GPS); they remember the names of your friends and translate foreign languages [and] unlike the billions of minds in the wild, the best of these technological minds are getting smarter by the year.”

that the resolution and bandwidth of brain scanning have been doubling in accordance with Moore’s Law. He predicts that in a couple of decades we’ll be able to reverse-engineer the brain and apply its principles to machines, and maybe even use machines to alter the brain.

the human brain is evolving on its own. By studying mutations in our DNA, researchers have concluded that our genes are evolving considerably faster than they were in preagricultural times.

“We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds.”

Kurzweil believes that the future will be far more surprising than most of us realize, because we haven’t internalized the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

“There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine and between physical and virtual reality.

Is this really our future? Not neccessarily, says Joel Garreau. He lays out three possible scenarios, each with its own poster child. The first is the heaven scenario, in which we become godlike through the continuing evolution

Finally, the prevail scenario says that humanity is not a slave to growth curves, and somehow we’ll muddle through. The poster child for this scenario is virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget.

Lanier’s view of the future. It suggests that we shouldn’t (and probably won’t) drive recklessly at ever-accelerating speeds; that we shouldn’t (and probably won’t) drive at ten miles an hour with the brakes on; and that we shouldn’t (but probably will) drive slightly faster than the speed limit, gripping the wheel nervously as we glance at the accident on the side of the

It suggests that there are limits to exponential growth that we simply have yet to encounter. We can only hope they’re not the catastrophic kind.

Economic gloom. Dwindling resources. Growing pollution. Failing schools. Why do we have so many huge, hairy problems? Are these the natural by-products of exponential change?

While an explosion of information is certainly a key driver of change today, we could also say that petroleum was a key driver in the Industrial Age.

magnificent mass production was both palpable

Our shared vision of machinery, factories, and magnificent mass production was both palpable and inclusive.

addressed, can turn into threats. The company

opportunities, if not addressed, can turn into threats. The company that ignores the struggling startup with a different idea can suddenly find its customers deserting in droves.

Innovation is the discipline that decides which it will be. In a time of rapid change, success favors those who can make big leaps of imagination, courage, and effort.

With innovation, people and institutions have the means to escape a dying past and make it safely to the other side.

Without it, they can lose their momentum, abandon their uniqueness, and wander off course as they drift back to the status quo.

Innovation is the antidote to entropy: If we stop breathing we’ll die.

In the Robotic Age, the drumbeat of innovation will only grow louder.

Whenever a paradigm shifts, three kinds of people emerge: 1) those who resist change because they’ve been so successful with the previous paradigm; 2) those who embrace change because they haven’t been successful with the previous paradigm; and 3) those who embrace change despite their success with the previous paradigm.

This third group is the serial innovators, the entrepreneurs, the iconoclasts who embody the principle of creative destruction.

Creative destruction was a term popularized by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s. It refers to a process of radical innovation in which new business models destroy old ones by changing the entire basis for their success. This applies to products, services, processes, and technologies.

Only companies who get good at creation and destruction can consistently turn discontinuity to their advantage.

The Doblin Group, a think tank in Chicago, has identified ten areas where innovation can deliver an advantage to companies:

The Doblin Group, a think tank in Chicago, has identified ten areas where innovation can deliver an advantage to companies: 1. The business model, or how the enterprise makes money. 2. Networking, including organizational structure, the value chain, and partnerships. 3. Enabling processes, or the capabilities the company buys from others. 4. Core processes, or the proprietary methods that add value. 5. Product performance, including features and functionality. 6. Product systems, meaning the extended system that supports the product. 7. Service, or how the company treats customers. 8. Channels, or how the company connects its offerings to its customers. 9. Branding, or how the company builds its reputation. 10. Customer experience, including the touchpoints where customers encounter the brand. In each of these areas, innovation can be employed as a booster rocket to leave competitors in the dust. Business leaders are beginning to see, sometimes through the dust of market changers, the wealth-generating power of originality. They’re learning what Rudyard Kipling knew a century earlier: They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind. So I left ’em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind. Almost everything can be copied these days, given enough time and motivation. The only thing that can’t be copied is originality.

the “trickle-down theory” of job creation. It goes like this: If we make the right people rich enough, they’ll give us jobs. Conversely, if we fail to make them rich, they’ll lose interest in building big companies, and jobs will disappear.

horse-and-sparrow theory, a concept from the 1890s. If you fed a horse enough oats, it went, some would surely pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Concepts like these have considerable appeal at the top of the food chain, as you might imagine. But the feudal system of the Middle Ages was abandoned for a reason—it didn’t work for the serfs.

the feudal system is always lurking in the wings, ready to sweep back onto history’s

By 2007 financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of corporate profits and nearly as much of corporate pay, up from 10 percent during the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1997.

Today we have the flip side. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

members of the middle class are being squeezed downward into the ranks of the poor, creating what Citigroup calls the “consumer hourglass effect,” in which there are only two worthwhile markets left, the highest income and the lowest income.

Now the top one percent of Americans takes home 25 percent of total income.

the top one percent controls 40 percent of the total.

a lot of growth in developed countries has come from information-based businesses, which have created enormous shareholder wealth, but relatively few jobs.

software giant SAP reported revenues of $16 billion, but only 53,000 employees. Google is now a $29 billion company, but only employs 29,000 people. Facebook has revenues of $4 billion with only 2,000 people.

Starving the middle class to feed the upper class hasn’t been good for anyone. Instead, it’s led to the Great Recession—an economic cul-de-sac in which the middle and the bottom no longer have the financial means to support the top.

Any marketing strategy that targets the top and the bottom of the hourglass and ignores the middle is not a solution but an act of desperation.

According to Reich’s figures, the average hourly pay of Americans has risen only 6 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1985.

Germans, whose average pay has risen nearly 30 percent. At the same time, the top one percent of German households takes home 11 percent of total income, while the top one percent of American households takes 25 percent of the pie. Germany has managed to avoid the hourglass effect by supporting manufacturing and education.

The job market is more than willing to shell out good money for original thinking and unique skills. But because business is competitive, creative processes tend to become routinized, moving step by step from original work down to skilled work, from skilled work down to rote work, and from rote work down to robotic work. At each step along the way, the value and the price decrease, with the value staying higher than the price.

At the top of the Robot Curve is creative work, where there’s less routine and a lot of experimentation. Since this work is fairly original, maybe even unique, the cost is high and so is the value, as long as the work addresses a significant need.

Creative work might include scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, new business ideas, product invention, organizational leadership, and all manner of creativity in the arts and entertainment fields.

One step down is skilled work, which includes the work of professionals. The techniques used by skilled workers and professionals were once original, but have now become best practices. There’s still an element of creativity, but much of the expertise is shared by other professionals in the same discipline.

degree of interchangeability in the people they hire, albeit on a sliding scale of talent.

I may not know which heart surgeon is the best, but I can at least be confident that my own doctor has a modicum of training and experience.

The professional photograph that once would have cost $4,000 and two days’ time can now be rented instantly online for $25.

Writing a decision-tree script for a phone operator requires the creativity and experience of a skilled worker. But it standardizes the work so employees don’t need the same high level of experience or education. The cost goes down, the value stays higher than the cost, and the work can be scaled

The welding operation that was once done by a human worker can now be done even better by a robotic arm. The professional photograph that once would have cost $4,000 and two days’ time can now be rented instantly online for $25.

While automation puts people out of work, it also opens up new opportunities at the top of the curve for the originators and professionals who invent and manage these systems.

As the 21st century deepens, robots and algorithms will move into every area of our lives, and even into our bodies and brains.

The current obsession with drugs and plastic surgery shows a willingness—even eagerness—to alter our biology with technological interventions.

Today, the company that doesn’t get ahead of the curve is the one that’s stranded on the wrong side of the innovation gap.

The lower you are on the curve, the less autonomy you have, the less money you make, and the less adaptable you are when the marketplace demands new skills. In the jargon of the jobs world, lower-level skills are “brittle.”

Every time a new idea becomes a professional practice, or a professional practice becomes a rote procedure, or a rote procedure becomes a robotic operation, there’s a chance for someone to profit.

“Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz-show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

If we can’t find valuable work, it’s not because we’re in a recession; we’re in a recession because we can’t find valuable work.

We’re still trying to apply Industrial Age ideas to Robotic Age realities, and the result has been a creative and economic vortex.

even when we worry that twenty million jobs are missing, three million jobs are going unfilled.

One in three employers around the world say they can’t find skilled workers to fill their jobs.

Today, you need to do that, but also know how to inspect for quality, understand lean business principles, be able to do repairs, and be willing to continuously improve your processes and keep on learning.” In other words, workers who offer more than clock time.

Giving rich people more money will not produce the jobs we need. Instead, the best jobs will come from creative people—rich or not—who put societal contribution ahead of salary and stock options.

Employers in the Robotic Age don’t want employees to be robots. They have robots. What they want are people who think for themselves, use their imagination, communicate well and can work in teams, and who can adapt to continuous change.

GDP measures in dollars the market value of all products and services produced during a given period, and it soon became the yardstick for the national “standard of living.”

the nation could simply focus on making money, and happiness would follow like day follows night.

the voice of Thomas Jefferson, who, in developing the constitutional Bill of Rights, replaced the right to “property” with a right to the “pursuit of happiness.” But since happiness is hard to measure, we use GDP.

Unfortunately, not only is there little correlation between happiness and a nation’s total throughput of goods and services, there may be an inverse relationship.

Today, GDP could be seen as a significant driver of unhappiness.

why don’t we try harder to measure happiness itself? This is exactly what the people of Bhutan have been doing since 1972. Gross National Happiness, as they call it, has set off a global effort to adapt the measurement for international use.

Gallup has phoned a minimum of one thousand adults at random to inquire about indicators such as eating habits, stress levels, wellness records, emotional states, and job satisfaction. They estimate that disengaged workers are costing the country a whopping $300 billion each year in productivity losses. They found that American workers are increasingly unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their companies, and disengaged from their work.

California District 14, otherwise known as Silicon Valley, a well-known bastion of workaholism. A not-uncommon workweek in District 14 is 80 hours, and it’s mostly voluntary.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me,” said Steve Jobs. “Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”

1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It was based on a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. He theorized that human beings tend to work their way from physiological needs, such as air, food, and water at the bottom of the pyramid, up to self-actualization, including spontaneity and creativity, at the top of the pyramid.

1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” It was based on a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. He theorized that human beings tend to work their way from physiological needs, such as air, food, and water at the bottom of the pyramid, up to self-actualization, including spontaneity and creativity, at the top of the pyramid. Self-actualization is a privilege that must be earned,

When eudaimonia is blocked, either by companies or society, human creativity goes underground.

In the headlong pursuit of productivity, the Industrial Age managed to take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business,

In the headlong pursuit of productivity, the Industrial Age managed to take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business, and the beauty out of everyday life.

The demands of the assembly line produced not only uniform products, but uniform people as well. There was virtually one kind of education, one sort of social behavior, one basic religion, one acceptable gender orientation, and one view of work.

The operating metaphor of the 20th century was the factory, so it follows that the goal of education was to assemble graduates as efficiently as Ford assembled cars.

Education today is now a streamlined process based on maximum throughput (the highest number of graduates), extreme efficiency (the fewest number of instructors), and reliable metrics (easy-to-grade standardized tests).

Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of hard-to-measure areas such as creativity, interpersonal abilities, emotional maturity, and resilience, which have been de-prioritized in the interests of efficiency.

Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised if we’ve created a society of oddly unimaginative and uncultured people.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with fact-based knowledge and rote skills. These are useful and necessary tools for success. But in an era of massive change and daunting challenges, we need more than rote skills. We need the ability to think and act in new ways to ensure

As researchers are quick to point out, it’s precisely these hard-to-measure areas of intelligence that make for great leaders and successful human beings.

‘I bought a bus and it sank.’”

Ammon had an argument with the god Theuth about the new invention of writing, saying it would destroy society. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by a means of external marks.” This, he said, “will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.”

the spread of literacy has clearly reduced our reliance on memory.

If you could easily pull a farmer’s almanac down from your shelf, you didn’t have to remember the exact rainfall probabilities for June. If you could walk to the public library, you could borrow a book on the Peloponnesian War rather than tracking down an expert who had memorized every battle.

The amount of knowledge we’ve accumulated since the invention of writing is too big to fit in a biological brain. We need Google and Wikipedia and other organizations to collect, store, and organize our knowledge, not only to access it, but just to make sense of it.

Psychologist Carl Jung proposed the collective unconscious as a way to understand our inherited, unconscious memory of human experience.

Today the Internet seems to be creating a collective conscious, a shared memory that exists outside of our physical brains. It might be even argued that the collective conscious is a fourth brain that we’re adding on top of the three brains we already have.

Today the Internet seems to be creating a collective conscious, a shared memory that exists outside of our physical brains.

might be even argued that the collective conscious is a fourth brain that we’re adding on top of the three brains we already have.

Paul McLean in the early 1990s. He theorized that evolution equipped us with three brains, one grown over the other, which he labeled the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex.

reptilian brain, or “lizard brain,” first appeared in fish about 500 million years ago, and reached its apex in reptiles about 150 milllion years ago. It works well at a simple level, but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive.

the limbic brain, or “dog brain.” This is the seat of value judgments, mostly unconscious and emotional, that have a powerful say over how we behave.

the neocortex or “human brain.” The neocortex showed up in primates two or three millions years ago, and gave us the flexible learning abilities that allowed the building of sophisticated technologies and complex cultures.

Evolution moves too slowly for us. So we’re taking evolution into our own hands, so to speak, building ourselves a shared artificial brain. And just as our hands had been freed to make tools when we emerged from the trees, our minds are now being freed to think in more creative ways

This higher-level understanding is the realm of metacognitive skills, or metaskills for short. They act more like guiding principles than specific steps, so they can be transferred from one situation to another without losing their effectiveness.

Metaskills determine the how to, not the what to. They form the basis of what Americans call know-how, and what the French call savoir-faire, “to know to do.”

by nature, skills are harder to measure than academic knowledge. It’s easier to check the correctness of math answers, for example, than the quality of thought that went into them. It’s as if we believe metaskills enter the body by osmosis. “You may never use calculus,” the argument goes, “but the experience will teach you how to solve logical problems.”

The world doesn’t want human robots. It wants creative people with exceptional imagination and vision—and standardized testing won’t get us there.

If problem solving is important, why not teach it as a metasubject, and use calculus, statistics, philosophy, physics, debate, and other subjects as expressions of it?

The Institute of the Future, on behalf of the Apollo Research Institute, took a long look at the workplace of tomorrow. They issued a document called “Future Work Skills 2020,” which identified these six drivers of change: 1. Extreme longevity. Medical advances are steadily increasing the human lifespan, which will change the nature of work and learning. People will work longer and change jobs more often, requiring lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning. 2. The rise of smart machines and systems. Automation is nudging human workers out of jobs that are based on rote, repetitive tasks. 3. Computational world. Massive increases in the number and variety of sensors and processors will turn the world into a programmable system. As the amount of data increases exponentially, many new roles will need computational thinking skills. 4. New media ecology. New communication tools are requiring media literacies beyond writing. Knowledge workers will be asked to design presentations, make models, and tell stories using video and interactivity.

The Institute of the Future, on behalf of the Apollo Research Institute, took a long look at the workplace of tomorrow. They issued a document called “Future Work Skills 2020,” which identified these six drivers of change:

Extreme longevity. Medical advances are steadily increasing the human lifespan, which will change the nature of work and learning. People will work longer and change jobs more often, requiring lifelong learning, unlearning, and relearning.

2. The rise of smart machines and systems. Automation is nudging human workers out of jobs that are based on rote, repetitive tasks.

3. Computational world. Massive increases in the number and variety of sensors and processors will turn the world into a programmable system. As the amount of data increases exponentially, many new roles will need computational thinking skills.

4. New media ecology. New communication tools are requiring media literacies beyond writing. Knowledge workers will be asked to design presentations, make models, and tell stories using video and interactivity.

5. Superstructed organizations. Social technologies are driving new forms of production and value creation. Superstructing means working at the extreme opposites of scale, either at very large scales or at very small scales.

6. Globally connected world. Increased interconnectivity is putting diversity and adaptability at the center of organizational operations. People who can work in different cultures, and work virtually, will deliver extra value to companies.

metaskills such as sense-making, determining the deeper meaning of what is being expressed;

future scenarios will demand metaskills such as sense-making, determining the deeper meaning of what is being expressed; social intelligence, the ability to connect with others; adaptive thinking, the ability to imagine solutions beyond the rote; a design mindset, the ability to prototype innovative outcomes; and cognitive load management, the ability to filter out nonessential information and focus on the essential problem at hand.

In Florence during the Renaissance, the archetype of l’uomo universale, the universal man, was born. The “Renaissance Man” was a person well-versed in all branches of knowledge, and capable of innovation in most of them.

There’s a growing recognition that the great advances of the future will come not from a single man or woman, but from the concentrated effort of a group.

“None of us are as smart as all of us.”

“None of us are as smart as all of us.” Yet to activate the creativity of a group—whether it’s a team, a company, a community, or a nation—we’ll need to bring our best selves to the party.

We’ll need to come with our skills, our metaskills, and our full humanity. In the postindustrial era, success will no longer hinge on promotion or job titles or advanced degrees. It will hinge on mastery.

What metaskills do is democratize creativity, spreading the responsibility for change more evenly and building a stronger middle class—the best-known

What metaskills do is democratize creativity, spreading the responsibility for change more evenly and building a stronger middle class—the best-known engine for economic growth.

A few creative specialists stashed here and there in the back rooms of our organizations won’t be enough to crack complex problems like environmental responsibility, sustainable energy, or food production for seven billion people.

These are called “wicked problems.” A wicked problem is any puzzle so persistent, pervasive, or slippery that it can seem insoluble. You can never really “solve” a wicked problem. You can only work through it.

Design as a distinct profession emerged only in the 20th century. It came out of the divide-and-conquer approach to production, in which one broke a complex process into its constituent parts so that each part could be studied and streamlined. Before that, designing was part of a general activity that included problem solving, form giving, and execution. When it finally became a discipline in its own right, with its own professional organizations and special history, design became more detached from the industrial world that spawned it.

If you want to innovate, you have to design. Design and design thinking—as opposed to business thinking—is the core process that must be mastered to build a culture of nonstop innovation.

The problem with traditional business thinking is that it has only two steps—knowing and doing. You “know” something, either from past experience or business theory, then you do something. You put your knowledge directly into practice. Yet if you limit yourself to what you already know, your maneuver will necessarily be timid or imitative. Traditional business thinking has no way of de-risking bold ideas, so it simply avoids them. This is not a recipe for innovation but for sameness.

between knowing and doing called making. Making is the process of imagining and prototyping solutions that weren’t on the table before. While this concept is easy to grasp, it’s difficult to practice.

since true innovation is not a best practice, it sets off alarm bells in the boardroom: “If no one has done this before,” the executive asks, “why should we take a chance? Why not just wait until someone else tries it, then jump on board if it works?”

Of course you can, if your goal is to follow. But if your goal is to lead, you have to embrace design.

A designer is simply someone who doesn’t take yes for an answer—a person who searches for better and better solutions to what could be, when others are satisfied with what

A designer is simply someone who doesn’t take yes for an answer—a person who searches for better and better solutions to what could be, when others are satisfied with what is.

Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, “A designer is anyone who works to change an existing situation into a preferred one.”

“Designers are in the miracle business,” says Dr. Carl Hodges, founder of the Seawater Foundation. He’s not intimidated by what is. He’s an innovative scientist who’s using the rise in sea level caused by global warming to turn coastal deserts into agricultural Edens.

“Design can bring back value where it has been sucked completely dry by commoditization.”

It wasn’t just knowing that brought us to this stage of our evolution—it was making. Our ability to make and use tools, starting with simple hammers and axes, and moving to spears, brushes, needles, grinding stones, and horticultural tools, came from a two-way conversation between our brains and our hands.

our hands made our brains as much as our brains controlled our hands.

Language unleashed a torrent of creativity, including the invention of new tools, music, art, and mythmaking, plus enough survival and navigational skills to migrate thousands of miles from Africa to Europe and Australia. Without language, it seems, our culture would have been constrained to very slow progress indeed.

the two millennia since Plato, and especially during the last 500 years after the Renaissance, academic education in the West has been successful in separating the hand from the brain. We’ve decided that making things is less valuable than knowing things, and therefore making has a less exalted place in the classroom. This is not only wrong, but it denies the very evolutionary advantage that makes us human.

our knowing muscles seem overdeveloped while our making muscles seem atrophied.

These are the five talents—the metaskills—that I believe will serve us best in an age of nonstop innovation: Feeling, including intuition, empathy, and social intelligence.

Seeing, or the ability to think whole thoughts, also known as systems thinking.

Dreaming, the metaskill of applied imagination.

Making, or mastering the design process, including skills for devising prototypes.

Learning, the autodidactic ability to learn new skills at will. Learning is the opposable thumb of the five talents, since it can be used in combination with the other four.

The bright thread that weaves through all five metaskills is aesthetics, a set of sensory-based principles that can stitch together the new and the beautiful.

One advantage of computers is that they never get emotional. They’re not misled by their dreams or desires.

evolution equipped us to think like computers?

If the ability to make fast, accurate calculations is so valuable, why hasn’t evolution equipped us to think like computers?

amazing feats of mathematical savants like Daniel Tammet. Tammet can do cube roots quicker than a computer and recite pi out to 22,514 decimal places. He can multiply any number by any number, and learn languages as easily as others learn capital cities. He can read two books simultaneously, one with each eye, and recall the details of all 7,600 books he’s read so far.

“Savants usually have had some kind of brain damage.” However, he says, “I think it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities.”

We have to consider the possibility that computerlike thinking is not central to our success on Earth;

Even today, if you inject your feelings into a business conversation, you can almost watch your credibility leaving the room. This is too bad, since we now know that our emotions are far smarter than our rational brain for handling complex tasks.

Sigmund Freud likened the ego and the id—the emotional brain and the rational brain—to a horse and rider. “The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it.”

Freud often advised his patients to “hold their horses” rather than “give free rein” to their emotions. Scientists have long speculated on

Freud often advised his patients to “hold their horses” rather than “give free rein” to their emotions.

Scientists have long speculated on why a particular area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is larger in humans than in other primates. Freud might have guessed that its purpose was to protect us from the animal instincts of our emotions. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, however, we can see that the purpose of the OFC is actually the opposite—its job is to connect us with our emotions. It turns out that the more evolved a species is, the more emotional it is.

Our feelings are central to our learning, our intuition, and our empathy. They allow us to make sense of rich data sets that our rational brains are not equipped to comprehend.

Emotion was less than welcome on the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. But in the creative labs of the Robotic Age it’s essential. Feeling is a prerequisite for the process

Emotion was less than welcome on the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. But in the creative labs of the Robotic Age it’s essential.

learning as the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, or habits.

Whenever we get a jolt of joy, fear, happiness, or sadness, our brain rewires itself, building neurological pathways that connect the emotion back to the sensory signal.

we’re learning how to make predictions about ourselves and the world.

emotions are so smart is that they’ve evolved to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

Errors create emotional events that the brain can easily remember.

failure triggers an emotion that we remember as knowledge.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with intuition: It takes many hours of trial and error before we can trust it, yet if we don’t trust it we’ll never develop

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with intuition: It takes many hours of trial and error before we can trust it, yet if we don’t trust it we’ll never develop it.

Industrial Age has been particularly hard on intuition, rewarding people who stick to the script over those who “waste time”

These are the nonlogical processes that help us to “know,” not through reasoning, but through judgment, decision, or action. Learning expert Donald Schön called this process “reflection in action,” because this type of knowledge doesn’t come from books but from the conversational back and forth of doing.

Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, he and his team noticed that the neurons needed for a given task would automatically fire in the brain of one monkey as it observed another monkey performing the same task.

This gave rise to speculation about a “monkey see, monkey do” gene in humans. Whenever we see someone else smile, our mirror neurons light up as if we ourselves were smiling.

When empathy breaks down, actual war becomes possible as we redefine our enemies as less human than ourselves.

The behavior-mirroring part of the brain may be largely responsible for our ability to interpret the thoughts and feelings of others. We call this ability empathy. In a world with seven billion people, empathy has become a valuable commodity. It lets us work together to achieve results we couldn’t achieve separately.

And it allows us to live together in relative peace, based on mutual respect for one another.

Our ancestors may not have agreed on the ethics of eating someone else’s dinner, but they most certainly knew you didn’t push your best friend from the top of a tree.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer pointed out that psychopaths aren’t the ones who can’t manage to behave rationally. They’re the ones who can only behave rationally. Their emotional brains have been damaged.

Here’s a research question taken from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, revealing the limitations of intuition:

Linda is single, outspoken, and very bright. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. Which is more probable? 1) Linda is a bank teller. Or 2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Number two, you say? If so, your intuition is working perfectly. But your conclusion is perfectly wrong. There’s no way that number two could be more probable, because it’s more limiting. If Linda happens to be active in the feminist movement, she fits description number one as well as number two.

But if Linda is not active in the feminist movement, she’s eliminated from number two. Don’t feel bad if you blew it. A full 85% of Stanford business students, steeped in probabilities, were tricked by this question. This is merely

But if Linda is not active in the feminist movement, she’s eliminated from number two. Don’t feel bad if you blew it. A full 85% of Stanford business students, steeped in probabilities, were tricked by this question.

one variety of cognitive bias, a large category of logical pitfalls that play havoc with our intuition. Other traps include negativity bias, in which bad is perceived to be stronger than good;

the gambler’s fallacy, or believing in “streaks” or in “being due” when no such possibilities exist;

hindsight bias, the illusion that we “knew it all along”;

anchoring effect, causing us to weigh a single piece of evidence far too heavily; belief bias, in which we evaluate an argument based on the believability of its conclusion; and the availability heuristic, which causes us to estimate the likelihood of something according to what is more available in memory, favoring events that are vivid or emotionally charged.

She proves it by asking her students to clip cartoons out of magazines. She then has them separate the captions from the pictures, making one pile of captions and one of pictures. When the students connect the captions and pictures randomly, they’re surprised to find that at least half of them are still funny.

“Creating meaning is an automatic process.”

A common example of this is how we manage to drive to work while thinking about what to say at the morning meeting. When we get to work we can barely remember our commute.

Your dopamine cells have been trained to recognize words more easily than colors, and only a superhuman effort by your pre-frontal cortex can contradict the training of your emotional brain.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor whose Hungarian name is more fun to pronounce than it seems (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee). He’s a founder of positive psychology and author of a series of books on flow,

work. The second is Tor Nørretranders, Denmark’s leading science writer, whose book The User Illusion

Your mind is part of your intellect. Intellect is a conscious ability to understand things, or to reach conclusions about what is true or real in the world.

But in reality your intellect is a seamless integration of your conscious mind, your physical body, and your environment.

Western philosophy has tended to separate intellect from behavior, as if your mind and body were two separate entities.

Psychologist Howard Gardner defines it as “a biopsychological potential to process information,”

a way to solve problems or create products in a cultural setting. Creativity, the subject of this book, is a special quality of your intellect. Where the real mystery is, however, is consciousness. Generally speaking, consciousness is the subjective experience of being awake and aware.

The fact is, most of the brain is engaged in unglamorous but crucial work like bodily metabolism, glandular functions, muscle control, and the sensations we get from touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, and motion.

According to psychologists, we can only hold a maximum of four “items”—thoughts or sensations—in our conscious mind at the same time.

race driver Vitaly Petrov, “Playing with all the steering-wheel dials at 300 kilometers per hour will be, I guess, like answering three Blackberry messages while making fried eggs and doing your shoelaces at the same time. We’ll see how it goes.” In the US Air Force, test pilots have a warning about this: “Wheels up, IQ down.”

Luckily, we have a powerful mechanism to turn this severely constrained bandwidth to our advantage. It’s called attention. By tuning out most of the information we receive, we can focus on what’s immediately useful. This is particularly important for anyone learning a skill or practicing a craft.

The objects we perceive “out there” are based on real things, but our experience of them is an illusion we create in our minds so we can make sense of them.

Humphrey believes Descartes got it slightly wrong. Replication, he says, is not what theaters are about. Theaters are places where events are staged to comment on the world, not replicate it. They exist to educate, persuade, and entertain.

evolutionary advantage on the human race. It spells the difference between truly wanting to exist and merely having some sort of life instinct. “When you want something,” he says, “you tend to engage in rational actions—flexible, intelligent behavior—to achieve

Humphrey makes a guess that this enhanced level of consciousness evolved during the Upper Paleolithic revolution—the same period in which we began painting in caves. While anthropologists view the paintings, carvings, tools, and weapons of early humans as functional, it’s now clear that part of their function was to delight the senses.

We can’t simply unveil our experiences or hand them over to be experienced in the same way.

the bifurcation of art and science. Up until the Renaissance, art and science were two sides of the same coin. The arts were toughened up by the rigor and rationality of science, and science was set free by the intuition and imagination of the arts. Today they work in separate buildings and are mutually impoverished by the separation.

Leonardo da Vinci, the great genius of art and science, was the personification of Renaissance creativity. He was also a homosexual, a vegetarian, and an anticlerical—at a time when the Catholic Church had spread its sinewy tentacles throughout Europe and looked askance at such proclivities.

100,000 drawings and 13,000 pages of mirror writing (all the better to discourage prying eyes). He never shared these with his contemporaries, fearing, among other things, that his livelihood might be compromised.

Leonardo’s assistant and occasional lover, erstwhile Francesco Melzi, ended up with the bulk of his estate, which included the full set of notebooks.

unceremoniously dumped the notebooks into chests in the attic.

Whenever curiosity seekers turned up at the villa, Orazio let them walk out with whatever they wanted. Any materials that were left were eventually scattered across Europe,

Whenever curiosity seekers turned up at the villa, Orazio let them walk out with whatever they wanted. Any materials that were left were eventually scattered across Europe, their significance underestimated

Whenever curiosity seekers turned up at the villa, Orazio let them walk out with whatever they wanted. Any materials that were left were eventually scattered across Europe, their significance underestimated and their author forgotten.

One of the best known notebooks is the Codex Leicester. It contains theories and observations about astronomy, geology, and hydraulics. Leonardo explains that the pale glow in the dark part of the crescent moon is due to sunlight reflecting off the earth, presaging Johannes Kepler by a hundred years.

He tackles the mechanics of water with detailed drawings of how rivers flow around rocks and other obstacles, adding recommendations on how to build bridges and deal with erosion.

So now we place science and art in separate categories. We want science to explain the truth of things, and art to express the experience of things. Put another way, science carefully excludes feelings, while art draws them out.

intended, and revealed his secrets to the nascent

Yet during the ascendance of Newtonian science after the Renaissance, something more happened. Educated people began believing that science was the only source of truth.

Sperienza—or experience—was the starting point for Leonardo’s knowledge. In making drawings of the objects and movements of nature, he was able to experience them as heightened reality, to own them in ways that merely looking doesn’t allow.

There’s something special that happens between the hand and the brain in drawing—and between the body and the brain by moving through space—that creates meaning.

“The infant immediately starts exploring the world, looking, feeling, touching, smelling,” he says. “Sensation alone is not enough; it must be combined with movement, with emotion, with action. Movement and sensation together become the antecedent of meaning.”

What captivated Leonardo’s interest was the dynamics of nature—the way water swirls or wind travels, the way sound moves through air, how organic forms unfold and grow.

Fritjof Capra, in his book The Science of Leonardo, notes that the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics, also known as complexity theory, may just be that tool. Meanwhile, we have a chance to reunite science and art through the discipline of design. Modern science is already forging ahead with synthetic biology,

They’re like church members who make hefty donations so they can feel more spiritual. If you listen to exchanges between art collectors and art dealers, you’re unlikely to hear any conversations about craft, meaning, or purpose. Instead, you’ll hear endless gossip about who knows whom or what someone paid or who’s showing where.

There’s very little talk about the beauty of an algorithm, the rapture of an architectural space, or the elegance of a phrase.

in James’s time, industrial America was busy creating just that kind of world for factory workers. The ideal employee was one with no emotional response, an automaton who could be satisfied with the soul-deadening repetition of a command-and-control business structure.

world—we’re still struggling to escape their legacy. Billboards, strip malls, traffic jams, factory farms, landfills, and housing projects are either concepts or consequences of a mass-production mindset.

If that’s ugliness, what’s beauty? Can beauty be defined? Or is analysis impossible, like cutting a kitten in half to see why it’s cute?

While we can certainly encounter an object or have an experience that gives us mild satisfaction—say, a nicely sculpted vase or a well-crafted melody—true beauty has something more going for it: memorability. Memorability is almost always the result of sudden emotion—the jarring pop of disrupted expectations. The pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction that follows this pop can be experienced as a warm glow, a slowly spreading smile, or the hair standing up on our arms.

to align with its purpose. If the purpose of a carafe is to pour liquid cleanly into a glass, then “rightness” may demand a certain shape of spout, a certain type and position of handle, and a certain proportion of interior space for the liquid.

You might think after ten thousand years of making carafes we would have this down, but we don’t. Many of the carafes, pitchers, and measuring cups on the market still pour badly, sloshing out their contents or dripping liquid down the sides.

Organizations can also suffer from a lack of rightness. Either they’re missing a clear, compelling purpose, or they haven’t aligned their activities with their purpose,

Inelegance plus a lack of rightness, when taken to an extreme, is the essence of kitsch.

Elegance, the third component of beauty, has been subverted by the fashion industry to mean luxury or overdecoration. Yet it really means the opposite.

An elegant dress, in this definition, would be the simplest dress that achieves the purpose of flattering one’s figure, or bringing out one’s personality, or signaling a certain position in a social setting. Any extra elements or unneeded decoration would be examples of inelegance.

Inelegance plus a lack of rightness, when taken to an extreme, is the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is delightful in its way, because it usually contains surprise. We’re delighted to find a table lamp made from a stuffed iguana, or a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pietá that doubles as an alarm clock. But beauty it ain’t. So most kitsch ends up in attics and landfills after the original surprise has faded.

Rightness and elegance, by contrast, require a little work to appreciate. And they last much longer and tend to retain their value. The original Pietá, sans clock, is more likely to stand the test of time than the kitschy copy.

Beauty can be experienced in almost any aspect of human life—a nail driven perfectly into wood, onions sautéed to perfection, dancing in perfect synchronization to music. Optimal closure gives an object or an activity its greatest power, for

Beauty can be experienced in almost any aspect of human life—a nail driven perfectly into wood, onions sautéed to perfection, dancing in perfect synchronization to music. Optimal closure gives an object or an activity its greatest power, for it admits of no extraneous perceptions.”

Another example is the software I used to write this book. Microsoft Word is the standard for word processing, but it falls short on all three counts. It doesn’t offer surprise along any particular dimension. It also lacks rightness, since its features are not well aligned with its basic purpose of helping me convey my thoughts in text. And it’s devoid of elegance, since there are far more features than I’ll ever need, including overeager ones that try to “correct” my writing, requiring me to correct the corrections as I go.

In the Industrial Age, beauty might have mattered less than it does today, since people were often thrilled just to have the basic item at a price they could afford. But now that customers have more

In the Industrial Age, beauty might have mattered less than it does today, since people were often thrilled just to have the basic item at a price they could afford. But now that customers have more choices, beauty has become the tiebreaker in many categories. BMW’S Mini Cooper is not beautiful in the traditional automotive sense of sleek or luxurious, but it’s beautiful in the surprise-rightness-elegance sense. It’s surprisingly small in a market dominated by hulking SUVS; it has rightness, focusing its features and communications like a laser on providing a fun experience; and it accomplishes all this with an elegant, low-cost design.

My own definition of aesthetics is this: the study of sensory and emotive values for the purpose of appreciating and creating beauty.

Using aesthetic tools just to use them is aimless—like using kitchen tools just because you find them in the drawer.

When content and form are well matched, the combination can seem iconic, a marriage made in heaven.

the cake may remind you of happy birthdays from your childhood, giving you the warm glow that comes from feeling loved. Or it may impart a feeling of wistfulness, because it happens to be your birthday, and after thirty years of struggling you had hoped to achieve more with your life. These are the associations the cake is triggering—influencing the meanings you take from it and the reason it matters to you.

Does that mean we can dispense with formal beauty and just create things that people can connect with on a meaning level? Sure. We do it all the time. We produce cartloads of kitsch, floods of fashion, torrents of tribal identifiers such as logo products, lot-filling “luxury” homes, me-too tattoos, derivative genre music, and trendy personal electronics that help us fit into the groups of our choice. But the satisfaction we get from these objects is often shallow and fleeting, and eventually we wonder if there might be something more.

We can marvel at everyday things, like the asymmetrical placement of an upper story window, or the roughness of chipped paint on a child’s toy, or the sound of a delicate cymbal floating over a gruff bass line.

We start to demand more from the things we buy, the people we take up with, the experiences we give ourselves.

Using aesthetics, we learn to separate the authentic from the fake, the pure from the polluted, the courageous from the timid.

Good taste is the promise and the payoff of aesthetics. And like beauty, good taste can’t be bought.

Good taste has long been considered a quality that existed mostly in the eye of the beholder.

The Romans had a saying for it: “De gustibus non est disputandum,” or “About taste there’s no argument.” But this isn’t completely true. While there’s a wide range of what might be considered good taste, it doesn’t stretch on forever. There’s such a thing as bad taste, too, and most of us know it when we see

The education of the eye and other senses is what separates those with good taste from those with ordinary or bad taste. This is not snobbishness. It’s a recognition that you have to work to develop good taste, and it’s mostly in the area of understanding formal principles.

Howard Gardner writes about it in his book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: “All young people will acquire and exhibit aesthetic preferences. But only those who are exposed to a range of works of art, who observe how these works of art are produced, who understand something about the artist behind the works, and who encounter thoughtful discussion of issues of craft and taste are likely to develop an aesthetic sense that goes beyond schlock or transcends what happens to be most popular among peers at the moment.”

In other words, good taste is learned through conscious effort.

Without an educated sense of aesthetics, your appreciation of beauty is likely to fall nearer the left side, toward objects that are high in associative meaning, but low in formal excellence.

This favors “tribal aesthetics,” or a preference for the symbols that identify people with a certain group. For example, the Harley-Davidson trademark does not contain truly beautiful formal qualities, but its associations make it beautiful to members of the Harley tribe.

Those with a greater degree of aesthetic education can more easily separate the formal elements from their personal associations, so that the formal elements can be appreciated—to

ability of some graphic designers to appreciate the formal properties of the Nazi flag, with its bold shapes and strong colors, while still being horrified by its associations.

The primary illusion of music is time, unfolding moment by moment in a rhythmic sequence of notes, melodies, and movements.

the primary illusion of storytelling is memory, as if the past can be perfectly reproduced in the present.

It’s important to remember that in any artistic pursuit—whether painting, playing music, writing software, building a business, or constructing a scientific theory—aesthetic choices are never right or wrong, just better or

It’s important to remember that in any artistic pursuit—whether painting, playing music, writing software, building a business, or constructing a scientific theory—aesthetic choices are never right or wrong, just better or worse.

the fact that aesthetics is approximate doesn’t mean that artistic knowing is less important than scientific knowing.

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality. Lately it’s been

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality. Lately it’s been fashionable to suggest that aesthetic judgment comes preloaded into the

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize

The process of knowing by comparing is called analogical intelligence. The difference is that, for professionals, the basis for comparison is locked into their intuition through experience. They don’t need multiple choice to recognize quality.

Later, as adults, people seem to prefer faces that are regular rather than those that are asymmetrical or unusual. They also seem to prefer scenes of nature to abstract art. (My dentist would be happy to hear it.)

What science should question instead is why so many adults can’t see aesthetic differences and don’t have an adequate framework for critiquing beauty.

My wife and I got hooked on a TV series called House Hunters International. Maybe you’ve seen it. In each half-hour program, would-be expats choose among three properties based on a wish list they’ve given to their agents (which is always bigger than their budget).

There are no parameters concerning the quality of the light, the authenticity of the materials, or the relationship of the house to its surroundings.

Yet in the end, it’s obvious that the buyers base their decisions mostly on their feelings. If all that mattered was the size of the rooms, they could just bring a measuring tape.

What actually matters, beyond basics such as price, is the beauty that they believe will give meaning to their lives. It’s just that they don’t have the vocabulary to express it.

Question: If average people aren’t conversant with beauty or the qualities that determine it, why should designers and other professionals bother with aesthetics? Answer: Because average people are deeply affected by beauty, whether of not they’re conscious of

What’s the solution: reduce technology, or give up brand share? Neither. The solution is to use empathy—the ability to recognize how other people feel—to design technologies,

Europe-based Ryanair has defined its competitive advantage solely in terms of low price (or at least the illusion of low price). Every decision the company makes is aimed at reducing costs while keeping as much of the profit as possible. The prices of their flights are low—sometimes as low as one penny for a return ticket—but there are hidden costs, including fairly high emotional costs.

The seats are closer together than the usual “pitch” of other airline seating, and they don’t recline, so your knees are pushing into the hard plastic back of the seat in front of you. Maybe it simply feels more cramped,

The seats are closer together than the usual “pitch” of other airline seating, and they don’t recline, so your knees are pushing into the hard plastic back of the seat in front of you. Maybe it simply feels more cramped, because the tops of all the seat backs are shiny yellow plastic, creating a visual foreshortening as if the seatbacks were a garish deck of cards standing on edge.

the plastic safety card is right in front of you, glued to the back of the seat (to save on cleaning and replacement costs).

President Michael O’Leary has suggested getting rid of two toilets to make room for six more seats; redesigning the planes so passengers can fly standing up; charging extra for overweight passengers; and asking passengers to carry their checked-in bags to the plane themselves. “Just kidding,” he said. But he would like to charge admission for the toilets. It’s part of Ryanair’s commitment to low prices.

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques. A few years ago my wife and I inherited a Nespresso machine

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques. A few years ago my wife and I inherited a Nespresso machine as part of a house purchase in France.

Swiss food giant Nestlé has tapped into a different kind of emotion with its sleek Nespresso coffee-brewing system. The idea is simple: a home appliance that brews espresso from single-serving “pods” of ground coffee.

Nestlé uses a razor-and-blades pricing strategy, in which most of the profit comes from continuous purchases of the pods rather than the machines themselves. The pods are only available to “members” of the Nespresso Club through its website or its 200 boutiques.

product displays, and packaging had more in common with Tiffany’s than Starbucks. Multihued coffee capsules glowed like jewels against dark wood paneling. Catalogs with the production values of coffee table books were positioned in soft pools of light. Clearly, this was a company that had a vision for its brand.

Why wouldn’t they simply buy one of the competing offerings from Sara Lee, Kraft, or Mars? The secret, once again, is empathy. The Nespresso designers were able to “feel” what it might be like join an exclusive Nespresso tribe. Instead of putting costs first, they put customer delight first, then engineered the pricing model to fit customer expectations.

True, the capsules are costly. But customers are buying much more than coffee. They’re buying something that can’t be measured, counted, or even described. Thanks to a well-crafted experience and a slew of patents to keep competitors out, the Nespresso brand has logged sales increases of 30% per year over a ten-year period. Those patents, however, are expiring, and customers are free to buy cut-rate capsules from a number of other sources. Will some of them defect? Sure, because money matters. But the most valuable segment of customers, the Nespresso loyalists, will continue to support the company because of the emotional benefits that come with membership in the original tribe.

In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun has correctly noted that innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their technical specs. Instead, they’re rejected because of how they make people feel.

One of the last century’s leading architects, Le Corbusier, made a colossal error of judgment when he set out to design a new approach to public housing. Instead of using his emotional brain to focus on the feelings of inhabitants, he used his rational brain to focus on the possibilities of the buildings. He envisioned people as interchangeable parts in a system, inputs to a “machine for living.”

Informed by a rigid Modernist ideology, the theories were bracing but the results appalling: geometric clusters of identical stacked cells, devoid of emotional benefits such as individuality, historical reference, or a connection to nature. Most of these projects ended up as “dirty towers on windswept lots,” as critic Tom Lacayo put it, “the kinds of places we have been critiquing in recent years with dynamite.”

Contrast this with the Katrina Cottages designed by Marianne Cusato. In response to the emergency housing needs of Hurricane Katrina victims, she developed plans for small traditional-style houses that can be built quickly for the cost of an emergency trailer. The 300-square-foot interiors feel surprisingly spacious (this is a nice size room), thanks to their nine-foot ceilings and thoughtful floor plans.

Their front porches encourage interaction with neighbors, and the original structures can be expanded when the owners’ insurance money comes in. There’s no emotional sacrifice to be made with these houses, since they tap into deep associations with family, community, and tradition. And on a strictly formal level, their proportions are sensible and satisfying. As a result, some people who could afford custom architecture are using the Katrina plans to build their vacation homes and guest houses. The success of the Katrina Cottages has led Cusato to design a 1700-square-foot version, called a New Economy Home, in the same traditional style. She sees it as an antidote to the “McMansion,” the feature-laden but inauthentic architecture of the 1990s that exudes all the charm of a checklist.

In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun has correctly noted that innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their technical specs. Instead, they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. “If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.” This applies equally to coffee brands, airlines, and online shoe stores. It also applies to residential architecture. One of the last century’s leading architects, Le Corbusier, made a colossal error of judgment when he set out to design a new approach to public housing. Instead of using his emotional brain to focus on the feelings of inhabitants, he used his rational brain to focus on the possibilities of the buildings. He envisioned people as interchangeable parts in a system, inputs to a “machine for living.”

Cusato hopes to remedy this situation by promoting an alternative vision for living, one that gets people out of the house and into the neighborhood. Would you really need your own cinema, exercise room, lavish kitchen, and large yard if you had theaters, gyms, restaurants, and parks all within walking distance?

Empathy, like morality and responsibility, spirals outward as it grows. It starts with caring for oneself, expands to include one’s family, then friends, then community, then region, then nation, then the world and all of nature.

The highest level of empathy takes all these circles into consideration.

The metaskill of feeling, the ability to draw on human emotion for intuition, aesthetics, and empathy, is a talent that’s becoming more and more vital as we move into the Robotic Age.

Naturally, there will always be home buyers who measure taste by the square foot, and developers and architects willing to cater to them. Knowing what buyers want does take a certain level of empathy, but it’s a fairly narrow definition of the concept. What a buyer wants may not be what the community wants, or even what the buyer needs.

technical skills are merely an entry-level requirement for most jobs. What lifts some people to the status of stars are their social skills.

A UC Berkeley study followed a group of PhD students in science and technology over a 40-year period. It turned out that EI abilities “were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige by the end of their careers.”

You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you can’t connect with people, you’ll be relegated to the sidelines.

our technology needs to come from a place of empathy and not from a place of fear, greed, or laziness. It has to make personal interactions more personal, not less.

Confirmation bias is a tendency to prefer evidence that fits what we already believe, blocking out any “inconvenient truths” with a mechanism known as perceptual defense.

So our view of reality is not so much a product of what we can perceive, but of what we do perceive.

Our emotional brain is happy with this state of affairs, because it prefers to make decisions that feel right. They feel right because we’ve trained our brain through constant repetition, like training a dog to sit, come, or heel.

Culture produces stories that bind people together, allowing them to function as a team, a family, a group, a company, a community, or a nation. Stories are helpful when they make our lives easier, but harmful when they keep us from the truth.

Once we identify with a culture or an ideology, our rationality can easily become a liability, allowing us to justify almost any belief.

The artist Goya fretted that “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” meaning that unchecked emotions can lead to nightmare behaviors. Yet the sleep of emotion also produces monsters.

We think of sociopaths as people who can’t control their emotions, but it’s actually the opposite. Sociopaths are people with damaged emotional brains.

language of Western culture, and are right up front in the philosophies of Eastern culture. In the simplest sense, systems thinking is the ability to contemplate the whole, not just the parts. It’s the metaskill I call seeing. Seeing let’s you hold your beliefs lightly as you seek deeper truths about the world and how it works. For PhDs: The

When it’s important to get things right, we try to replace our beliefs with actual knowledge.” To replace beliefs with

When it’s important to get things right, we try to replace our beliefs with actual knowledge.”

The only path to profound knowledge, the kind of knowledge you’ll need to make a difference in the Robotic Age, is proficiency with systems thinking.

Most people can’t draw what they see. When they use a pencil to transfer an object or a scene onto a sheet of paper, they tend to draw not what they see but what they know. Or at least what they think they know. So a sketch of a face ends up looking like a Cubist sculpture, and a drawing of a street scene looks like primitive folk art.

The mind likes simple choices, and it loves a choice between opposites. “Either/or” propositions are so prevalent we hardly question them. But we should. Our preference for simplistic either/or propositions—good or bad, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, friend or foe, us or them—blinds us to the deeper questions we need to address if we’re to survive beyond the 21st century.

In many developed countries, including the United States, either/or is baked into the political voting system through a simple choice between opposing parties. It’s a direct extension

In many developed countries, including the United States, either/or is baked into the political voting system through a simple choice between opposing parties. It’s a direct extension of popular sports, in which two opponents battle for supremacy, and fans choose sides based on beliefs, feelings, and allegiances. In the two-party system of government, winning becomes a substitute for progress.

Sociobiologist Rebecca Costa observes that, from a historical perspective, civilizations based on opposition eventually face gridlock, and finally collapse.

She explains that choosing between two extreme options doesn’t work for highly complex problems such as global recession, poverty, war, failing education, or the depletion of natural resources, since it forces the brain into choosing which instead of what.

A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy in which a situation seems to have only two alternatives, when in reality others are possible.

Those of us who accept false dichotomies can easily be manipulated by unscrupulous leaders in government, business, religion, and other institutions.

When two sides attack a problem, the problem is no longer the problem. The problem is the sides.

With dichotomous decisions, there are only three possible outcomes: win-lose, lose-win, or compromise. None of these is optimal, and all can lead to gridlock.

Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into separate pieces and work on them one by one. Instead, they see the entire architecture of the problem—how the various parts fit together, and how one decision affects another.

Reject the tyranny of or and embrace the genius of and. Leave the sides behind. Look for a third narrative based on common ground instead of compromise.

Drawing a picture in a visually realistic way is not really a drawing problem. It’s a seeing problem. Until we can clearly see what’s in front of us, free of misleading beliefs and partial knowledge, our picture will necessarily be distorted or fragmented. Painter Robert Irwin said, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing seen.” As soon as we label something,

Leonardo da Vinci epitomized this relationship between seeing and thinking, as amply illustrated in his notes. His scientific insights came straight from his passion for drawing; he drew things to understand them.

He was trying to see how things are connected, and the way nature continually transforms itself.

The ideal of the Renaissance Man doesn’t suggest that we learn everything about everything, but that we see the world as an interconnected system of systems, instead of separate parts.

On a good day, this is exactly what designers do. They observe a situation—a product, service, experience, process, a communication, or business model—then devise new components, new relationships, new interactions that reshape the situation into something better.

Their metaskill of visualization—of seeing how to see—makes this transformation possible.

Since the peephole of consciousness is so small, most people find it easier to focus on a single tree than a whole forest.

We forget that the world isn’t linear. It’s full of arcs and loops and spirals. It often seems more like a Rube Goldberg contraption than Newtonian equation. We can pull a lever here and get an unintended consequence over there.

We send aid to foreign countries to fight poverty, only to find we’re feeding corruption instead.

We develop pollution-free nuclear energy, only to end up with a nuclear waste problem that could haunt us for ten thousand years.

Trying to turn a nonlinear world into a linear world for our emotional comfort is usually a bad idea, because linear planning only works with problems that can’t resist our plans.

By focusing on narrow problems, we’ve learned how to move large weights over long distances, increase our production of food, eradicate a whole raft of diseases, transport people through the air, communicate instantly around the world, and perform any number of miraculous feats. Yet to the extent we’ve been thinking in fragments instead of whole thoughts, our solutions have only created bigger problems that are now beyond our comprehension.

“Always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is not a clear one.” In other words, think in whole thoughts instead of fragments.

systems thinking, adaptive thinking, cybernetics,

Like an artist composing a canvas, a systems thinker squints at a problem to see the complete picture instead of the components.

How systems work A system is a set of interconnected elements organized to achieve a purpose. For example, the plumbing in your

How systems work A system is a set of interconnected elements organized to achieve a purpose. For example, the plumbing in your house is a system organized to deliver clean water and flush waste water away.

The structure of a system includes three types of components: elements, interconnections, and a purpose.

The feedback mechanisms in most systems are subject to something called latency, a delay between cause and effect, or between cause and feedback, in which crucial information arrives too late to act upon.

By the time she gets the numbers, the situation is a fait accompli. Any straightforward response based on the late information is likely to be inadequate, ineffective, or wrong.

In systems theory, any change that reinforces an original change is called reinforcing or positive feedback. Any change that dampens the original change is called balancing or negative feedback.

let’s get back to the problem of latency. Every change to a system takes a little time to show up.

This is best illustrated by the classic story of the “unfamiliar shower.”

the delay between cause and effect—between adjusting the taps and achieving the right temperature—deprived you of the information you needed to make appropriate changes

A mother is concerned that her children may be exposed to danger if they’re allowed to roam the neighborhood freely, so she keeps them close and controls their interactions with friends. At first this keeps them safe, but as they grow older they suffer from impaired judgment in their interactions with the broader world.

other examples of system delays:

A student feels that his education is taking too long, so he drops out of college and joins the workplace. He makes good money while his college friends struggle to pay their bills. Over time, his lack of formal education puts a cap on his income while his friends continue up the ladder.

A bigger child learns that she can bully the other children in school. At first this feels empowering, but over time she finds she’s excluded from friendships with other children she admires.

Our emotional brains are hardwired to overvalue the short term and undervalue the long term. When there’s no short-term threat, there’s no change to our body chemistry to trigger fight or flight. If you pulled back your bedsheet one night and found a big, black spider, your brain would light up like a Christmas tree. But if you were told that the world’s population will be decimated by rising ocean waters before the year 2030, your brain would barely react.

We have to exert ourselves to override our automatic responses when we realize they’re not optimal. In this way, systems thinking isn’t only about seeing the big picture. It’s about seeing the long picture. It’s more like a movie than a snapshot.

after viewing the first few minutes. How?

My wife can predict the ending of a movie with uncanny accuracy after viewing the first few minutes. How? Through a rich understanding of plot patterns and symbolism, acquired over years of watching films and reading fiction,

she understands the system of storytelling.

2. Addiction, or “when the cure is worse than the disease.” Whenever we use a short-term fix for a long-term problem, we’re in danger of addiction, because we begin to depend on the temporary fix instead of solving the root problem.

This helps in the short term, but by the afternoon you’re even more tired, so you toss down a venti latte in lieu of lunch. At night you’re wired from the caffeine, so you calm your nerves with a couple of glasses of wine and wander off to bed. You go to sleep right away, but by three in the morning you’re tossing and turning. You struggle up the next morning and repeat the whole process, hooked on a downward cycle of quick fixes while the root problem grows worse.

the feedback delay in this system? It’s between drinking the coffee or wine and seeing the results. A jolt of caffeine works quite well in the first two hours, but later makes us feel more tired.

then the long-term solution is to address the root cause of insomnia. It may be anxiety, stress, sleep apnea, or alcoholism (especially if it’s more than two glasses of wine),

3. Eroding goals, or “lowering the bar.” We’ve seen this phenomenon in school, where a teacher gives up measuring students against a broader standard and begins “grading on the curve.”

The US and the USSR lived through forty years of escalation, caught in a mindless competition to build the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, a whole generation learned that life could end any moment in a fiery mushroom cloud, and that planning for the future was futile. The best one could hope for was to live for the moment—a recipe for suboptimization if there ever was one.

The best way to exit an escalation trap is to find a way for both sides to win. It’s not about compromise so much as common ground. By using empathy to understand the needs of the other side, you can design a third solution that changes the original positions for mutual benefit.

5. The tragedy of the commons, or “don’t be selfish—take turns!”

A commons can be any shared resource that becomes endangered by overuse. A highway is a commons that can accommodate only so many cars before it becomes gridlocked. A park is a commons that can become trampled by too many picnickers. A company home page is a commons that becomes less effective with every inessential item that’s added to it. A fishing area is a commons that benefits no one after it’s fished out.

Garrett Hardin. In it he told the story of a village with a publicly owned pasture on which herdsmen were encouraged to graze their animals. Since the privilege was free and the pasture was large, each herdsman in the village began to think, What harm could there be in adding more animals to the pasture?

The American highway system is a frustrating experience for many drivers, not because of the quality or capacity of the roads, but because of the mental models people use for driving them.

European drivers avoid this problem by using a different mental model. Instead of a slow lane and a fast lane, they conceive of them as a driving lane and a passing lane. They stay in the driving lane until they need to pass, then move into the passing lane, then immediately back into the driving lane,

While European highways certainly have speed limits, there’s little need for police enforcement since accidents are rare. If we Americans want more freedom on the road, we could do worse than learn from the European system.

The problem is that everyone does do it, so the effect is multiplied by the number of people in the system. When the system becomes damaged enough to cause concern, the finger of blame is often pointed at the moral character of the participants.

the computerized speed traps that result in hefty traffic fines could be altered to reward safe driving as well, tracking cars in order to bestow “responsibility points” on their owners. The points could then be used to lower their insurance premiums.

“You’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

7. Limits to growth, or “what goes up must come down.” Every form of growth eventually encounters limits. A wildfire that runs out of trees to burn, a city that runs out of buildable land, a virus that runs out of victims, and a business that runs out of customers are all examples of bumping up against limits.

As success feeds upon success, the growth line soars and the company keeps it accelerating by hiring more staff, opening new offices, launching subbrands, and layering complexity upon complexity.

In 1990, IBM knew that the market for large computers would eventually desert them, while Kodak could see that digital cameras would soon replace film cameras. IBM radically transformed itself from a seller of “big iron” into a consulting company that also sold computer systems. Kodak, on the other hand, tried to preserve its profitable film business too long, starving their digital investments in the process. There’s still meaning in the Kodak brand, but little momentum in the business.

Entropy causes fast-moving things to slow down, and order to collapse into chaos. There’s a price to pay for maintaining any kind of difference or individuality. When you see the limits approaching, getting around them is theoretically straightforward: If it ain’t broke, fix it. What’s not so straightforward is convincing others to follow.

Competitive Exclusion Principle. It says that two species can’t continue to live in the same habitat and compete for the same resource. Eventually, one species will win a larger share of the resource, giving it an advantage in future competition, until it becomes impossible for the other species to compete.

Finally, the winner takes all, and the habitat suffers from a lack of variety.

This is the situation the US finds itself in now. The moneyed have become increasingly powerful by virtue of their wealth, which has allowed them to rewrite the rules in their favor. As the rich have gotten richer, more of the middle class has joined the working class, and now the wealthiest are feeling the economic pinch of a consumer population that can no longer afford the products that their investments depend on.

The way out of the success trap is by leveling the playing field.

Other possible techniques are closing income tax loopholes, launching social programs, and limiting the power of lobbyists. Perhaps the most sensible rule is simply to match the power of the public sector to the power of the private sector.

The well-intentioned goal of the No Child Left Behind Act was to improve the quality of US education by making sure students performed well on a standardized test. Sounds logical, right? But when the government made test scores a prerequisite for funding, the de facto goal became good test scores, not good education. Many schools immediately diverted their attention from teaching to testing.

Others ignored subjects not on the test. Still others focused on the midlevel students who were most likely to make a difference, giving less help to struggling students who were likely to fail, or gifted students who were likely to pass on their own. Funding was the all-glittering prize. In the process, the best teachers lost interest in teaching, since there was little room left in the system for individuality.

The purpose of a leaf is to turn sunlight into energy. The purpose of a bicycle is to turn walking into riding.

The organizing purpose of a company can be defined as the reason it exists beyond making money. Beyond making money? Isn’t a company in business to make money? Yes, but if profits are primary, it may have trouble keeping customers, attracting talent, and building a culture that can sustain the business. Management expert Peter Drucker famously said that the only realistic definition of a business purpose was to create a customer.

The stated purpose of Apple is “to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” The purpose of security-software maker Symantec is “to create confidence in a connected world.” The purpose of Patagonia, a maker of outdoor clothing, is “to inspire and implement solutions to an environment in crisis.” Now contrast these three statements with the following three. The purpose of Chevron is “to achieve superior financial results for our stockholders, the owners of our business.” The purpose of Office Depot is “to be the most successful office products company in the world.” The purpose of Ametek is “to achieve enhanced, long-term shareholder value by building a strong operating company serving diversified markets to earn a superior return on assets and to generate growth in cash flow.”

“Systems, like the three wishes in a fairy tale,” says Meadows, “have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce.”

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide

A company’s purpose, norms, and shared meaning are the “self” that it organizes around, and which serves as a compass for all of its plans. This is the first step in building a durable brand. A participant in one of my brand strategy workshops summed it up nicely: “You can put your hat on first or you can put your boots on first. But before that, you have to decide you’re a cowboy.”

Toyota’s purpose is “to sustain profitable growth by providing the best customer experience and dealer support.” Were the executives simply sacrificing the how to get the what? A better purpose statement for Toyota might be “to bring the highest quality cars to the most people at the lowest price.”

Comedian Eddie Izzard said that the American Dream is to work hard and buy a home, while the European Dream is to hardly work and own a motor scooter.

Scientists have talked about a “dangerous flaw built into the brain” that causes a preference for instant gratification. Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of quick rewards, but we’re shortsighted when it comes to consequences.

My bad behavior was initially good behavior—but only for me and only for the moment.

A working definition of sin, therefore, is any act that values selfish, short-term good over unselfish, long-term good.

Your ability to think whole thoughts—to see how one thing leads to another over time—is a crucial skill in the Robotic Age, given technology’s scope for producing large-scale unintended consequences.

freedom you should be accorded. The more parsimonious

History shows that giving broad freedoms to irresponsible people is a recipe for mayhem. This is especially true for rights that call for a high degree of responsibility, such as gun ownership.

Economist Steven Landsburg, in The Big Questions, shares his own rule for good behavior: “Don’t leave the world worse off than you found it.” Unfortunately, simply living in the 21st century means you’re doing damage to the planet. If you drive a car, buy groceries, use a computer, wear manufactured clothing, have children, own a home, fly to meetings, or read a newspaper, you’re doing damage to the planet.

Apalled by the atrocities of World War II, German sociologist Dr. Robert S. Hartman set about creating a new “science of value,” which he hoped would organize goodness as efficiently as the Nazis had organized evil. He called his science axiology.

study the values of ethics and aesthetics—ethics being the study of right and good, and aesthetics being the study of beauty and harmony—so they had a fighting chance against more fleeting values

We live in an “exaggerated present,” says Donella Meadows. In other words, we pay too much attention to the now, and too little to the before and the after, giving us a warped view of what’s important.

The world is now too complex to be guided by ten simplistic commandments.

A driver whose car skids on an icy road is more likely to turn the wheel the wrong way than the right way, simply because the right way is counter-intuitive. A CEO whose company suffers from sagging profits is likely to focus on costcutting instead of innovation, simply because the rewards are more direct and immediate.

It wasn’t long before productivity became the Holy Grail for the entire society, replacing the previous goal of happiness with one that’s more easily measured.

Economist Victor Lebow introduced the term “conspicuous consumption” in the 1950s, complaining that we’d already begun to ritualize the purchase of goods in search of spiritual satisfaction. “We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

The result has not been happiness, nor spirituality, nor economic health, but a national shopping jones that’s turning our birthright into a landfill. Too harsh? We’ll see.

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors

Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system: What will happen if I do nothing? What might be improved? What might be diminished? What will be replaced? Will it expand future options? What are the ethical considerations? Will it simplify or complicate the system? Are my basic assumptions correct? What has to be true to make this possible? Are events likely to unfold this way? If so, will the system really react this way? What are the factors behind the events? What are the long-term costs and benefits? We shouldn’t become too discouraged if at first we don’t succeed. It took nature 13 billion years to create the systems around us, and they still don’t always work perfectly.

Let’s say, for example, we think clean drinking water will soon be in short supply, and we’d like to solve the problem before it becomes a global disaster. We could start by framing it four simple ways: 1) How can we create an affordable product that will purify water at the household level? (Small and conventional); 2) How can we build large water purification plants that can serve millions of households through existing plumbing systems? (Large and conventional); 3) How can we “manufacture” drinking water at the local level? (Small and unconventional); 4) How can we “manufacture” drinking water on a global scale? (Large and unconventional). The small-conventional solution might be something like the filtration products Brita already sells, but for less money or with smarter materials. The large-conventional solution might be similar to our existing water plants, but with better purification systems or better distribution methods.

the large-unconventional solution, to imagine one example, might be to use rising sea levels to flood coastal deserts, turning them into marshlands that remove salt and produce clean water, as the Seawater Foundation proposes.

Yves Behar would design a computer so simple, so durable, and so portable that children in underdeveloped countries could have access to the same educational resources as children in advanced countries. They called their initiative One Laptop Per Child. They succeeded admirably within their frame, but eventually learned that they had drawn it too small. They had neglected to solve the problems outside the problem, such as how to build a barrier to competition, how to navigate government bureaucracies, and how to change entrenched views about education. It was one of the most heartrending bellyflops of the digital age, due to the wrong choice of frame. Of

We’ve been trained by Industrial Age marketers to believe anything good is already on the shelf.

When Einstein was asked which part of the Theory of Relativity gave him the most fits, he said: “Figuring out how to think about the problem.” In another interview he said that if he knew a fiery comet was certain to destroy the earth in an hour, and it was his job to head it off, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it.

John Dewey had famously said that “a problem well defined is half solved.” Einstein apparently believed it was more than 90% solved.

Seeing a problem from your own viewpoint comes naturally, of course. Putting yourself in the shoes of other people is more difficult. And getting outside the system to view it objectively takes a conscious effort.

Leonardo believed that unless you could see a problem from at least three vantage points, you’d have trouble understanding it. When he designed the world’s first bicycle, he looked at the problem first from his own point of view, from the rider’s point of view, from the investors’ point of view, and from the point of view of the communities where the bicycles might be used.

The outside viewpoint, or metaposition, is more attainable when you climb up to a higher level and look down on the problem.

2. Develop a problem statement. Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, is not only a witty observer but an insightful thinker. In a Wall Street Journal editorial he described the current budget deficit in a way that could be a model for all problem statements.

Problem statement: The US is broke. The hole is too big to plug with cost cutting or economic growth alone. Rich people have money. No one else does. Rich people have enough clout to block higher taxes on themselves, and they will. Likely outcome: Your next home will be the box that your laser printer came in. The beauty of this problem statement lies in its brevity and simplicity (no extra charge for the wit). If you think this kind of concision is easy, just try

3. List the knowns and unknowns. What are the known parameters of the problem? Can you visualize and name the parts? What are the relationships among the parts? What is the nature of the problem? Is it a simple problem? A complex problem? A structural problem? A communication problem? A political problem? What remedies have been attempted in the past, and why have they failed? Why bother solving the problem in the first place?

The danger with unknowns is the human tendency to replace them with assumptions. It’s important to question whether the knowns are really knowns and not beliefs in disguise. Usually the best way to deal with unknowns is to let them remain a mystery while you forge ahead.

4. Change the frame. What happens when you make the frame bigger or smaller? Or even swap it for another one? For example, the movie industry now believes its biggest challenge is to stop piracy. But what if the problem were reframed? Original problem statement: Viewers are accessing copyrighted content without paying for it, resulting in millions in lost revenue. Likely outcome: If piracy isn’t stopped, there will be little incentive to make movies. Solution: Enact tougher laws against piracy. So far, piracy laws haven’t moved the needle, so it's unclear whether harsher ones will make a difference.

New problem statement: Viewers have unprecedented free access to copyrighted material through the Internet, and there’s little chance of stemming the tide. Likely outcome: Unless the movie industry changes its models, it will miss out on the exciting possibilities created by advances in technology.

Systems thinker Gene Bellinger says, “It’s hard to make water flow uphill.” Maybe the solution is to increase the flow of free content, and use it to create deeper relationships with viewers so that movies become a bigger part of their lives. Or maybe access could be restricted to new content only, using the old content as advertising for the new. Or maybe free downloads can produce valuable information about audiences, thereby adding value to future marketing efforts. Then again, maybe the movie industry can simply reduce its lobbying efforts, save a little money, and let time take care of the problem.

5. Make a simple model. Constructing a model is a practical way of visualizing the key elements of a problem.

This is also why they’re right. The simpler you can make a model, the easier it is to understand the problem. In The Gardens of Democracy, the authors simplify the problem of political gridlock by dividing the prevailing attitudes toward government into three main categories.

As practitioners in the creative and scientific fields master their professions, the art of framing problems eventually leads to the art of finding problems.

Experience teaches which problems are worth solving, and which, if solved, would produce little significant effect.

But where do you find problems that are both worthy and inspiring? While they could arrive from the blue, you can also hunt them down using questions like these: What’s the either/or that’s obscuring opportunities for innovation? Where are the usual methods no longer achieving the predicted results? What’s the can’t-do that you could turn into a can-do? Which problems are so big that they can no longer be seen?

passion. But where do you find problems that are both worthy and inspiring? While they could arrive from the blue, you can also hunt them down using questions like these:

But where do you find problems that are both worthy and inspiring? While they could arrive from the blue, you can also hunt them down using questions like these:

In my experience, people who claim that all talent is inborn—you either have it or you don’t—are often masking insecurity. The “born geniuses” know the truth: In developing talent, hard work trumps genetics. This is even true for the next talent, the amazing metaskill of dreaming.

Imagination is one of the more mysterious capabilities of the human mind. How is it possible to conjure up images, feelings, or concepts that we can’t perceive through our senses? How can we arrive at perfectly workable solutions without the benefit of logical thought?

Alexander Graham Bell, arguably one of our more prolific inventors, seemed to be unaware of the role of imagination in his own work. He laid down three rules for innovation: 1) Observe as many worthwhile facts as possible; 2) Remember what has been observed; 3) Compare the facts so as to come to conclusions. Observe,

Alexander Graham Bell, arguably one of our more prolific inventors, seemed to be unaware of the role of imagination in his own work. He laid down three rules for innovation: 1) Observe as many worthwhile facts as possible; 2) Remember what has been observed; 3) Compare the facts so as to come to conclusions. Observe, remember, compare—then presto!—idea. Hello? Alex? Could there be anything missing between comparing and concluding? Like maybe an insight? No disrespect to the telephone, but since when does the comparison of facts produce innovation?

Imagination is closely linked to dream states. Neuroscientists Charles Limb and Allen Braun studied the brains of jazz musicians, revealing a “disassociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex” when they played improvisational music. They found it was absent when they played memorized sequences. These disassociated patterns, they say, are similar to what happens in REM sleep. Dreaming

Imagination is closely linked to dream states. Neuroscientists Charles Limb and Allen Braun studied the brains of jazz musicians, revealing a “disassociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex” when they played improvisational music.

When students exhibit this behavior in the classroom, teachers call it attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. When musicians exhibit it, we call it genius. Dreams don’t simply visit us. We actively create them while we’re unconscious, not unlike the way we create our perceptions while we’re awake. What makes dreams so fascinating is the absence of logical narrative.

The word for dreaming in French is rêver—to rave, to slip into madness. Even though the scenes we create in our dreams may seem random or fantastical, their emotional trajectory often makes complete sense.

Innovation needs a little controlled madness, like the controlled explosions of an internal combustion engine, to move it forward. Applied imagination is the ability to harness dreaming to a purpose. Innovators, then, are just practical dreamers. The encouraging news from science is that people who have this talent are no smarter on average than other people. They’ve simply learned the “trick” of divergent thinking.

In order to innovate, you need to move from the known to the unknown. You need to hold your beliefs lightly, so that what you believe doesn’t block your view of what you might find out.

When asked to imagine a new tool for slicing bread, or a new format for a website, or a new melody for a song, they’ll stare blankly as if to say, “How could there be such a thing?” They may recall many of the knives, or the home pages, or popular songs they’ve known, but nothing new will come to mind. At most they might try to combine the features of two or more existing examples to come up with a hybrid.

our world of ready-made everything has turned us into a population of idea shoppers. We expect to choose our solutions off the rack instead of building them from scratch. We mix them and mash them, never believing that real originality is within our power. And the companies that make our products are not much different. They shop for best practices to make their jobs easier, instead of imagining new practices that could set them apart or push them forward.

Somewhere along the line we’ve lost our tolerance for trial and error, settling instead for the derivative, the dull, and the dis-integrated. We need to reverse this trend. If we don’t, we’ll end up low on the Robot Curve.

When you learn the trick of dreaming, of disassociating your thoughts from the linear and the logical, you can become a wellspring of originality and brilliance.

Originality doesn’t come from factual knowledge, nor does it come from the suppression of factual knowledge. Instead, it comes from the exposure of factual knowledge to the animating force of imagination.

an idea can fall into four categories: 1) an idea adapted from the same domain; 2) an idea adapted from a different domain; 3) an idea that is new to the innovator; 4) an idea that is new to the world.

When we’re stumped by a problem, or when we feel hurried to solve it, our brains can easily default to off-the-shelf solutions based on “what everyone knows.” The problem-solving mind is a sucker for a pretty fact. But what we know today may not be what we need to know tomorrow,

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

jumping to conclusions, we need to hold off solving a problem until we can perceive the general shape of its solution.

1) discover what is; 2) imagine what could be; and 3) describe the attributes of success.

What is the conventional thinking about it? How have similar problems been solved in the past? In other domains? Other cultures? And what are the practical constraints of the problem?

Bounded challenges provide not only a starting place but a booster shot of adrenaline.

If innovation is determined by what’s “useful, novel, and nonobvious,” as the US patent system puts it, then you need ways to get beyond the obvious. One such way is by asking deeper questions.

When Thomas Edison imagined the light bulb, he didn’t frame the question as, How can we create an alternative source of light? Instead he framed it as, How can we make electricity so cheap that “only the rich will burn candles”?

The best problem solvers are “high yearners,” people who reach for the stars and land on the moon.

Desiderata are secondary objectives that support a goal or a solution.

The desiderata included the budget (small), the hoped-for look (stunning), the number of workspaces (15), the type of workstation privacy (semi-open), and the need for electrical outlets where there were none.

The architects came back with a plan to spend my entire budget on a single element: a large, curving wall of translucent, corrugated plastic that contained interior uplighting and electrical outlets to feed the entire workspace. Inside the wall was a huge logo looming softly over the reception area. In a single move, this simple but inspired solution established the identity for the new firm, separated the client spaces from the working spaces, supplied electricity to the workstations, and created a buzzworthy experience for visitors.

The principle of desiderata can be applied to any number of problems. It’s really as simple as compiling a wish list. Ask yourself this question and fill in the blank: Wouldn’t it be great if ______? When you finish your list, call out the wishes that would create the most compelling outcome.

On one side you’ve got the reality of what is, or what is common, and on the other side you’ve got a vision for what could be, or what could be different. In between lies a battle. For this reason most people are eager to get in, make a decision, and get out. But creative people know they have to stay in the dragon pit because that’s where the ideas are.

If architect Frank Gehry had used logical reasoning as a starting place for his projects, he never could have invented the swooping, shimmering forms of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.

I could hardly wait to meet the man behind the Macintosh. Right from the start it didn’t go well. We argued. I don’t know how this happened, because my only task was to pose questions and record the answers on a pocket tape recorder.

What was it about Jobs that enabled this level of success? Was it his immaculate design sense? His visionary stewardship? His Buddhist leanings? His vegan food preferences? His Sixties idealism? The adoration of his adoptive parents? His belief that he was chosen to “put a dent in the universe”?

He was a prime contrarian. If you said the sky was blue, he said it was wide. If you said a trademark couldn’t be printed in three colors, he would stamp his feet until he got six. As a designer, he was slow to recognize the potential of another person’s idea. But after knocking it around in his head for a while he would often take ownership of it.

A key characteristic of an inventive mind is a strong disbelief system. Einstein and Picasso were dyed-in-the-wool skeptics. Einstein’s physics professor once told him, “You are quite smart, but you have one big failing. You never listen to anybody.”

In science and art, as well as in other fields, innovation is an act of rebellion. You have to reject conformity if

In science and art, as well as in other fields, innovation is an act of rebellion. You have to reject conformity if you’re looking for brilliance.

Real innovators revel in the unknown. They love a mystery. As business advisor David Baker says, “An entrepreneur is someone who dives into an empty swimming pool and invents water on the way down.”

Alignment works well when the world isn’t changing. But of course the world is changing. Rules can be helpful, but some rules are nothing more than scars from a previous bad experience.

Working without knowledge can feel like driving without headlights, but there’s no law that says all the research has to come

Don’t wait for research. Working without knowledge can feel like driving without headlights, but there’s no law that says all the research has to come first. Sometimes it’s better to grope your way toward an answer, then check it against reality when you have a specific hypothesis in hand.

Steve Jobs put it bluntly: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”

The 20th century has been a triumph of quantity over quality, but in the 21st century we need to reverse the trend. “Be a quality detector,” says systems thinker Donella Meadows. “Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality. If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass.”

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them…Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

During the Industrial Age, fun was discouraged. It took time to have fun, and time was the nonrenewable resource that needed to be managed, maximized, and measured. Employees were paid by the hour, the day, or the year. They were paid by number of pieces they could complete. Or they were paid by the predetermined function they performed. They were not paid by the number of new ideas they brought to the table or by the passion they brought to their work.

After the clock came to Europe in 1307, it took less than a century for mechanical time to sweep the continent. With clocks you could agree on the delivery of a shipment, regularize the baking of bread, and estimate the completion of a brick wall.

The ancient Greeks understood that time came in two flavors: objective time, called chronos; and subjective time, called kairos. Chronos could be measured by the sun, the moon, or the seasons. Kairos could not be measured, only judged by the quality of one’s experience.

Today we use the phrase quality time to describe the experience of living in unmeasured time. We find that as soon as we measure or limit quality time, it quickly turns into quantity time.

Yet quality time is the state in which imagination flourishes best. You can’t decide to produce an insight in 30 minutes or have an idea by 3:15. But you can decide to forget about the clock and focus on the challenge, in which case you may well have an idea by 3:15—or even five ideas.

This is the central conflict between the world of business and the world of creativity. They need each other, but can’t seem to understand each other.

Focus on goals, take away the clocks, and start playing as soon as possible. What you’ll find is that generating ideas “out of time” can produce results much faster than holding yourself to a deadline.

innovation requires something more—it requires unmeasured time in the dragon pit.

The best creative thinkers are usually the most prolific thinkers, because innovation, like evolution, depends on variety. In fact, you could say that innovation is really just evolution by design.

In the parlance of creative theory, you’re fluent. When ideas flow, the music of chance plays faster.

“A genius,” he said, “is a person who has two great ideas.” What he meant was that innovation often comes from connecting two thoughts that previously had been unconnected.

or two ideas previously thought to be in conflict, or one old idea plus one new idea. Einstein’s term for this process was combinatory play.

exhibition called “Making Connections,” about midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames, Ralph Caplan described their firm belief in combinatory play—the excitement of connecting disparate materials such as wood and steel, of connecting alien disciplines such as physics and painting, of connecting people like architects and mathematicians or poets and corporate executives.

The importance of connections is also echoed by recent discoveries in neuroscience. The brain forms new ideas when two old ideas suddenly overlap.

the real genius lies not in making interesting combinations, but in separating the great ideas from the merely crazy ones by applying the principles of aesthetics.

Think in metaphors. A metaphor is a way of making a comparison between two unrelated things. “All the world is a stage” is an example.

Thinking about problems metaphorically moves your thinking from the literal to the abstract, so you can move freely on a different plane.

Many people assume Einstein was a logical, left-brain thinker, but he was actually the opposite. Rather than using mathematics or language to crack a tough problem, he preferred to think in pictures and spatial relationships. This is because visual thinking can strip a problem down to its essence, leading to profoundly simple conclusions that ordinary language might not be able to reach.

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

Voltaire said, “originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”

Gutenberg got the idea for the printing press from watching the mechanics of a wine press. This mental connection launched the book industry, and did no harm to winemakers.

What do you get when you cross a bank with an Internet café? A shoe store with a charity? A Broadway show with a circus performance? Adhesive tape with a bookmark? You get successful business models like ING Direct, Tom’s Shoes, Cirque du Soleil, and Post-it Notes.

Now, reverse the assumptions to see what happens. 1. Employees love doing dishes. 2. It’s easy to tell whose dishes are in the sink. 3. The dishes are employee property. 4. Dishes are easier to clean before they soak. 5. Dishes never pile up.

What would it take to make these true? Well, employees might love doing their dishes if they had a great music system at the sink. It would be easy to tell whose dishes were in there if each item were personalized with the employees’ names or initials. Maybe employees could be allowed full kitchen privileges, but only if they agreed to use their own kitchenware. Or maybe you could install a large-capacity dishwasher that makes it just as easy to put dishes there as in the sink.

Give it the third degree. What else is like this, from which you could get an idea? Is there something similar that you could partially copy? What if this were somewhat changed? What can you eliminate? What can you substitute? Is this the cause or the effect? What if you changed the timing?

Be alert for accidents. The great thing about creative play is that mistakes don’t have consequences. You’re free to follow any rabbit down any hole. While most of the time you won’t find what you’re looking for, sometimes you’ll find what you weren’t looking for, and that can be even better.

When mechanic John Hyatt was looking for a substitute for billiard-ball ivory, he accidentally invented celluloid, the plastic used in making movie film and hundreds of other products.

When Percy Spencer was working on radar for the military, he found a melted candy bar in his pocket, thus discovering the working principle for microwave ovens.

Steve Jobs, while trying to design a tablet computer, discovered a great set of features for the iPhone instead. The iPhone became the stepping stone back to the iPad.

There were two flaws in this logic. First, I did forget good musical ideas, and, second, the value of ideas often lies in their ability to trigger better ideas. If you don’t capture them, you can’t build on them. “Ideas never stand alone,”

A cloud of ideas is a wonderful image. But my advice? Don’t try to hold them all in your mind. Write them down. Record them. Get in the habit of taking notes, keeping a diary, carrying a sketchbook, or thinking out loud on a whiteboard.

Dreaming together Personal mastery can only have meaning in the context of group. None of us can succeed alone, even those whose work is mostly solitary.

In the Robotic Age, creative collaboration needs to escape the lab, linking people from top to bottom, beginning to end, across disciplines and over regional boundaries.

The key to brainstorming, believed Osborn, was to foster an atmosphere in which judgment was temporarily suspended.

walls with hundreds of ideas, but then they’d run out of energy before they could sort them and turn them into workable solutions.

Brainstorming groups that followed the rule of suspended judgment could often cover the walls with hundreds of ideas, but then they’d run out of energy before they could sort them and turn them into workable solutions.

When the mission is critical and the time is short, however, what works best is hardball brainstorming, in which participants are experienced, well matched, and focused like a laser on the problem to be solved.

Studies by organizational psychologists have shown that individuals, not groups, tend to be better at divergent thinking, while groups are better at convergent thinking.

groups often default to a herd mentality instead of fighting for divergent ideas. To guard against herd thinking, shared goals should be as bold as possible. They shouldn’t be ordinary or safe. As Howard Schultz said about the challenge of engaging stakeholders at Starbucks, “Who wants a dream that’s near-fetched?” The simplest way to develop bold goals is to start by wishing. When you get the members of a group to start wishing, their dreams can quickly become roadmaps. There’s a reason people tell you to be careful what you wish for. It works. For large design projects, especially those which benefit from multidisciplinary teams, there’s an ongoing search for “T-shaped” people. A T-shaped person is one who has a strong descender (the vertical stroke of the T) and a well-developed crossbar (the horizontal stroke). The descender represents deep experience in a certain discipline, and the crossbar represents the ability to work with people across disciplines.

creative groups need specialists who can contribute something unique to the collaboration. The last thing they need is I-shaped people—specialists who have useful skills but can’t work with others.

both rock bands and creative groups need one more member: an X-shaped person. This is the one whose main role—though not the only role—is to bring the group together and facilitate progress toward a goal. X-shaped people are rare, because they usually have to prove their worth by first mastering a discipline. The leadership gene is an extra gene, a skill on top of a skill. John Lasseter has been a great creative leader for Pixar, but he developed his credibility and his deep-domain expertise by working first as an animator. When X-shaped people attract the right T-shaped people to the mission, magic can happen.

A master’s degree won’t help you. Only mastery itself.

I can honestly say that I’d rather have an epiphany than win the lottery. Okay, the lottery brings money, but it leaves you with the problem of how to turn your money into the kind of transcendent experience that makes life worth living.

It’s much easier to turn epiphanies into money than the other way around. Winning the lottery is like finding a golden egg;

Their subconscious mind has been busy working behind the scenes to sort through the rational complexities that kept the solution hidden. This “dark time” is known as the incubation period,

The solution can only come when the rational mind lets go so the dreaming mind can take over. It can happen during actual dreaming, but it can also show up anytime the rational mind lets down its guard—while taking a shower, driving a car, lying on the beach, or having sex (presumably with one’s muse).

An autofocus camera is a little like your rational mind. It doesn’t like ambiguity, so it will either take the first picture that comes into focus, or else become confused and freeze.

Six tests of originality The goal of dreaming is to produce an original idea. The idea can be new to you, new to your group, or new to the world.

creative judgment comes with practice, maturity, and familiarity with the world of ideas.

1. Is it disorienting? A great idea should be unsettling—not just to you, but to others in your group. Some people may reject it on the spot. This is not always a bad sign, since the potential of a new idea is often inversely proportional to its comfort factor.

Some people believed airplanes would have no military value; that broadcast radio could not become popular; that no one would want a computer at home; and that educated people would never contribute to an encyclopedia without being paid.

2. Does it kill ten birds? A good idea kills two birds with one stone. A great idea kills ten or twenty.

great ideas don’t come from compromise. They come from common ground.

Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold.

3. Does it need to be proved? Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold.

When my design firm was tapped by Apple in 1988 to rethink the packaging for the company’s range of software products, one of the ideas we presented was a retail package with nothing on the front but a simple hand-drawn icon, a product name, a trademark, and a splash of color.

At the time, no self-respecting software package would go out dressed in less than five colors, one or more photos of people using computers, at least three screen shots, and six or seven bullet points explaining its features—and this was just the front panel.

The prevailing mantra was “the more you tell, the more you sell.” The current voice of reason, David Ogilvy, maintained that “people do not buy from clowns.” DDB’S creative teams not only believed they did, but delivered their witty headlines and graphics with stark simplicity.

Does it create affordances? Affordances are the opportunities inherent in a new idea.

An affordance of Twitter, for example, is to enable instant communication in places where communication is controlled, such as the Middle East during the Arab Spring rebellions. An affordance of democracy is that citizens can voice their opinions without the threat of reprisals. An affordance of baking soda is that it can soak up fridge odors in addition to making cakes rise.

Can it be summarized? Every innovation—whether a government, gadget, service, iPhone app, movie plot, or business model—can be reduced to a one-sentence description.

The Pages tablet application lets you be a writer one second and a designer the next.

The measure of a great idea is the number and quality of the affordances it throws

The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple

The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple but because it has a strong internal order,

Complexity without order is an indescribable mess, while complexity with order appears simpler than it is.

The 20th century has made us believe that everything of value can be bought in a store; that the answer to the question lies at the back of the chapter; that design is something only designers do. But now, in the 21st century, we’re being nudged nervously forward—by our customers, by our employers, by our economy, and by the robots nipping at our heels—to be original. To innovate. To make things. Yes, make things.

Leonardo was famous, or perhaps infamous, for taking months to complete a painting—if indeed he did complete it.

He felt that il discorso mentale, the mental conversation, was more important than the actual painting.

He painted to learn.

Originality without craft, to a Renaissance artisan, would have seemed like marriage without sex—lofty but Platonic.

Can we know all about the world without changing it? No, he finally said. Knowledge must come from action if it’s to be deep enough and rich enough to drive lasting change.

We can’t reshape the world without a little trial and error.

Growing up in Denmark, Anders Warming loved to wash and polish his parents cars. He’d trace their subtle curves with his hands, marveling at the seamless progression of forms, one flowing into another, each in perfect harmony with the whole. “I touched them so many times that I could close my eyes and draw them,” he later said.

he would end up designing for BMW in 2011.

Warming doesn’t start a new design by going straight to CAD software. He also steers clear of verbal descriptions and PowerPoint presentations. Instead, he draws. He may make hundreds of sketches before even looking at a screen. “You probably need 90 sketches just to get warm, and after that, you’re really in the flow.

The creative process is one of surrender, not control.”

In design, sketching is the mother of invention. In science it’s the experiment; in business it’s the whiteboard diagram; in writing it’s the rough draft; in acting it’s the run-through;

In design, sketching is the mother of invention. In science it’s the experiment; in business it’s the whiteboard diagram; in writing it’s the rough draft; in acting it’s the run-through; in inventing it’s the prototype;

You go in not knowing so you can come out knowing.

The no-process process There’s a standard model that designers use to describe the creative process, usually with minor variations. Sometimes these are followed by a trademark notice, as if to say, “Hands off! This is my process, invented by me! By the way, did I mention it was mine?” Yet they all conform to the same progression that goes from a state of not knowing to a state of knowing, laid out in 4-10 logical steps.

1) discovery, 2) definition, 3) design, 4) development, and 5) deployment.

Most process diagrams are circular, suggesting that the end of the journey leads you right back to the beginning. There’s only one hitch. A truly creative process bears little resemblance to these models. In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. If it had to be circular, the real process of making things would look more like this: 1) confusion, 2) clutter, 3) chaos, 4) crisis, and 5) catharsis. But if designers presented this process as a diagram, they’d scare the bejeesus out of their bosses and clients. So instead they present the calm, confident progressions of the so-called “rational model.”

creativity doesn’t respond to project management so much as passion management.

By overemphasizing process, you can discourage greatness.

Designers may taxi to the runway with briefings, data, and deadlines, but they reach flying altitude with emotion, empathy, and intuition.

Listen to author Annie Dillard: “Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations.

Whatever place releases the most energy. “It doesn’t matter where you start,” said composer John Cage, “as long as you start.”

A better model for designing is the no-process process,

As a believer in the magic of design, I have three fond wishes. The first is that a greater number of creative people—designers, entrepreneurs, strategists, engineers, scientists—begin to embrace the true process of design, and abandon the comforting models that lead to mediocre outcomes. The second is that educational institutions arrive at a similar understanding, making room for messy thinking and surprising ideas in the classroom. While I doubt I’ll see real paint splattered on the walls of Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, metaphorical splatters would be a start. The third is that the leaders and managers of companies encourage the real process of design in all of its chaotic splendor, trusting, even insisting, that the results be more than efficient—that they be surprising, amazing, and occasionally even world changing.

Every day is Groundhog Day

The protagonist is forced to repeat the same day until he finally gets it right.

When at last he achieves the perfect day, he wins the girl and breaks the endless loop of repetition.

The experience of Groundhog Day is not unlike the experience of creativity. There are two main stages in innovation: 1) getting the right idea (dreaming), and 2) getting the idea right (making). As in Groundhog Day, getting the idea right is an iterative process. It doesn’t happen overnight or in a sudden flash.

how many innovations have managed to succeed temporarily, only to fall by the wayside as competitors out-designed the original idea?

The superior customer experience delivered by these brands is the direct result of design. “The details aren’t the details,” said designer Charles Eames. “They make the product.” Eames’s every creative decision grew from “a tight and painful discipline” that brought him to grips with the most prosaic and minute problems.

“You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them.

The successive drawings, models, and prototypes that designers make are not designed to be perfect solutions. They’re designed to illuminate the problem, and in the process hone their intuition. In fact, the best designers are those who can keep the project liquid—allowing more iterations and more interaction among collaborators.

The discipline of uncluding Many people can include. Even more people can exclude. But very few people know how to unclude. Uncluding is the art of subtracting every element that doesn’t pull its weight. Or, as artist Hans Hofmann said, “eliminating all but the necessary so the necessary may speak.”

We live in a time of unprecedented clutter: visual clutter, verbal clutter, product clutter, feature clutter, conceptual clutter. Clutter is any element that doesn’t contribute to meaning or usefulness—a form of pollution that makes life harder to navigate. If life were a garden, clutter would be the weeds that block our paths or obstruct our views.

We have an urge to build shelters, store food for the winter, add to our knowledge, add to our wealth, and add to our personal power. In some people this addiction devolves into a pathology known as hoarding, causing them to fill their houses to the rafters with old newspapers, used pie tins, odd scraps of plastic, pieces of cardboard—always collecting, never discarding.

maybe we should simply view it as human, only more so. Companies, also, have a tendency toward hoarding. They build up a tangle of products, services, brands, subbrands, features, departments, offices, and the bureaucratic rules to manage them. They only cut them back when the weeds begin to strangle their profits.

there’s a difference between complexity and clutter. Complexity, if well organized, is healthy. Clutter is a sign of dysfunction.

optimum choice, not maximum choice. A technique called conjoint analysis—a way to study the trade-offs customers are willing to make in a purchase decision—has taught researchers that the most number of choices is rarely the best number of choices.

The human brain resists “overchoice”—a word used by Yankelovich Partners to describe the baffling number of options in the marketplace today. They recommend instead that companies offer customers “one-think” shopping as a way to simplify the buying experience.

In an age of extreme clutter, the strongest brands are simplifiers.

When CEO Ken Constable took over Smith & Noble, an online window-covering company, the product team had been adding new styles of woven blinds at an alarming pace. They named every new product after an Asian city. “I knew we were in trouble,” said Constable, “when they told me they were running out of cities.”

Only a warrior like Jobs would insist on total simplicity. While other technology companies loaded up their products with functions and buttons, he treated buttons like blemishes, and had them removed.

Companies are collections of individuals, and individuals can make little decisions that have large cumulative effects.

overblown language, like on the sign next to security at Gatwick Airport: “Passenger shoe repatriation area only.” Put your shoes on here might have been clearer, but not nearly as important sounding.

“We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.” In other words, verbal clutter.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Kill ten birds with one stone. Find the place where several problems line up, then knock them down in a single move.

organize potential solutions into lists of what’s cheap, what’s new, what’s available, what’s different, what’s

organize potential solutions into lists of what’s cheap, what’s new, what’s available, what’s different, what’s compelling, what’s proprietary,

The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but messiness. Likewise, the enemy of complexity isn’t simplicity, but also messiness.

The phrase “To be or not to be” is a simple string of words, and each word in it is equally simple. But the meaning behind the phrase is profoundly complex. Namely, why is life worth living? It’s not only the basis of a great play, but of the world’s great philosophies and religions. Therefore, is “To be or not to be” a simple question, or a complex one?

So, is a MacBook Air a simple product, or a complex one? It may be helpful to think of simplicity and complexity as a combo-concept called simplexity. Simplexity stands in opposition to disorder, to entropy, to the messiness that has no meaning.

actual mess can describe itself. The problem with messes is that one looks a lot like another. One cluttered website looks a

When JetBlue says every passenger flies business class for the price of coach, they’ve encapsulated their entire value proposition in one sentence. But when American Airlines says passengers can fly without putting their lives on hold, they’re unable to find a competitive advantage other than wi-fi.

In systems terminology, I’d be shifting the burden to my reader; in the language of economics, I’d be externalizing the costs of communication. The value of my work would be low.

The amount of meaning that can be easily extracted from a message is called its logical depth. According to IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, the more “calculating time” a sender invests—either in his head or on a computer—the more meaning the receiver will get from it, and the greater its logical depth.

you threw out half the parts in a laptop, you might achieve simplicity, but the product wouldn’t work. To retain the richness of simplexity, you need compression, not reduction.

the other side of the wall. Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.

Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, says his task is “to solve incredibly complex problems and make their resolution appear inevitable and incredibly simple, so that you have no sense how difficult it was.” Maybe this is what Leonardo meant when he called simplicity the ultimate sophistication.

Billy Baldwin, one of the last century’s most influential interior designers, believed that nothing was in good taste unless it suited its purpose. “What’s practical is beautiful,” he said.

Is there a key subject, a central theme, or a main benefit to anchor the proposed solution to its purpose? If it seems like it’s trying to satisfy too many goals, or too many people, go back to the drawing board.

If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one. If you please the wrong people while leaving the right ones unmoved, you may wish you had done a little testing before going public. Henry Ford didn’t believe in testing, and found out too late that the 1958 Edsel was a car without a market.

7. Is it courageous? Even testing won’t take all the risk out of innovation.

many bold ideas have managed to attract fanatic followings.

1. Is it surprising?

2. Does it have fitness for duty?

3. Are the underlying assumptions true?

4. Does it have a clear focus?

5. Are the elements in harmony?

6. Will the right people love it?

8. Is it valuable beyond the near and now?

9. Does it have depth? Does it connect on more than one level?

Asymmetrical knowledge—a situation in which one person or group knows less about a subject than another person or group—creates fear in the first group and frustration in the second. This is because appreciating a new idea is a kind of journey. Those who’ve taken the journey, the innovators, forget that the others will need a little more time to catch up.

most people love change until it affects them. Scott Berkun says, “The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to change the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.”

discounting the integrity of an innovation is like buying an airline ticket halfway to China—you save some money, but you never arrive.

Extreme resistance can be a portent of extreme success.

Fact-laden PowerPoints will not win hearts and minds. Dr. Spencer Silver spent five fruitless years trying to persuade 3M of the value of his adhesive because he couldn’t tell a simple story about what would later become Post-it Notes.

Managers get frustrated when employees say their company has no vision.

“Of course, we have a vision,” the manager sputters. “It’s to be a $5 billion company in five years!” Actually, that’s not a vision. A vision is an image, a picture, a clear illustration of a desired end state.

When you lead people from what is to what could be using a simple story, they can more easily visualize themselves playing a role.

“leaders are high-status superconformists, embodying the group’s most typical characteristics or aspirations.”

Even politicians long for positive change, but the way the political system is set up, they aren’t free to promote unproven ideas. They have to wait until ideas gain traction at the grassroots level before they can embrace them.

Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University, said that a good rule in life is that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.”

To me, launching an innovation is like giving birth: it’s painful, it seems to last forever, and afterwards you don’t get much sleep.

What’s a Goldilocks planet, you ask? Well, it’s one that’s not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. One that’s just right. It’s a planet in the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at the right distance from its sun, with earthlike temperatures, liquid

Recently a group of astronomers in Geneva announced the discovery of a promising Goldilocks planet. What’s a Goldilocks planet, you ask? Well, it’s one that’s not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. One that’s just right. It’s a planet in the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at the right distance from its sun, with earthlike temperatures, liquid water, a rocky surface, and a decent atmosphere.

particular Goldilocks planet (with the endearing name of HD 85512b) is 3.6 times as massive as the earth and circles its sun at about one-fourth of the distance that our own planet does. It takes only 58 days to complete one orbit (so you could celebrate your birthday six times as often). Its sun is orange and only one-eighth as bright as ours. But the good news is this: It’s only 36 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Vela. That means if we could figure out how to travel at the speed of light, then find our way to Vela, we could reach the surface in less than four decades

We could make cities more livable. Researchers predict that 75 percent of the world’s population will live in them by 2050. Cities offer huge advantages, including the sharing of resources, knowledge, and talent. But does that mean we have to give up trees, quiet streets, and clean air?

Let’s get a handle on our food problem. Half of the world is growing obese while the other half is going hungry.

On the subject of pollution, we need to clean up the oceans. The thing that makes our own planet the best possible Goldilocks planet is our water. It’s the envy of the universe.

Wouldn’t it be sad if we poisoned our own atmosphere with fossil fuels, then discovered we didn’t have enough to get us to a Goldilocks planet?

If we’re really smart and determined, we should be able to design our products so they can be recycled instead of downcycled or thrown away.

There is no “away” in a closed system.

Let’s democratize medicine. This is more than a humanitarian cause. As long as medicine doesn’t reach every corner of the planet, the human race is in danger of fast-moving viruses and other contagions. As we become more connected, we become more exposed.

While war is generally on the wane, we need to outgrow it entirely. War is the very essence of entropy. Under the strain of seven billion people, we can no longer afford the wholesale waste that comes from large-scale, mechanized violence. It’s a drain on resources and a drain on the human spirit.

Our school system was built on the belief that education is a form of programming. It presumes people will need to follow standardized modes of thought if they’re to contribute profitably to society.

prediction. They ask themselves, In the near future, which jobs will be most abundant?

I often hear students make statements like, “I guess I’ll be going into social media, since that’s where the money is.” Or, “It looks like economic power is shifting to China, so I'm learning Mandarin.” Or, “Biology is the new black.”

The future doesn’t belong to the present. And we don’t belong to our education. It belongs to us. We need to take responsibility not only for what we learn, but how we learn.

“We need to be able to formulate new questions, and not just rely on tasks or problems posed by others.”

Gardner’s view is that even honors students suspect that their knowledge is fragile, which contributes to the uneasy feeling that they—and even the educational institution itself—are somehow fraudulent.

Today’s students are not only rewarded for shallow learning, they’re punished for deep learning. Genuine learning requires going “offroad,” spending as much time as necessary to really understand a subject or a discipline.

Self-directed learning, or autodidacticism, is a powerful practice because it lets you build a new skill on the platform of the last one.

Learning to learn is personal growth squared. It gives you the ability to move laterally from one skill to another by applying deeply understood principles to adjacent disciplines. The faster the world changes, the more fluidly you need to adapt.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,” said Alvin Toffler in Rethinking the Future, “but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Whenever you take on a new subject or skillset, your brain reconfigures itself to accommodate the new knowledge.

Demaine hopes to make the design of synthetic proteins possible. What kind of person does this? “I’m a geek,” he says with a grin. His interests read like the to-do list of a precocious ten-year-old: card magic, juggling, string figures, video games, paper folding, improvisational comedy, and glassblowing.

Does Erik Demaine get time to play because he’s a genius? Or is he a genius because he gets time to play?

they referred to Demaine as “moving readily between the theoretical to the playful” in his effort to coax scientific insights from his personal interests. This is what some would call ludic learning, or learning by playing.

Emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning.

Filmmaker Jane Campion put it this way: “Playing in your work is the way to find your energy.” There’s a reciprocal relationship between playfulness and joyfulness.

You enter a joy zone in which learning accelerates, sometimes by a factor of five or ten. The time seems to fly by, and before you know it you’ve learned something that becomes deeply embedded in your psyche.

Schools would have to become facilitators of passion instead of directors of course material.

individual passion can’t be standardized.

I believe this is exactly the model we’re moving toward. But for many people it’s too late.

They’re either fully occupied in the workforce or just completing their formal education. If this is you, your best bet—which is still a good one—is to take control of your education from here on out. To realize that every day is opportunity to enter the joy zone, the place of autotelic learning, where the thing being learned is its own reward.

When you’re in your element, mastery becomes a simple formula: practice × passion = skill.

If you remove practice from the equation, all you have is aimless enjoyment.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee, remember?). Professor C. is the acknowledged expert on flow, a term he uses to describe the mental state of being truly creative. It’s a state of optimal experience—the feeling of being in control of your actions, master of your fate.

If a task is too easy, what happens? You lose interest. If it’s too hard, what happens? You give up. The space in the middle—where a task is neither too easy nor too hard—is the joy zone.

when competition becomes an end in itself it ceases to be

They can be competitive, but only if the competition is a means to perfect our skills; when competition becomes an end in itself it ceases to be fun.

The optimization of creative experience assumes freedom—the freedom to find the right balance between challenge and personal ability.

We live in a society where competition often determines winners and losers in accordance with the Competitive Exclusion Principle.

According to Professor Csikszentmihalyi, “The age-old riddle—What is the meaning of life?—turns out to be astonishingly simple. The meaning of life is meaning.”

A mission, simply stated, is a plan to fulfill a purpose. Having a mission doesn’t guarantee success, but it does make it more than an accident. A mission isn’t permanent. It can change as you learn more about your discipline, your competition, and who you are in relation to the larger world.

It keeps you from running off in a hundred directions at once in the mistaken belief that more is better. “There is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement,” said Jaron Lanier. “What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.”

The reality is, you can’t know the ultimate shape of your mission. You have to begin the journey someplace and correct course as you go. But it does help to set off with a rough map of the territory.

You may long to be a musician, for example, but the world doesn’t need more musicians. It needs certain kinds of musicians, with certain skills, who can make certain kinds of music, and address certain audiences.

choose a direction that lets you work with your whole heart instead of a divided heart. In today’s fragmented world, wholeheartedness confers a distinct advantage upon those who can offer it, because it turns ordinary work into extraordinary work.

“Good work is excellent,” said Gardner. “It meets the technical standards of the relevant profession or craft. It is personally engaging. Carrying out good work over the long haul proves too difficult unless that work remains inviting and meaningful to the practioner. The third E is ethical,” he said. “The good worker constantly interrogates herself about what it means to be responsible.”

Yet Deming was no bean counter. He was a teacher who understood that the most important things in life couldn’t be measured. Profound knowledge can’t be taught, he said, only learned through experience. While many people would agree that “experience is the best teacher,” he believed that experience by itself teaches nothing. You need to interpret your experience against a theory.

understand what happens, not at the event level, but at the systems level. It helps you answer the question: What

understand what happens, not at the event level, but at the systems level. It helps you answer the question: What does this mean?

Becoming an autodidact requires that you develop your own theory of learning, a personal framework for acquiring new knowledge.

here are 12 timeless principles you can borrow to construct it: Learn by doing.

Find worthy work. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Try not to settle. It’s too hard to work with one hand holding your nose.

Learn strategically. You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything. Read specifically on your subject. Appreciate great ideas with felonious intent. Keep a file of every idea you wish had been yours, and you’ll begin to absorb the lessons of your heroes. Über-restaurateur Reed Hearon said, “If you read two books on a subject written by knowledgeable people, you will know more than 95% of the people in the entire world know about that subject.”

Harness habits. The brain forms habits when routines are shoved from the frontal cortex down to the basal ganglia. They allow you to perform familiar tasks with very little conscious thought,

Focus on your goals. Of the eight conditions for creative flow, five are concerned with focus.

neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to connect new ideas to old ones. “Nerve cells that fire together wire together,”

When someone says he’s had 15 years of experience, you wonder if he’s actually had one year of experience 15 times. Masterful practitioners are those who constantly stretch into new areas, even at the risk of failure.

Dr. Gerald Grow of Florida A&M University offers this list of six metaskills for budding journalists: clarity, compassion, commitment, context, creativity, and centeredness. What are the metaskills that will drive success for you? Feed your desire. I once asked my mentor, painter Robert Overby, what he thought was the secret of creative success. He said, “The Big Want.” It’s the burning desire that can’t be extinguished with failure, lack of sleep, lack of money, or loss of friends. When you want something so bad you’ll never give up, no matter what kind of setbacks you encounter,

Dr. Gerald Grow of Florida A&M University offers this list of six metaskills for budding journalists: clarity, compassion, commitment, context, creativity, and centeredness. What are the metaskills that will drive success for you?

Training a skill involves performing an action over and over, deliberately and mindfully, until it becomes part of your muscle memory.

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” Practice is the scaffolding of magic.

Michelangelo

One way to think about career learning is to conceive it as a bridge that’s built on a series of spreading columns.

Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge, the entry level for your journey upward. From there you acquire disciplinary knowledge, the skillset that qualifies you as a competent professional.

Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge,

Higher up is domain knowledge, a broader understanding of the environment in which you practice your discipline. And at the very top is universal knowledge.

There’s no express elevator to universal knowledge. The only way to reach it is by working your way up from the bottom, tier by tier. Once you get there, however, it’s fairly easy to move across to new domains, where you can drill down into the supporting disciplines and crafts from a position of experience.

I’m always suspicious of job applicants who define themselves as “concept people.” Concepts about what? Based on what? Who’s going to execute these concepts? A concept is only as valuable as the knowledge, experience, and skills behind it.

Bridging, to paraphrase political scientist Robert Putnam, is the process of making friends with like-spirited people, people with different views and skills but similar ethics and goals. Bonding, in contrast, is making friends with like-minded people—people of the same political party, the same religion, the same nationality, the same age group, or the same race. Both kinds of connections, bridging and bonding, are necessary to be successful and happy.

bridging is the activity that brings the highest rewards, and the one that pushes society forward.

Social bridging makes use of what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “weak ties.” He found that weak ties between groups can be stronger than the strong ties within groups.

a clique is a closed system that acts more like a mirror than a window. For example, the workers at Google are a fairly diverse group of people, but they spend a lot of time together at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley, reading the same great books, eating together in the same great cafeterias, working on the same fascinating problems.

The antidote to the clique is to open the window. Connect with groups outside your own.

If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. While this may be flattering to New Yorkers, the opposite is more likely to be true: If you can’t make it somewhere else, you can probably make it in New York.

People who hoard knowledge simply don’t get much knowledge back.

Frank Stephenson, the designer of the BMW Mini and the Fiat 500, is proudest of his work on the McLaren MP4, since the tight-knit design team was able to create a cohesive look for the body styling. “A lot of times when you get a car out there,” he said, “it looks like you had somebody working on the front, somebody working on the sides, and somebody working on the back—and they were all mad at each other.”

We know Apple as a company with thousands of designers on the payroll, but the company’s key products were conceived by a small, intimate team, working

We know Apple as a company with thousands of designers on the payroll, but the company’s key products were conceived by a small, intimate team, working closely in a small space with great tools.

Unplugging To be creative, whether alone or in a group, you need the ability to pay attention. “Paying attention” is the right phrase, because it costs something to focus on a task, or a train of thought, or another person’s words. The price of attention is psychic energy.

As life sped up, our attention spans got shorter. Now we have a situation called continuous partial attention, meaning that our consciousness is so fragmented, so chopped up and balkanized that the pieces are nearly unusable.

We’re left with partial thoughts, partial experiences, and partial understandings. This is the trap of the always-on, always-on-ya culture. Mobile computing offers a built-in escape from sustained focus. At the same time, it provides a ready excuse for avoiding conversation with the strangers, neighbors, and colleagues who might expand our thinking. If we’re always on, then our creative brains are always

A recent New York Times article reported the story of a 14-year-old girl at Woodside High School, in California, who sends and receives 27,000 texts per month, “her fingers clicking at a blistering pace” as she holds up to seven conversations at a time. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else,” she says. Once we get past our admiration for anyone who can develop such arcane skills, we can see this is not so much a skill as an addiction. With her day taken up with texting, it’s unlikely that she has time for focused schoolwork or homework,

In fact, there’s a good chance she’s even uncomfortable being alone with her thoughts. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders even has a new term for it: Internet use disorder. “When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device,” says Sherry Turkle, psychology professor at MIT. “Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure.”

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

“Without solitude,” said Picasso, “no serious work is possible.” Leonardo found the same thing to be true.

Wozniak, designer of the original Macintosh, said that “most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.” You can’t switch off the world. But you can block it out while you work. You can carve out quiet time to work things through by yourself, so that when you return to the world you have something deep and pure to show for it. Working alone doesn’t mean being lonely.

You put in your time, you pass your tests, and ta-da! You’re educated. They slap a diploma on your back and ship you off to work. Yet tomorrow an education will look less like a package and more like journey. It’s estimated that by 2025, the number of Americans over 60 will increase by 70%. This means occupational changes will become more commonplace, requiring new habits of lifelong learning.

The trend toward multiple careers is not lost on what’s been called Generation Flux. GenFluxers are a psychographic group made up mostly—but not entirely—of young people who understand that the race goes not to the swift but to the adaptable. They embrace instability and revel in the challenge of new careers, new business models, and shifting assumptions.

the vast bulk of our institutions—educational, corporate, political—are not built for flux.

Your story becomes your map. What makes us happiest is getting where we want to go. The quality of our attention shapes us, then we in turn shape the world.

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

When you find the joy zone and stay in it, you embark on a journey to the center of yourself. You carry with you the five tools that define your humanness—feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning.

We’re not human beings; we’re human becomings. We’re not the sum of our atoms; we’re the potential of our spirit, our vision, and our talent.

I wrote Metaskills primarily for professionals already in the workplace—those of us whose education didn’t prepare us for the rigors of the Robotic Age.

Anyone born after the year 2000 will face a much different world than we did, and will require a different kind of education. Tellingly, the need for transformation is coming at a time when the cost of traditional schooling is spiraling out of reach, causing students and parents to question the cost-benefit ratio.

all we worry about is what college our kids will get into. In 1972, according to a recent study, high-income families were spending five times as much on education as low-income families. It said that by 2007 the gap had grown to nine to one as spending by upper-end families doubled.

An educational garden replaces replication with imagination, reductive thinking with holistic thinking, passive learning with hands-on learning, and unhealthy competition with joyful collaboration.

Facts are useful when they serve as fuel for the mind, but the problem is that the number of useful facts keeps growing. To accommodate them, schools keep reducing the depth of their teaching. Facts look like towns flashing past on a speeding train, and courses are souvenir decals on a suitcase. “Rome—isn’t that where we had the gelato?”

by the time you need them, 95% of the actual facts are gone, lost in the mists of memory. With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach in school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects—the ones that will matter

by the time you need them, 95% of the actual facts are gone, lost in the mists of memory. With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach in school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects—the ones that will matter in the 21st century—are metaskills.

Students today should be learning social intelligence, systemic logic, creative thinking, how to make things, how to learn.

Flexible pathways through the five metaskills would turn education into a strategic exercise. It would put students in charge of their own learning, allowing them to tap into their own interests and discover who they are. It would leverage emerging technologies, including new repositories of factual knowledge like Wikipedia, and social learning tools like those from Inkling and Pearson,

enable interactive, collaborative learning.

Refocusing education on metaskills means transforming the educational experience.

Changing the course of traditional education is no easy task. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard, once likened the difficulty of reforming a curriculum to the difficulty of moving a cemetery.

Salman Khan may have accidentally started a revolution. In trying to teach his cousin a little math, he stumbled onto the biggest educational idea since the textbook. He began tutoring young Nadia with fairly good results. But when he moved out of town, his only option for continuing to teach her was through online videos. So he asked himself an odd question: “How can an automated cousin be better than a cousin?”

The answer turned out to be the Khan Academy. Founded in 2009, the website now offers thousands of free 10-minute videos, spanning a wide range of educational subjects from math to history and science to English,

His bare-bones tutorials have been watched an average of 20,000 times each by high-school and middle-school

why did the Academy catch on in such a big way? Sure, it’s free, but since when did free education ever inspire such fanaticism? There are four good reasons for Khan’s success, all of them suggestive for the future of education.

1. Sal is a charming presenter.

2. The videos are accessible round the clock,

3. They can learn at their own pace,

At first glance, this looks like the Robot Curve in action—teachers being replaced by videos. But it’s actually an opportunity for instructors to stop being “the sage on the stage” and start being flesh-and-blood mentors and coaches.

A world-famous instructor could only be an asset to a traditional institution.

4. Stop talking, start making

“What they taught us in law school,” said a recent graduate of George Washington University, “is how to graduate from law school.”

Creativity, the process of experimenting with things, ignites knowledge.

“Not letting children learn the hands-on component of science is killing us as a nation,” she said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.”

the brink of giving up, she had an epiphany: Boys learn better on their feet. She hurried down to Lowe’s and bought some wood, glue, nails, paint, and simple hand tools. She laid them out next to a plan to build a birdhouse. The boys were transfixed. They became fascinated with the problem of building their own structures, suddenly paying attention,

Technology innovator Ray Kurzweil thinks it is. “The best way to learn is by doing your own projects,” he says. Project-based learning, also called problem-based learning, has become a hot topic.

I once had a college instructor who would shout, “Shut up and design!”

the cause of most hyperactivity and lack of focus is the nature of our schooling, not an outbreak of neurological difficiencies.

Most students, if offered a choice between the fun of playing a videogame and the fun of designing one, would choose the latter.

In a typical textbook lesson, such as memorizing word pairs or historical events, most students can only recall an average of 10 percent of the material after 3 to 6 days. The other 90 percent goes away. In contrast,

Deep learning comes from the addition of emotional drivers such as imagination, intrinsic rewards, experiential truth,

Deep learning comes from the addition of emotional drivers such as imagination, intrinsic rewards, experiential truth, aesthetics, intuition, passion, and wonder.

A third of students do less than five hours of studying per week and yet manage, on average, to earn Bs.

Finishing a course has come to mean proficiency. And getting a degree has come to mean expertise. Meanwhile, cheating has reached epidemic proportions.

Anyone at the top of his class, according to the principle of flow, is necessarily underchallenged.

real advancement is measured in mastery, not correctness. As you master a topic, a skill, or a discipline, you can feel your confidence grow. The feeling itself is the measurement.

Mastery can’t be reached without guidance and sustained focus. It can’t be assembled from thin, 50-minute classes spaced apart by days.

Quest University in British Columbia has attacked this deficiency head-on. Instead of the usual curriculum of several subjects spread over 16 weeks, Quest uses the “block system.” Students take one course for four weeks straight, no interruptions, before moving on the next one. This means the students are together with their instructor every day for the duration of the course. Instead of juggling, they focus. Instead of grazing, they dive. Instead of piling up credits, they collect skills, knowledge, and experience.

he asked the students why they weren’t more curious, why they didn’t ask more questions. The answers fell into three categories. Answer 1: “There’s so much to learn, and it’s all on Google anyway.” Answer 2: “This is a seminar; asking questions could be a sign of weakness.” Answer 3: “You have to understand, I’m paying for a degree, not an education.” Soon after, Quest University was born.

The old world turned on the axis of knowledge and material goods. The new one will turn on the axis of creativity and social responsibility.

The cold rationality of the assembly line has denied us access to the most human part of ourselves. It made us believe that if a thing can’t be counted, weighed, measured, or memorized,

There’s a theory called cognitive recapitulation

The cold rationality of the assembly line has denied us access to the most human part of ourselves. It made us believe that if a thing can’t be counted, weighed, measured, or memorized, it can’t be important. It caused us to narrow our experience of life, leaving little room for feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, or learning.

In the 21st century it seems as if we’re straining towards a new stage of evolution. Our “fourth brain”—the shared, external brain we’re building in the technology sphere—is rebalancing the load so that our right brain can rejoin our left as an equal partner.

The evolutionary relationship between brain and hand is written in our DNA. It’s living proof that we’re not only Home sapiens but Homo creatis. I make, says the hand on the wall, therefore I am.