I'm a writer and a builder - and frequent procrastinator. Quick to jump in with a sketch or a couple of key ideas, and even a launch. But a lot slower to let things percolate and evolve. And quick to revise, throw stuff out, question why I ever went down a particular path. When I sit down to write or work on a creative project, my process is the equivalent of sharpening a hundred pencils and reorganizing my desk ten times before actually digging in. Sometimes I'll even clean the oven.

After many years, I've learned to trust that this procrastination is an active part of my thinking process. I  recently ran across Adam Grant's terrific talk on this very subject. Highlights:

• "If you look across fields, the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most."
• "The more output you churn out the more variety you get and the better your chances of churning out something original."
• "Originals are not all that different from the rest of us. They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. They have bad ideas. And sometimes it's not in spite of those qualities, but because of them, that they succeed."
• "Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

Adam Grant – Books, Podcast, TED Talks, Newsletter, Articles

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author who studies how people find motivation and meaning, and what it takes to lead more generous and creative lives.

Adam Grant

Reopening the mind: how cognitive closure kills creative thinking

The need for cognitive closure is the motivation to find an answer to ambiguous situations — any answer that aligns with our existing knowledge. Not only can it lead us to make mistakes based on erroneous assumptions, but it can obscure the path to innovation.

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

I'm a huge fan of Better World Books for its social impact business model. When I don't buy books from a local bookstore, this is my merchant of choice.  

Their transactional communications demonstrate the power of a good story and a great sense of humor to delight - and generate a regular return business.  

Check out a shipping notice I received. Simple. Powerful. Borrow/Steal this idea!

Hello Erika,

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It's me... it's me! I can't believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I've got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can't believe I'm leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don't have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it's time to see the world!

I can't wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol' brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I've had, I'm ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn't take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I've found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

But hey, enough about me, I've been asked to brief you on a few things:

Eagerly awaiting our meeting,
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found | IndieBound.org

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door …

HomeSuketu Mehta

Brian Hayden recently interviewed me for his Finding Your Venture Podcast. We had a great conversation  about telling - and evolving - an unconventional story as I launched my first tech company.

From Brian's intro:

You’re going to hear a story from Erika Block about how a story that doesn’t make sense at first can evolve to be effective and compelling.

Share Your Idea Early and Often

The potential benefit of talking to people about the problem you’re solving and what you’re working on is enormous. Your biggest competitor at the start is the world’s indifference.

When you talk about your company and ask for help, you’re activating a support network that can help you. And if you’re a decent person then your network is huge and powerful, even if you don’t know it.

Wanderlust, by Rebecca Solnit,  has had more impact in my life than any single book I've read. It actually changed my life,  in a wandering kind of way. It inspired a multi-year theatre project  that, ironically, led to my interest in learning about technology for mapping and storytelling, which sent me back to grad school, which  led to me founding a couple of tech startups. Which led to Sticky Lab.

Ironically, because as Solnit writes, “I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”  

Modern life moves fast, often in thoughtless ways, mostly as a result of how we've adopted modern technology. Wanderlust implies that we lose possibility when we live in a world of interiors, enabled by speedy technology,  focused on speedy growth, rather than walking through the world, engaged and sometimes finding what we didn't know we were looking for.

In her chapter The Mind at 3 Miles an Hour, Solnit discusses European philosophers whose walks may have lubricated the ideas that shaped western culture.  "Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world."

She goes on to discuss the disconnection of our bodies from the world we live in, concluding: "If there is a history of walking, then it too has come to a place where the road falls off, a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce, where bodies are not in the world but indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic or feeble."

A reality which has been brilliantly illuminated during a  year of  pandemic, is how unavoidably connected our bodies are to communities, to our work, to other people. Being among people in these interior landscapes became dangerous. And yet, to be safe, we've become even more entrenched in our  tech-assisted interiors.

The flip side is that many people have spent more time outside walking, as a safe way to be out in the world and with others. Or to escape from others, as the case may be.

Walking bring back the possibilities of wandering, with its potential for new discoveries and opportunities.

"The imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet. Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics."

Further readings

The Walking Project

a selection of performance, audience, jam session, workshop, walking and installation photos from The Walking Project.

Flickrblockwork

Weaving a tread thread

The first steps of the Walk & Squawk Performance Project’s latest endeavor aren’t baby steps. Rather, The Walking Project: First Steps, is an experimental, broad-reaching multimedia event, not to mention a tremendously creative and ambitious undertaking.

Detroit Metro Times

The New Yorker Recommends: Rebecca Solnit’s Ode to Walking

“Wanderlust,” published in 2000, is a requiem for the disappearing practice—a “subversive detour.”

The New YorkerElizabeth Barber

Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind

“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”

Brain PickingsMaria Popova

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity

Stanford researchers found that walking boosts creative inspiration. They examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. A person’s creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking.

Stanford NewsStanford University

In this imaginative and powerful story, neuroscientist Anil Seth explains how what we perceive isn’t an accurate reflection of a real, externally existing world. In fact, perception and hallucination are based on similar processes—they are our brain’s interpretation of myriad inputs.

All our perceptions are a kind of storytelling by the brain.

We can't perceive something unless we can imagine it. We can't imagine something unless we can perceive it.

From The Future of Storytelling

This is communications design that inspires action. Words and graphics that popped off my LinkedIn feed and got me thinking - and wanting to know more about Juhan Sonin.

While the policies are consistent with some (but not all) of my own positions, I'd have zoomed in and engaged with this whatever the message.  

Public officials need a policy list
… for constituents,
… for staff,
… for colleagues.

A policy list
… reflects the needs of The People they represent,
… directs staff on prioritization,
… shows convergence with fellow elected humans.

This is my draft version policy list
… for the nation,
… for healthcare,
… for next steps.

Positions change,
are often not binary, and
should be public for those elected.

Each policy also needs a ripple effects assessment, that shows potential intended and unintended consequences.

Next up:
Map out ripple effects.
+
How do we get a stronger and stronger bead on what US residents need? How about a public service that collects our... List of Needs?

#howtostickyourfootinit

Juhan Sonin on LinkedIn: Juhan’s Draft Policy List v.02

Public officials need a policy list… for constituents,… for staff,… for colleagues. A policy list… reflects the needs of The People they represent...

LinkedIn816 Posts

Lucie Howell is the Chief Learning Officer of The Henry Ford, a museum that explores the American experience of innovation, ingenuity and resourcefulness.

"God bless all elementary teachers out there because they are amazing at creating these interdisciplinary experiences where students just move naturally from developing one set of skills to the other."

Mentioned in this Podcast

Shaping Our Future Together: Talent, Enthusiasm, Career Rock-climbing & Innovation History

“Lean into young people. They want us to make changes for the better. They need us to make changes for the better.”

Michigan Future Inc.admin

The Transcript

Erika Block: I'm Erika Block and I'm here with Lucie Howell, who's the chief learning officer of The Henry Ford. What is a Chief Learning Officer?

Lucie Howell: Well, that's a really good question and I'm still figuring that out. For the most part, my responsibility really is to drive our learning strategy and help support the organization and the institution...really figure out what educational platform do we want to build and tell our stories from, and how can we do that in the most innovative but most relevant ways possible?

I think we're also looking at ensuring that we do them with best-practice ideas in mind. So, it's part of my responsibility to kind of know what the current educational, philosophies that we should be activating as a learning institution, and really sharing those with the organization such that we're able to share our stories and have them help people learn, develop and grow as guests -- to whatever degree the guest is comfortable and engaging. So, for some of those guests, it's maybe come to the museum and have a fun time. Right? For others, we actually embed this into the learning experience.

For example, we work with Detroit Public Schools Community District. We have fourth and fifth-grade field trips and we've actually developed a curriculum where the students learn before they come to the museum, and come to The Village. And then they have a learning experience at The Village as part of a field trip day, and then they have followups. That's really deep, embedded learning. And so my responsibility, and my team's responsibility, is to figure that out from a very low-level touch to a really integrated learning experience.

Erika Block: So, let’s go back and define the word platform, because we use that in so many different ways. So, is curriculum a platform? Or what is a platform when you talk about that?

Lucie Howell: I guess, and maybe this is the engineer in me, when I think of platforms, I think of it sort of as a launch point. So, our launch point has really developed, as an innovation learning framework -- which is really a language that has been pulled from our objects and stories. We call it the Model I Innovation Learning Framework, and we talk about the habits of an innovator and the actions of innovation. And these are habits that we see again and again and again in the stories of innovators that we have across the venues and the actions that we see individual inventors and innovators showcase, or teams of inventors and innovators showcase, across their stories. One of the things we've learned through this process is that every innovation journey is unique. So, you'll notice we don't talk about the innovation process. We talk about an innovation journey. And the reason is because of that uniqueness. You can have the same inventor or the same team of inventors, who exhibit the same habits, but for a new invention they'll actually take a slightly different, innovation path. So, each journey is unique. But what we see again and again are these actions reappear and the habits that those people activate in that journey come up again and again. That’s allowed us to have this language where we can tell the story of Rosa Parks, alongside the story of Thomas Edison, alongside the story of George Washington Carver -- and it creates this lovely kind of connective tissue for the stories that could, at first glance, feel sort of isolated and individual.

Erika Block: What are some of the connective tissues or threads?

Lucie Howell: George Washington Carver was a scientist in the agricultural field, and he worked a lot on optimizing different seeds. So, you can see that story kind of resonate with a Thomas Edison story -- optimizing the invention of that tungsten material and his team doing that. With Rosa Parks, there was a lot of taking risks and challenging the rules. Those are some of the habits of an innovator that we talk about. And again, in order to invent one new thing once a week -- which was the goal that Edison set his team -- you have to take risks and challenge rules to be able to do that.

And that's, I think, one of things that the learning landscape teaches us -- that it's so much easier to make connections across stories when there is a common language. And this framework really gives us that common language to help others make, create connective tissues.

There were six habits that we've highlighted, and by the way, we don't think  that these are the only habits of any innovator, but these are the ones we see again and again and again across our stories. And now you're going to test me. Let's see if I can remember them. So, there's learning from failure, which is probably my favorite one. There is: take risks, challenge the rules, stay curious, be empathetic, and collaborate. Nice one.

And then the actions of innovation -- there are five of those: uncover, define. design, optimize, and implement. And the actions sound to me, as an engineer, very much like the engineering design process. But I think what I've learned through the stories from The Henry Ford is...it's actually...the power is when these two things come together to tell those journey stories.

As an engineer, I was always taught to use the engineering design process and, you know, it was cyclic -- or as a scientist to use the inquiry process that’s sort of very linear and research-based. But what I've learned is that no person follows it. Or, no group of people follows a particular trajectory...that they take a journey and they experience these steps along the way, and they activate these different habits.

The other thing that's really powerful about this tool is we can now tell each one of the stories that we have using this language, but we can also help people in their own innovation journeys. So, if you are on an innovation journey -- and it can be something as simple as your New Year's resolution being you want to manage your finances at home better -- you're going to create a system where you manage them a little bit better. You can actually think about where am I in my innovation journey? Use those steps, and then recognize the habits you might normally engage with at the step. And if you have hit a wall -- you can't solve that particular part of the problem -- actually activate a different set of habits. So, you might be at the design phase and you're always very good at being empathetic, but you forget to stay curious. Just these will help remind you: “Oh, maybe I need to practice that habit a bit more.”

Erika Block: It's another set of tools to do this. I want to talk about the nature of interdisciplinary thinking and the cross-pollination of experiences and ideas and disciplines which we've touched on here. I want to read a quote from something that you wrote. I saw a blog for Michigan Future and you said, “As you can tell, I think about learning a lot as an engineer by head, and an educator by heart. I care about us all losing out on our collective human potential because our society has set up systems that, without meaning to, limit how our innovative potential is recognized and encouraged.”

That’s very much in sync with what you've just discussed. I'll give you an example of conversations I recently had with somebody who said you can have the most interesting and innovative technology and even a tremendous market for it, but in the end it comes down to the people and the systems they build and the stories they can tell to get it out. And you could argue that people and organizations are harder than technology and pure science. And so it seems it's something that’'s embedded in this.

Lucie Howell: Yes, I think it is embedded. I think, probably the biggest frustration that I experienced as an educator, is...and it started when I was teaching science. I remember one of my kids turned to me and said, “Ms. Howell, you need to stop teaching me math because you're my science teacher. Can you get on with the science, please? And not teach me math?”

Erika Block: Eighth grader?

Lucie Howell: Well, yes! And that to me really demonstrated that we had done something to education. We had created these siloed buckets that young people

really, genuinely thought: “You know, when I am in a math class, I do math for no other reason than to do math because I'm in a math class. And then I go to my science class and the same job happens there.”

What's fascinating to me is when you think of Pre-K kids or elementary kids, that learning experience is completely intertwined and totally interdisciplinary. God bless all elementary teachers out there because they are amazing at creating these interdisciplinary experiences where students just move naturally from developing one set of skills to the other. Right? We then move kids into kind of middle school and high school, and then college, and at each step we create bigger and more narrow fields and bigger and bigger silos, and create even harder and harder walls to break down.

And then, at the end of all those experiences, we put them out into the world of work and then go and say, “Go be interdisciplinary! Go be cross-functional.” And then we wonder why they don't know how to...why teamwork is so -- it can be challenging for many people when everything they’ve done up until that point in time has been measured -- that success is measured on the individual’s ability and they're actually put on assessment mechanisms that have them competing as individuals; against one another. Yet, we want them to then learn the skills of teamwork. That, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats.

One of my other things about young people is: It isn't what you tell them. It's what they see that matters. So, you can say to a kid, time and time again, that learning from failure, for example, is a really important part of life. That you really need to learn from failure. But if that kid sees that Dad come home from work, and that Dad is feeling failure at work and he's worried about the risks of that in terms of that work -- then that kid is learning that we're basically telling them a lie. Right? And I think that's part of my frustration, too. If we're going to share these ideas and stories, we need to recognize that it is important to tell the truth. We need to recognize that nuance matters, and the kids are smart enough to understand nuance. So, that young man is smart enough to understand that it's okay to learn from failure. It is okay to take risks. But you might need to address the risks that you're taking or the failures you're willing to make, dependent upon the situations you're in, right?

Nuance matters. And I think all too often we have a tendency to try and simplify everything down to, you know, that five words or...and I think human beings are smarter than that. I certainly know the kids I've worked with a smarter than that,

Erika Block: How do you sustain that? I completely agree with you, but I also -- and this is a conversation we have a lot: people don't pay attention enough to get the nuance. We're moving so fast. We don't have time. We're overloaded. We have too many responsibilities. There's a zillion reasons why. And this extends to work. It extends to our families. It extends to our politics. Nuances. Really, it requires attention. It requires time.

Lucie Howell: Yes, it does. This one's a hard one because you have to recognize the realities that we live in. Right? But I also think you have to hold people accountable. What was really being said in there is that we're all a little bit lazy, right? And, I don't know if you want something...it isn't meant to be easy to get it. Right? It's the things that are really important in life are the things you work for...and the things you work for are things that take patience and they take time. And we have developed a tendency to this idea of: it should just come easy. And if it isn't coming easy -- If I don't feel comfortable and okay...then someone did something wrong. And we look around for who did something wrong? Why is this experience that I'm having one that's challenging me? Right? I shouldn't have to have this. I shouldn't have to sit in this discomfort.” But I'm going to make an argument, which is you never learn anything new unless you're made to feel slightly uncomfortable about your current state of learning.

Erika Block: Yes.

Lucie Howell: There's a reason why you go on and learn a new math technique. It's because the ones that you have don't quite work for the new situation. Therefore, you're uncomfortable enough that you've got to go and do the next thing because that will help make it easier. That, I think, is true for everything in life. And one of the things...and I think this is a challenge for adults, honestly: As a Gen Xer, I have been taught that my job was to always solve everybody's problems for them and that I shouldn't ever have anyone in my space that should feel uncomfortable at any point in time. Like my job is to go and fix it, whether it's me as the mom, me as a teacher, frankly me as a bs -- that discomfort in other people is not a good thing. And I’m meant to go in and fix it.

Well, first of all  who am I to be the one to know what is the right fix for every single person? There's a lot of hubris in that! And the second thing is...by doing that, I'm actually not allowing other people to grow and develop, and persevere, and learn that it's important to wait long enough and actually listen and pay attention because nuance matters. I almost feel like we have created our own monsters.

I would argue that maybe rather than us saying things like: “We don't have time. Things move fast. People don't have the attention spans.” Maybe by doing that, we're making people comfortable with not bothering to be patient and listening. Maybe we need to be starting to change that narrative and start saying, actually, nuance matters. And you might want to spend ten more extra minutes on this, really thinking and playing with it, rather than ignoring it. And I know that is a really uncomfortable thing but, you know, I said, “New learning doesn't take place unless you're made to feel uncomfortable with where you're currently at.”

Erika Block: Yes. There's actually research that says you have to be uncomfortable or pushed in order for it to really resonate with you. So, I agree with you -- by the way, I'm sort of playing Devil's advocate with all of this -- I'm going to go back to the same article where you cited a metaphor from Lou Glazer who's the Director of Michigan Future. And, I think you say he nailed what your work in education has been all about. He said that the education systems we're working with now were designed to prepare people for the career ladders of the past -- and not the career rock faces of today and the future, ...which is just lovely.

Lucie Howell: I couldn't agree with you more.

Erika Block: Yes. So, what you're talking about was with the increased rate of change in our work society that has derived from technological advancement. We need to develop talented people who are prepared to be flexible and adaptable, both in the work they're doing, and in their expectations of how and where that work will come from. In short, we need to provide learning experiences that arm our young people with the tools to move forward without always having a specific and clear endpoint or correct outcome in mind. And then you say, so what does that look, sound and feel like? And that's actually my question to you. What does that look, sound, and feel like?

Lucie Howell: It looks, sounds, and feels uncomfortable, right? And I think that, for me, is sort of a big part of it. What's interesting is I've always accepted change is the norm. I was talking with a very close friend of mine just recently -- I think I realized that my experiences in life have made me more accepting that change is just normal. In fact, for me, things staying the same feels very abnormal. I moved around a lot as a child. The one thing I could rely on is that every year looked different. I was probably living in a different house. I was probably going to a different school. I may well have been in a different country -- and so the only thing I could rely on was that change was completely normal. And so learning to be flexible and adaptable to that change, but kind of ground myself and who I was, was a really important thing for me. I hadn't realized until recently how that makes me slightly askew to a lot of people that I have the privilege of working with or living with.

And, I think, what we are looking at for young people moving forward is that they are going to need to be okay with change in a way that their grandparents didn't need to be. And even their parents. I think that parents are experiencing it, but even they won't need to be. And so we've got to be able to arm them with the tools of how to manage change and how you actually embrace it. And you know, people ask me, how do you do that? And one of the things I always say is the notion that things stay the same is actually a false narrative anyway. So all of us have the tools to adapt and be flexible because change has occurred in all of our lives all of the time. It's just that I happen to be way more comfortable with it than most. And I guess what you hear me wanting...is to ensure that those young people I know are going to experience -- just feel -- the same level of comfort. So, when they know change is happening, it isn't something that is scary. It isn't something to fear. It's something to kind of embrace. To have the wherewithal of saying, I've got all of these tools in my toolbox. I've got it. I know change is going to happen. Change is going to be slightly uncomfortable, but I've actually got tools to manage that discomfort, channel that discomfort, and use it and learn and develop and grow.

Erika Block: It sounds like you were able to a large degree to develop those tools because you were experiencing change every year when you moved. And so you developed good strategies for when you went into a new school; when you went into a new community. And so that was a learning experience. I would say that I grew up in a house where entrepreneurship, and starting new things and taking risks, was a big part of dinner table conversations. And watching my father, specifically, cycle from being: business going well to doing really poorly. And that enables me to adapt and take risks as an entrepreneur that a lot of people can't. Not very many people have similar situations. So, how do you build learning experiences that come from outside of the lived everyday experiences that we had growing up that can help folks get to this place.

Lucie Howell: Oh! Well, this is my favorite conversation! So, I think for me, project-based learning -- problem-based learning -- is just the key to it. Actually setting young people challenges where the adult in the room doesn't even know what the answer is going to look, sound, and feel like, and they're on the journey with those young people. It's very interesting when you do that. It makes educators very uncomfortable. Teachers like to feel...we were measured on our classroom control and our classroom management. And now more what I'm advocating for is that you’re not, in a sense, managing the experience. I think, for me, classroom management is about facilitating that experience in a safe and rich way, rather than ensuring the successful outcome of that experience. Right? I have seen what happens to kids when they make the sudden realization that their teacher doesn't know what the right answer is, and they go through, you know, a first stage...shock! Second stage: fear. And then the third phase is empowerment.

Wow! I could actually come up and share something with my teacher, or my parent, or the adult -- the person who's meant to know everything in this space -- and tell them something they didn't know.

And I think that's why I love the Invention Convention work so much -- where you have these young people who have chosen to be at the cutting edge. They're inventing brand new things and they've been given the opportunity -- by their educators, by their schools, or by their home -- to just go and be as creative as possible, pushed to the cutting edge of imagination and they feel safe  If it doesn't go right, I've learned something from it, and I'll go onto my next invention, or I'll go into something new. And, you know, watching the confidence that comes with that is incredible. I guess for me, that then goes back to this: preparing a talent pipeline for those rock faces.

The more experiences like that you can give young people, the more they will know and understand how to tackle that rock face. The last thing we should do is create, set, truly artificial safe learning environments where kids don't stumble and fall, and then set them at the bottom of a rock face that is their career. Right? That, to me, is a huge disservice to young people. And you know, as an educator, do I want my kids to stumble and fall and feel frustrations? Is it hard to watch? Absolutely! Of course, I don't want that and, yes, it is hard to watch, but yeah, trust me, I would much rather have it in a safe, controlled, managed environment where the risks they're taking are small -- where the failures they're going to have aren’t catastrophic to their lives, or to their lives of their family.

Erika Block: Yeah.

Lucie Howell: And if we don't do that, but we put them at the bottom of a rock face, which is their career, and then have them experience it later with no tools for how to survive, I think we've not educated our kids properly.

Erika Block: Do you think that happens more often than not right now?

Lucie Howell: Oh...a big sigh. I think for all kinds of reasons that are truly people wanting to do the right thing -- we have created a system that has sanitized learning such that they're not ready for those rock faces.

Erika Block: I know this from people who teach at the university and see students who've been raised with no obstacles in front of them. And all of a sudden, they're on their own and they don't know what to do, and their parents get involved. My partner is a psychotherapist and a lot of the students who come in...it was really the beginning of when mental illness was visible, but there were things that were triggered by this sort of failure to launch because nobody made it hard for them when they were younger, and all of a sudden, boom, they were thrown into something on their own. I want to go back to this notion of no rules, no defined outcome, which I think is super important because it's sort of life…

Lucie Howell: Yes, it is.

Erika Block: I'm going to bring it back to this cross-disciplinary thing. So you know, the first half of my career was making theater, and the work that we did was based on improvisation. And my job as a director was to work with folks to bring the right content and inputs and create this environment where people could explore with no defined outcome other than at some point we were going to have a show about a thing. And that thing, the topic, might change, and it was very hard for traditionally trained performers who were used to working with the script that Shakespeare or some contemporary playwright wrote for them. But building that safe environment and allowing people to go on a journey together where the only rules, you know, the core rules of improvisation are: you don't say no to somebody. It's yes. And if somebody hands you a prompt, you go with it. And that's pretty much the rule. And you don't do anything to hurt anybody. And you have to adapt. And what I've seen -- and I've seen this with people who've moved out of theater who have either improvisational or even just hardcore stage production backgrounds. Because you're used to getting that show up. There's no way you cannot meet your deadline. So, if you have to go fix something with duct tape, or if your sound board is broken...you’d better go find a can for that -- to bang on for that sound effect --- or whatever it is you have to do. You have to do it. You have to adapt. You have to make it work. It's never going to be perfect. The outcome is completely unknown because you're going to be in front of a live audience. So you don't even know what that audience is going to be like. They may be tired. They may be thinking about a failure they just had at work. The people I've seen who move into different arenas -- coming out of that background -- are incredibly flexible and adaptable.  I would be interested in hearing if you have any particular examples of a teacher, a classroom, a narrative that a student has experienced around this adaptability and the ability to dive into something without knowing that you have to get to a specific outcome?

Lucie Howell: I do. It's my favorite story to tell. So, I was lucky enough to lead a program, when I was working at Quinnipiac University, that was embedding a project-based learning experience into a science curriculum. And we got to work with. Middle school and high school science teachers...

Erika Block: For people who don't think about it. What's project-based learning?

Lucie Howell: Project-based learning is learning where you are given a project to do, that's team-based and you actually have to work and develop a solution. In this particular case, these were engineering projects. So, the idea was we might have a chemistry high school curriculum and it would be an embedded chemical engineering project that the kids then work on. And the idea is you’ll be given a brief -- just like you would be given at work -- that doesn't have an actual specific solution. And what you have to do as a student is to apply your knowledge, apply your skills, apply your understanding, apply your common sense, and work together as a team to come up with a solution to that project. And so you could think of it as a capstone project -- something like that. The idea for this program was that we would have a classic science curriculum, and we would choose an engineering design project to embed into that curriculum. And the students would, as part of that curriculum, have this project-based learning experience -- and this would be something that, if we embedded it into enough of the science curriculum units, they would experience it two or three times in middle school and then two or three times in high school. Because again, what we know is, a one-shot wonder does not work if you want to develop this kind of muscle memory. You have to practice these habits and actions -- and experience them again and again. So, weirdly, I discovered that high school chemistry teachers really, really struggle with this concept of project-based learning and engineering design processes and curriculum.

And I had this one particular group -- one particular teacher -- who very early on said. “I think this is a ridiculous idea. I'm here because my principal told me that I needed to be here.” It was a year-long project, so we spent some time in the summer and then they had to apply it through the year. This was a big ask and this teacher said it right off the bat to me and she went on to say -- with the rest of our team-- “You know, I teach chemistry. You can't do any engineering and chemistry. That's not a thing.” Well, I kind of looked and smiled and said, “Well, that's lovely, but I happen to be a chemical engineer by degree -- so it's not going to fly with me. So, let's move on from there.

Erika Block: Did she flinch? Did she say anything?

Lucie Howell: Oh, no. I think she just smiled wryly and went away and moaned quite a bit in the corner with the rest of the team about, again, how stupid this whole concept was. So, this team actually went on to create a really interesting project because their curriculum was all about absorption as part of 10th grade chemistry. And actually, the project can they came up with was that students needed to design a diaper that could do a number of different things -- and they had these different resources -- and it was actually a really interesting project. But even though they were actually able to come up with a project -- which was her first thing that wouldn't be possible-- she was still not convinced. So, they go back to the schools and they apply this curriculum, they work with their students and, at the end of the year, the whole cohort of teachers comes back to share what their experiences have been so we can look at doing it again and improve the curriculums that were developed. So, they're in the room and, you know, one of my first questions to them was: We're here to share what we've learned this year. And this one teacher, she puts a hand up -- “I'll show what I'm going to share.” And, you know, I had my head in my hands going, Oh, no...anyone...could we start with anyone? But, “Okay, sure. Share your story with me.” And this is a summation of what she said. She said, “As you all know, I started this year not believing in this at all, but I have to tell you that as the year went on, I've completely changed my opinion. This project changed the way my classroom acted and behaved. And the students changed their perceptions of one another because of it.” And she went on to tell the story of...they’d done this project, -- this curriculum -- and when they got to the project piece, all of her students who were straight A students in chemistry struggled and were getting Ds on this project. And all of her D students, who really struggled with chemistry,  just loved the project and were getting A's. And while they were doing the project-based piece of the curriculum, the way that the classic A-grade students started to speak and treat, and act with the students who'd been getting Ds changed completely. And the respect for different perspectives, different skill sets changed how her kids talked to one another, and how she thought of them. So, she's sharing this with me, and I have not got my phone on record or anything! But I will tell you, the hairs on the back of my neck went up. Tears were in my eyes because that's why we should do this.

Erika Block: Wow.

Lucie Howell: It was a good moment.

Erika Block: Yeah. Wow. .

Lucie Howell: There was actually something I wanted to add as you were talking about your experiences with improvisation and the people that you had engaged with. One of the things that came into my head is: watching young people go through frustrations. When they're in the middle of that learning because they don't have the answer -- and because the adults in the room don't have the answer --  they're just waiting for the answer. And one of the things that I would want to make sure we own is: Those emotions are really important and powerful. And letting people actually sit in them and experience them, and not go and fix it for them, is part of what drives people to learn and develop, and grow -- feeling the euphoria then of solving the problem. When someone does it for you, you don't get to experience the low emotions; you don't get to experience the high emotions either. And I think when I use that phrase sanitize, that's what I mean. I think by not creating these spaces where some of the more negative emotions we don't want kids to experience -- we're not then giving them the opportunity to experience the high that comes from that. That nuance, and that patience, and that thing we were talking about earlier gets you to.

Erika Block: And I would even say the aha and the intensity of creativity and discovery -- and the parallel to that -- I can think of hundreds of improv sessions where when I was sitting out as a director, One of my roles was to make sure people were safe, but also know when to throw in a prompt or to stop it. And things would come to a standstill -- not very often, but enough...it would come to...there'd be silence and people would not be sure what to do. And it would've been very easy for me to throw in a new prompt to get things moving or say, “Okay, let's try a different exercise.” And the hardest thing I've done when, the hardest thing everybody had gone through was: “No, we're going to sit with this for five or ten minutes until something happens and not change it.” And you can see almost the sweat starting to form on the brows. And, very often,  I don't know if it's the majority of the time, but very often, something incredibly powerful came out of just sitting with it until that happened. And that's the story of -- that's the classic writer’s story. That's the classic scientist story. You sit and you wait. Or you repeat and repeat and repeat, and at some point: boom!

Lucie Howell: Something shifts, something moves and you are able to take it to another level.

Erika Block: But you need patience. I think patience is really key here.

Lucie Howell: Which then brings me to the other thing I was gonna mention. As a teacher, I was taught,my responsibility was to set a question at the beginning of a lesson. Set an objective, take students through a one hour experience, that had them address through various activities -- a visual activity and auditory activity, a kinesthetic activity, some kind of mix -- something that would help them figure out the answer to that question. And then, at the end of it, have some kind of capstone moment where that question gets answered. But it was always to leave the classroom with closure -- to have that question answered. To not leave something hanging in the air. And one of the things I now think, is: that's a false framework.

Erika Block: Because there isn’t an answer?

Lucie Howell: No, because different people get to the answer at different stages. And this idea that, by the end of the lesson, I should have given the answer -- what it actually did, upon reflection, is: kids are smart So what did the smart kids do? They knew that if they just waited an hour, I was going to give them the answer anyway. And if they did it by looking like they were doing all the activities very studiously, I would even feel really good about the fact that that happened. But that's not learning. So, I've come to a point whereI will tell some of the teachers I work with: “It's okay for your kids to leave at the end of that hour without having that question completely answered for themselves.” That's okay.

Erika Block: Thank you, Lucie. This was really thought provoking. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I've learned a lot and I look forward to continuing. So, thank you for taking time to speak with us. But also, for the work that you're doing at The Henry Ford.

Lucie Howell: Thank you for having me. This has been fun.

The Essay

Decluttering’s been a hot topic. It’s proof positive: we all have too much stuff. This applies in spades when we consider the firehose of information inundating us all day, every day. We do our best to triage the torrent. We frantically scan, set aside, forward and delete items — all in the hope that we don’t overlook something important. The outcome for many is a depletion of our capacity to think, to cultivate understanding, to make meaningful connections and mentally thrive. People speak of a general cultural “dumbing down,” but perhaps there’s an equally pernicious force at work: a “numbing down” — a deadening brought about by too much of…everything.

The old adage “You can’t see the forest for the trees” seems apt but nowadays it needs to be flipped: “You can’t see the tree for the forest."

We’re so caught up in the management of overwhelming volumes of information that we no longer take the time to truly get to know any of it.

The rain of data creates a thicket increasingly difficult to penetrate or parse.

This gets me thinking about my own experiences traversing forests as well as more open landscapes. Each has its own particular character. A natural forest can be majestic — the tall pines of the East Texas Hill Country come to mind — or it can be overgrown and impassable, a stultifying terrain where non-native species proliferate and clutter the forest floor. In East Texas you can stroll unimpeded for miles simultaneously appreciating individual trees and the whole forest community in equal measure.

One reason for this welcoming openness is the occasional, naturally occurring forest fire that clears away the undergrowth while doing no damage to the stately native residents. Our ancestors, when confronting dense wilderness took similar steps; creating clearings where they could build homes and introduce agriculture. Simple trails and roads connected one homestead to the next creating circuits of fruitful exchange.

This idea of “clearing” — of creating openness — is appealing. There are powerful ways to apply it in our daily confrontation with information overload.

Here are three interwoven strategies that work well together:

1. Create a ritual space — a physical place uncluttered and arranged to support deeper thought. Think of it as a refuge where only what truly matters is allowed in. Ban all electronics and, instead, surround yourself with artifacts and talismans from your life that inspire and sustain you. For many, physical movement can be conducive to free-flowing thought. If you are among those, don’t hesitate to venture out into nearby neighborhoods and parks as stimulating extensions of your primary sanctuary.‌
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2. Cultivate mental space. Meditation has gone mainstream for good reason, it works. Set aside time to clear your mind and open it up to unexpected leaps, intuitions, calculations, and reveries. The mind at rest is actually the mind at work — just on a deeper level. Here, too, movement can be a boon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”‌
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3. Carve out some “up time.” Schedule time each day when you can intentionally elevate your thinking beyond the routine and mundane. Guard this time — make it inviolable by friend or foe. Although inspiration frequently arrives in a split-second flash of insight, it’s usually a harvest born of persistent periods of deep thought. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote “To create art, time must stand still. The artist cannot be in a hurry.”

The promise of open spaces -- whether physical, mental, or temporal -- carries with it the opportunity to step back and observe at a distance; to introduce perspective, contemplation and deeper meaning into our daily lives. It’s a skill and practice that will only increase in value as the spigots of undifferentiated information continue to flood and disrupt our every waking hour.‌

I've been a long-time reader of Brain Pickings, a blog that embodies the best of what the internet can be when it's used to share ideas and provide context and back stories through hyperlinks. Maria Popova has been reading and writing about books, the human condition, science, poetry, and the universe  for more than a decade.

She connects books and ideas and big thinkers through essays that require time to digest, all the while optimizing her work for the web and taking advantage of links to provide further depth and exploration - and also to reconnect readers with earlier posts that may have new relevance.

Brain Pickings is also a pioneer in a new model of publishing, having built a business through what Popova calls a labor of love. It provides completely free content but requests pay-what-you-can contributions from readers. (Disclosure: Sticky Lab is just getting started along this path.)

There's no one better suited to discuss Wisdom in the Age of Information than Maria.

Read the essay:

Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World: An Animated Essay

Thoughts on navigating the open sea of knowledge.

Brain PickingsMaria Popova

Learn more:

The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of Information

“We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other… knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respectin…

Brain PickingsMaria Popova

A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read by 121 of the Most Inspiring Humans in Our World

A labor of love 8 years in the making, featuring contributions by Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth G…

Brain PickingsMaria Popova

A few weeks back, I piled into a car with some colleagues for a short drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit to attend a gala celebration of notable Michigan women. We’d given ourselves plenty of time to get there, taking into account we’d be leaving at the height of rush hour.

Erika, my boss, was driving. I was tasked with keeping an eye out for possible traffic buildups along the way via the GPS on my iPhone. We were also armed with directions to our destination, the TCF Center (formerly Cobo Hall), with very specific instructions on where to park.

Little did I suspect on departure that, over the next one and a half hours, a study I’d recently come across would be validated in stark relief as I continually kept us orbiting—but never quite arriving—at our destination through a mismatch of GPS-based mapping data and the chaotic, ever-shifting reality on the ground in downtown Detroit.

Like many, I have a longstanding, love-hate relationship with GPS mapping software. Typically, it efficiently transports us door-to-door: “Turn right and your destination is on the right. You have arrived.” There’s something very satisfying about that. When I travel with my wife, I’ll frequently navigate while she drives because I’m generally more comfortable with the technology—and she’s a better driver.

Val prefers physical maps, frequently hitting up the local AAA office for regional maps before departure. In the car, I have little patience for physical maps. They lack detail, are unwieldy, provide no feedback on your current location, and are even dangerous to unfurl and illuminate at night.

Over the years, despite isolated instances of epic GPS failure (signal loss is a big one), I’ve developed a sense of confidence that I can get us from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss. It’s a confidence that, as it turns out, bears some additional scrutiny.

Getting Down to Earth

Don’t get me wrong, I love maps, too. A U. S. Geological Survey topo map of the Grand Canyon was pinned to the wall of my college dorm room. Back in my twenties, I took an interest in the fine art of orienteering—heading out into the wilderness armed with compass, map, and canteen determined, for the fun of it, to successfully traverse some unfamiliar terrain in the High Sierra. What I loved most was the ability to pinpoint my location through triangulation—identify two distant landmarks and, working with the compass, pencil in two lines that, at the point where they intersect, reveal precisely where you are. Kind of magic.

Relying solely on auditory directions, with an occasional glance at the screen-based map, it’s easy to become lulled into a kind of navigational submission.

There are three keys to success in orienteering: 1) compass and map, 2) a little know-how, and 3) direct observation. It’s that third one that interests me most right now when it comes to navigating my everyday world. Relying on GPS encourages users to cede agency—even common sense—to the soothing drone of the digital assistant. Relying solely on auditory directions, with an occasional glance at the screen-based map, it’s easy to become lulled into a kind of navigational submission. We may gaze out the window at our surroundings but mostly as a means of confirming what we’re being told by our devices. Direct experience, in terms of close observation, engagement with, and analysis of our progress and whereabouts, takes an experiential back seat.

Why is this important/significant? A March 2008 wayfinding study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology offers some interesting insights. During the study, participants were divided into two groups (GPS vs. paper maps), then asked to navigate six different routes. Findings revealed that GPS users traveled longer distances more slowly, made more stops, became more frequently lost, and, understandably, found the experience more difficult than participants using physical maps. Spatial and topological recall was also significantly diminished.

To be sure, GPS has come some distance since 2008, but don’t tell that to Erika, patiently putting up with my off-kilter navigational advice during our multiple failed attempts to arrive and park at the TCF Center. At one point we came within a block of our destination before being shunted onto a service road leading to an additional ten-minute excursion back onto the freeway headed out of Detroit! In the end, we ignored the GPS and managed to arrive with plenty of time to nosh and mingle prior to the formal celebration—no thanks to ill-informed GPS mapping software, poor parking directions (obtained from the Internet), unforeseen road closures, and one very insistent traffic cop.

Mike Kuniavsky is the author of Observing the User Experience and Smart Things, and currently leads the Digital Experiences Group at Accenture Labs.

Before he became interested in UX research or machine learning, Mike Kuniavsky was interested in engines. Or, to be more specific, he was interested in the effects of automation on people like his father, an engineer at Ford Motor Company who tuned engines. Testing for various conditions that might stress those engines was conducted manually until the mid-’80s when it became computerized. The implications for the humans who once ran these tests were profound. The implications for Kuniavsky were monumental too. He wrote a high school honors thesis on the impacts of computerization on middle management. That thesis was the genesis of a career centered on the nexus of humans and the technologies that would become an indelible part of their lives.

Recognizing our need to be able to easily find information in the vast new landscape known as the World Wide Web, Kuniavsky was part of the team that designed the early search engine HotBot. Identifying the need for more satisfying interactions once we found what we were looking for, he helped pioneer the field of UX research and design, writing the widely used text Observing the User Experience. And seeing that our relationship to nearly every object we use in our everyday lives was shifting dramatically, he wrote another book, Smart Things, and shifted his focus to product research and development. Currently, Kuniavsky is running an R&D lab focused on people’s experiences of emerging technologies. Kuniavsky and his team takes a three to five-year outlook, firmly situating him in a middle space between heads-down developers and twenty-years-out futurists.

From that middle space, Kuniavsky sees potential where many others see pending doom. This, it seems, is the crux of his three decades of work—from helping fellow students figure out their Mac Pluses at the college computer lab to helping Fortune 500 companies devise sensor-enabled shipping labels—Mike identifies in new technologies the societal good many of us can’t see through our fear. At the same time, he recognizes the validity of our fears and reflects them back to developers so they might best respond to our needs—practical, emotional, and ethical.

The aim of machine learning, Kuniavsky says, is not to take over people’s lives by doing things for them. Rather, “it’s to help them do those things better with either more information or with better tools that allow people to do things with their hands and their minds and their bodies that they would like to be able to but currently can't.” There will, inevitably, be fallout—the world is going to look a lot different for an anesthesiologist in the next 10 years. And it’s not that Kuniavsky doesn’t see risks as computers do more and more of our thinking for us. It’s just that he understands that human decision-making is risky, too.

“If you go to Wikipedia and look at the list of cognitive biases, human brains are not these perfect things. They're far from it,” he says. “They’re really, really flawed in many ways—interesting ways—but the way that our brains have evolved, there's all kinds of things we're really terrible at.”

Statistics, for instance. “When we see something happen, we want to find the single root cause of that thing. Well, in fact, in the world, most of the time there isn't a single root cause. It's an emergent property of a whole bunch of different things going on at the same time. So looking for that single root cause is sending you down the wrong path, “ he says, “Similarly we're always looking at, ‘This thing happened and therefore it's really important and therefore it happens a lot.’ We almost never think about all the things that didn't happen at that same point. Our brains are really bad at that.”

Computers don’t have these problems, he argues, and our need to have a human in charge often boils down to comfort—and culpability. “This is why we have pilots in airplanes but not drivers in little airport shuttle trains, even though computers have been able to take off and land airplanes without having a pilot on board for years—in many cases better than pilots can,” he says. “The reason we don't do that is we want someone to blame. We want someone there that we feel is like us, who will have our values, who will be, essentially, reflecting our needs.”

"Navigating our imminent future will require profound shifts in perspective."

For all of human existence, we’ve expected that our activities will be governed by human decision-making. There is an entire literary genre devoted to our anxieties about ceding that control. Kuniavsky says navigating our imminent future will require profound shifts in perspective. “It’s essentially a cultural negotiation that we have with technology,” he says.

The unsettling irony, of course, is that as humans are, quite literally, driving things less and less, digital culture is enabling us to project ourselves everywhere. Kuniavsky sees an antecedent in Father Coughlin, the priest from suburban Detroit who, in the 1930s, used the emerging technology of radio to broadcast his antisemitic views across the country. “I think we're literally in an analogous version of that—a situation where technology creates a fundamentally different level of access for every kind of ideology and we're not really built for dealing with that,” he says.

In other words, we’ve been here before. It’s fraught. But it is happening. Rigorous checks and balances are required—AI ethics is a major part of Kuniavsky’s work. But he believes society will be better in the end. “You know, we are all kind of roiled by these waves all the time,” he says. “It's a really challenging position to be in, but it is the human condition, unfortunately, since perhaps enclosure started in the UK in the 17th century. I want to see the positive side of it, and I want to see where we really can give people superpowers—but with the knowledge that significant challenges happen with every single innovation.”

Digital Experience | Labs R&D | Accenture

Accenture teamed with Qualcomm and Kellogg’s to reinvent how brands and retailers gather consumer data and perform research. See more.

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The future is either beaming or bearing down on us (depending on your perspective) much more quickly than anyone had expected.

We often think of the future in terms of technology and machines. But the future is shaped by individual ideas and decisions, and by the systems we develop in science and civil society, across culture and commerce - separate from technology. Indeed, the way people communicate has more impact on the future than any technology. Fact or fiction. Good, evil or neutral. New ideas don’t get anywhere without a storyteller.

This week’s Sticky List highlights stories that explore these themes.

• Language is important. How we talk about the present informs our experience of the present. And how we discuss the future really will shape it.
• Innovation and invention comes from everywhere. Frequently, it isn’t recognized. Who gets to tell the stories, and how they are told matter.
• The myths and narratives of Silicon Valley are coming undone. This is important because there are few areas of our lives and our futures that aren’t impacted by it.

The Sticky List is bookended by two animated videos about finding time and space to breathe, read, and think.

We start with The Temple of Knowledge, about the hush of a public library at night,and conclude with Clearings, a visual essay about cutting through the noise of information that bombards us daily.

Read on. Stay well.

And please don’t be shy about  hitting reply with any feedback or requests. As a new publication, the Sticky List relies on your input to keep improving and to understand what resonates and what doesn’t. Let me know which story in this week’s issue was most useful or interesting to you.

Erika

The Temple of Knowledge

Ronald Clark’s father was the custodian of a branch of the New York Public Library at a time when caretakers, along with their families, lived in the buildings. He remembers literally growing up in a library, creeping down to the stacks in the middle of the night when curiosity gripped him.

The Innovation Journey: A Conversation with Lucie Howell

Earlier this year I recorded a conversation with Lucie Howell, the Chief Learning Officer of The Henry Ford, a museum that explores the American experience of innovation, ingenuity and resourcefulness.

“One of things that the learning landscape teaches us – that it’s so much easier to make connections across stories when there is a common language. And this framework really gives us that common language to help others create connective tissues.”

“If we’re going to share these ideas and stories, we need to recognize that it is important to tell the truth. We need to recognize that nuance matters, and the kids are smart enough to understand nuance.”

Listen or read the transcript.

A note on “innovation” - it’s a slippery word, tossed around too often. But like many words that have been watered down through overuse, it’s important to remind ourselves what it means and why it’s part of our common language. Simply put, to innovate is to create or introduce something new, whether a product, a process, or an idea.

Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation

The pandemic shows that the US is no longer much good at coming up with technologies relevant to our most basic needs.Silicon Valley and big tech in general have been lame in responding to the crisis.

Sure, they have given us Zoom to keep the fortunate among us working and Netflix to keep us sane; Amazon is a savior these days for those avoiding stores; iPads are in hot demand and Instacart is helping to keep many self-isolating people fed. But the pandemic has also revealed the limitations and impotence of the world’s richest companies (and, we have been told, the most innovative place on earth) in the face of the public health crisis.Big tech doesn’t build anything.

It’s not likely to give us vaccines or diagnostic tests. We don’t even seem to know how to make a cotton swab. Those hoping the US could turn its dominant tech industry into a dynamo of innovation against the pandemic will be disappointed.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” - Clay Shirky

Kevin Kelly writes about The Shirky Principle, which “declares that complex solutions can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.”

Silicon Valley has worn the flashiest cloak of innovation since the 1960's.

But the culture that made it famous and effective has changed, writes Alexis Madrigal.

“Then the post-dot-com generation of companies became the most ubiquitous and valuable corporations in the world, and Silicon Valley’s rhetoric began to change. Over time, the leaders of Facebook and Google, specifically, began to argue a new line: The most innovative, competitive companies are not small and nimble, but big and rich with user data. The real game isn’t among American internet companies; it’s global, and pits American giants against Chinese corporations, governments, and values. In competition with such power, small will lose, or so the executives warn when facing down antitrust action.”

The One Question Every Founder Should Ask Before Rebuilding Their Business

“How can I rebuild my business as fast as possible?” It’s the one question all founders and CEOs are considering right now.

And it’s the wrong one. Instead, we should be asking, “If I were starting my business today from scratch, what business would I build?

While this piece is geared toward business leaders, the question is relevant to anyone who is re-thinking their career, their personal life, and their place within community. Combine what you’ve learned over the years with the opportunity of the current world-changing event and ask yourself:

“If I were starting [fill in the blank] today from scratch, what would I do? And how can I make that happen?”

Words matter. Style matters. Honesty matters.

How Dr. Amy Acton Helped Save Ohioans from Coronavirus

A nuts and bolts analysis of the extremely effective communications style of Dr. Amy Acton, who has earned praise for her daily briefings on the pandemic.

The Power of Story In Crisis: Andrew Cuomo Shows How It's Done

Our need for compassionate, thoughtful, and decisive leadership is best served by a blend of hard truths and something far more difficult to conjure: the power of our collective human capacity for decency, love, and levity.

“Words matter, because people are scared, and people panic. Shelter in place is used currently for an active shooter or a school shooting. We are fighting a war on two fronts. We are fighting the virus, and we are fighting fear. When we act on fears, then we’re in a dangerous place.”

Finding the Right Words in a Crisis

Words are the most important tool in a world where “command and control” leadership has given way to power by persuasion.This is especially true during a crisis, when attention spans are flagging and noise levels are high. People are being bombarded by information, some of which is misleading or false. The clearer and more concise you are, the better your chances of getting your message across and persuading people to act on it.

Tech Experts Think the Internet Is Ruining Democracy

Digital media overwhelm people with a sense of the complexity of the world and undermine trust in institutions, governments and leaders. Many people seize simplistic unworkable solutions offered by actual and wannabe tyrants,” wrote Jonathan Grudin, a principal researcher at Microsoft.

“Add to this the ease of spreading false information and the difficulty of formulating effective regulations for a global system and it is difficult even to envision a positive outcome, much less take steps to realize it.

Silicon Valley Broke All Its Promises

How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides. The smartphone, for all its wonder and utility, has also proved to be a narcotizing agent.

What Islamic Golden Age Thinkers Discovered Long before the West

Sure you’ve heard of Copernicus, Fibonacci and Fermat. But what about Ibn al-haytham, al-Bīrūni, al-razi - the often uncredited Islamic Golden Age scholars who inspired and informed their discoveries?

Information is Beautiful's  interactive infographic charts the discoveries, inventions and scientific breakthroughs of the Islamic Golden Age and beyond versus their comparative date of ‘discovery’ by the West.

Highlights:

Astronomy: Persian polymath Nasīr al-Dīn Tūsī was first to put the Sun at the centre of the solar system, 940+ years before Copernicus. He also surmised that the Milky Way was composed of millions of stars (later confirmed by Galileo in 1610)»

Clinical trials: Persian polymath al-Razi performed the first controlled medical trial in 890AD, some time before John Haygarth in 1799.»

Surgery: Spanish physician Ibn Zuhr developed techniques for removing cataracts and kidney stones, at least 700 years before the West. Thankfully, around 975AD, a fellow scientist al-Zahrāwi had pioneered the use of inhaled anaesthesia to put his patients into a painless sleep during surgery.

Clearings

We’re so caught up in the management of overwhelming volumes of information that we no longer take the time to truly get to know any of it.We’re inundated with a barrage of information that crowds out original thought. What matters - and even what’s true - is obscured by the noise.

Read David Rossiter's essay and watch the video.

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Many of my conversations these days swirl around themes of learning and not knowing, discomfort and ease, resignation and gratitude. This pandemic spring comes with a jumble of contradictions, along with unexpected opportunities for discovery and growth.

I’ve been thinking about how we develop our individual world views - and how these views can change as a result of both external events and internal decisions.

This week’s Sticky List starts with neuroscientist Anil Seth discussing the nature of perception and reality in a fantastic animated video.

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

Maria Popova writes about psychologist Carol Dweck, whose work on “fixed” and “growth” mindsets, “is rooted in rigorous research on how the mind — especially the developing mind — works, identifying not only the core drivers of those mindsets but also how they can be reprogrammed.”

"One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality.

"A 'fixed mindset' assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.

"A 'growth mindset,' on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness."

Pain Plus Reflection Equals Progress

Our most painful moments are also our most important.

Shane Parrish writes, "Our images of learning are filled with positive thoughts about how we learn from others. We read memoirs from the titans of industry, read op-ed pieces from thought leaders, and generally try to soak up as much as we can. With all this attention placed on learning and improving and knowing, it might surprise you that we’re missing one of the most obvious sources of learning: ourselves. Pain is something we all try to avoid, both instinctively and consciously. But if you want to do amazing things in life, you need to change your relationship with pain."

Facts Don’t Change Our Minds. Friendship Does

James Clear asks, “Why don’t facts change our minds? And why would someone continue to believe a false or inaccurate idea anyway? How do such behaviors serve us?

"Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome."

COVID surprise: Kids are doing all the stuff their helicopter parents used to do for them

Lenore Skenazy writes, "Pre-pandemic, the culture had stopped believing kids could do anything safely or successfully on their own. Not only were kids incredibly overscheduled, they were also overprotected. Adults were driving them everywhere, arranging their playdates, intervening if the kids got a B, or a bruise. As a result, I’ve met middle schoolers who’d never been allowed to walk the dog, or ride their bike to a friend’s house. Middle schoolers who’d never used a sharp knife. They’d been helped so much, it was actually hurting them."

The coronavirus pandemic may have a silver lining: It shows how insanely resourceful kids really are.

"A 2018 Pew study found 70% of adolescents said anxiety and depression were big problems among their peers. Makes sense. Being treated like a baby when you’re not a baby is depressing.And then, suddenly—WHAM! Time to step up to the plate, thanks to a bio-catastrophe."

The Birth of a Network Nation (October 1984)

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, turned 68 last week. To celebrate, he published 68 bits of unsolicited advice (a few of my faves are below).

Meandering through his website I discovered The Birth of a Network Nation, a 1984 article about the first online networks. Excited about the possibilities for networking a million people Kelly asks, “As we forge this network nation, will it help temper our anger? Will it soften our hearts to the ignorant? Can it encourage us to forgive when forgiveness doesn’t seem possible? Beyond intelligence, where will the governing soul reside?”

"The truth is that telecommunicating is still slow, cumbersome, and expensive. Worse, no two systems are the same. Every bulletin board or data bank has its own idiosyncratic layout, a different protocol, a different dialect. At the same time, it’s hard to lose a grip on the computer dream: networks of small computers flashing our intelligence along the surface of the globe just as our thoughts surge along the membrane of our cerebrum."

36 years later, with over 4.5 billion internet users, we haven’t resolved the stickiest of these questions, but it’s nearly impossible to work or learn without the internet.

Internet Live Stats is a realtime dashboard that tallies traffic and activity of 4.5 billion internet users. At this scale, it’s almost mesmerizing to watch it in action, scanning data that represents billions of people working, blogging, searching, posting, viewing, reading, emailing, sharing. It also tracks related energy consumption, CO2 emissions, device purchases and demographics.

COVID-19 is a wake-up call to close the digital divide

As Jim Steyer reminds us, "The digital divide is inexcusable. Nearly 12 million children nationwide continue to live in homes without a broadband connection. A 2019 Common Sense nationwide survey of teachers revealed troubling evidence of the continuing homework gap. But it is by no means unsolvable."

The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice from Kevin Kelly

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

• Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.
• Don’t trust all-purpose glue.
• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

Progress is complicated, but it's real.

Millions of Children's Lives Have Been Saved

The final story in this week’s Sticky List is a gorgeous visualization - a painting in data - that demonstrates, “One direct effect of human progress is longer lives. 100 years ago, nearly half the world’s children died before the age of 5. Today it’s less than 4%. Meaning millions have had a chance at life. That’s progress.”

It’s from Beautiful News Daily, a project designed to “move our attention beyond dramatic news headlines to the slow developments and quiet trends that go unseen, uncelebrated. Amazing things are happening in the world, thanks to human ingenuity, endeavour and collaboration.”

Stay well,

Erika

It feels like we’re doing a lot of cutting and pasting as we rearrange, reshape and edit the way we live and work. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been drawn to the work of Barbara Wildenboar and Rogan Brown, paper artists who create intricate pieces about nature, science, complexity, and scale - with just scissors and glue.

Brown writes, "A recurrent theme in my work is the limitations of science when confronted by the vast scale and complexity of nature. Science’s goal of containing and defining nature is constantly subverted and fractured by the sheer volume and variety of data that needs to be observed, analysed and classified."

Wildenboar has a gorgeous series of nervous system pieces cut from science books, which is a nice segue to newly published neuroscience research about the gut/brain connection, led by Coltan Parker. His team traced viruses from the small intestine and found they entered areas of the brain that involve cognitive and emotional function.

"With more research, we may finally begin to understand how hunger makes us ‘hangry,’ or how a stressful day becomes an irritable bowel."

Speaking of food, Anthony Bourdain called Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter “Simply the best memoir by a chef. Ever.”

Hamilton’s restaurant, Prune, was one of my favorite in New York. Her writing is even better. Last week I found myself holding my breath as I read about her business ethos and her process of figuring out what’s next.

And at a time when everyone’s trying to figure out what’s next, two pieces stand out. In January, Alex Lindsay shared broad predictions about market opportunities and challenges for the next decade that seem to be accelerating, including his thoughts on the nature of employment: Fundamentally, we need our leaders to stop trying to protect jobs and start figuring out how to build an infrastructure that supports the future of work.

Finally, Derek Thompson discusses the landscapes of cities as small businesses struggle to survive: The big will get bigger as mom-and-pops perish and shopping goes virtual. In the short term, our cities will become more boring. In the long term, they might just become interesting again.

Stay well. And don’t be shy about hitting reply with any questions, feedback or requests.

Erika

Sprawling Paper Nervous Systems Cut into Repurposed Books

Barbara Wildenboer produces sculptures pieced together from delicately cut books, thin strips of paper splaying out from each book’s spine. Wildenboer’s found books are often ones containing maps, atlases, and scientific subject matter, sometimes using images from the book as central elements to her pieces.

Gut communicates with the entire brain through cross-talking neurons

You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It’s also a metaphor for what scientists call the ‘gut-brain axis,’ a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.

Outbreak: Hand Cut Paper Microbes and Pathogens

In 2014 paper artist Rogan Brown completed this amazing piece he describes as an exploration “of the microbiological sublime.” Over four months in the making, the work depicts an array of interconnected sculptures—entirely hand cut from paper—based on the smallest structures found within the human body: cells, microbes, pathogens, and neurons. www.thisiscolossal.com

Science in the Romantic Imagination

Science makes us understand what we see, art makes us feel it.

Brown writes about his work in American Scientist.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the great Romantic poet William Blake gave voice to the widely held view that the way to human progress and fulfillment lies not in reason and science, but rather in the development of our ability to contemplate the small wonders of the world that surround us and that we barely notice. Blake was writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, which he saw as both a desecration of the land and a destruction of the age-old, intimate, and mystical relationship between Man and Nature. It’s ironic, therefore, that it is not mysticism that has shown us the hidden world in a grain of sand, but science itself.

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

Forced to shutter Prune, I’ve been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.

For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next. Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters. Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers — former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance.

2020 — A Decade of Predictions

Way back in January, Alex Lindsay laid out his predictions about technology-related market opportunities for the next decade. It’s an interesting read that touches on key technologies and how he thinks they’ll evolve. Some of the opportunities and issues he addresses are rapidly accelerating in the current moment: Amazon getting bigger/stronger, home delivery, movie theaters, and online education. His thoughts on the gig economy and the future of work are particularly notable.

Bringing back old-fashioned employment has about the same viability as bringing back coal. Workers are not better off with a job, they are better off with a stable process to improve their position. Most business owners know that depending on a single large client is a recipe for disaster. Their employees have not learned this lesson yet.

The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever

Echoing Lindsay’s forecast, Derek Thompson writes that the Pandemic has accelerated trends that are already underway.

This is a dire forecast, but there is a glimmer of hope. If cities become less desirable in the next few years, they will also become cheaper to live in. In time, more affordable rents could attract more interesting people, ideas, and companies. This may be the cyclical legacy of the coronavirus: suffering, tragedy, and then rebirth. The pandemic will reset our urban equilibrium and, just maybe, create a more robust and resilient American city for the 21st century.

It’s a hopeful possibility, reflective of multiple histories of neighborhoods in decline that have been reclaimed and improved by artists and scrappy business owners. However, this cycle frequently includes gentrification and a new cycle of displacement. So the question will be what have we learned that can break the cycle?

P.S. If you like what you’re reading, please consider sharing the Sticky List with your people.

As I write this, a barrel of oil is cheaper than a cup of coffee.

Endangered leatherback turtles are building more nests than they have in 20 years on deserted tourist beaches in Thailand.

And time seems to have slowed to a turtle's pace. (more on this below)

Many people I've talked with in the past week seem to be regaining their ability to concentrate - just a bit - after a month of struggling to focus. Twenty-one days is the minimum amount of time it takes for something new to become familiar, or to begin establishing a new habit. And most of us are rewriting the playbooks on how we live and work.

There's new evidence that damaged brains repair themselves by going back to an embryonic state, from which "cells become capable of re-growing new connections that, under the right conditions, can help to restore lost function."

Emma Taylor's work, creating sculptures from discarded books, may be one of the best metaphors for the current moment I've come across. You could say she takes old books and rewrites them.

Lately I've been thinking about tools. Not physical tools, but the mental tools we have to help us solve problems and invent the future: memory, creativity, playfulness, tinkering, collaboration and optimism. This week's Sticky List highlights stories about people using these tools.

Stay well.

Erika

New Three Dimensional Narratives Composed from Discarded Books

UK-based book sculptor Emma Taylor sources old books from charity and antique shops and gives them a second story. Taylor uses simple materials—just glue, paper, and scissors—to sculpt architectural facades, lively animals, and leafy trees from otherwise unused titles.

Confession

I'm a sucker for Rube Goldberg machines and domino toppling. Lily Havesh, a 21-year old domino artist, combines both in this feat of art and engineering. With a YouTube channel that's pushing a billion views, Havesh is also building a serious business.

An entirely different machine from 2D House - Isaac Newton vs. Rube Goldberg:

Why Time Has Slowed

"The leading theory for why this happens is that the perception of time relies on the number of memories formed in a period, and memories are encoded from new and surprising experiences," writes Morgan Housel.

"Time slowed in March because for the first time since childhood many of us are being bombarded with new and surprising experiences. We learned that shaking hands can be deadly. That the economy can stop overnight."

The Common Denominator: Optimism

How Artists of All Ages Keep Their Creative Spirit Alive

From veteran actor Cicely Tyson to teen poet Kinsale Hueston, nine artists share what inspires them to keep working.

TimeNaina Bajekal

The Coronavirus Is Already Changing the Way We Think About Scientific Cooperation

"Viruses are constantly evolving through interactions inside 'clouds.' Inside these swarms, they pick up traits from their neighbors, forming novel strains that more efficiently hijack cells or are harder for the immune system to neutralize. Essentially, they cooperate," writes Ella Fassler.

"To fight the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, scientists are also cooperating, and on an unprecedented level.

Ditching the normal publication process for research — which moves slowly and oftentimes offers access only to those who pay — more than 50 journals and publishers signed a statement in January pledging to share findings rapidly and openly and to make all of their publications related to Covid-19 and the coronavirus 'immediately accessible' and licensable 'in ways that facilitate reuse.' "

Just as there are many ways for microbes to infect a body, there are many ways for epidemics to affect the body politic. (Elizabeth Kolbert)

Pandemics and the Shape of Human History

"Outbreaks have sparked riots and propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions and redrawn maps," writes Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker.

"Whenever disaster strikes, like right about now, it’s tempting to look to the past for guidance on what to do or, alternatively, what not to do. The trouble is that, for all the common patterns that emerge, there are at least as many confounding variations."

"Among the few predictions about covid-19 that it seems safe to make at this point is that it will become the subject of many histories of its own."

Two Things We Know With High Confidence

"Unknowns exceed knowns even in the best of times," writes Morgan Housel, echoing Kolbert's piece. He also notes that "The most important innovations are born from panic-induced necessity more than cozy visions. That’s been true for a long time, and I can say with high confidence that it’s true today."

We aren’t just stopping coronavirus. We’re building a new world.

"Even though our instincts and political leaders might be saying otherwise, it is more important than ever in this emergency to take the long view. If there was ever a moment to think about the future, it’s now," writes Eric Holthaus.

"Dollar-for-dollar, investment in large building projects is one of the best stimulus payoffs, but we need to cast a wide net and make sure everyone has a chance to participate in the new economy. With long-term interest rates less than 1% right now (or even negative in some countries), there’s virtually an unlimited amount of money available for public works projects that could help create the carbon-free economy we all need."

A Plan to Reconnect a Town in Quarantine: 10,000 Onions

When Life Gives You Quarantine, Plant Potatoes

The pandemic separated my family from our neighbors. Could a network of backyard gardens bring us together?

NYTimesC. J. Chivers

Return, Investment, Return

Leah Naomi Green's essay has a breathtaking start. Birth, death, a first book published - all in a few short weeks during March.

"Spring has no reverence for pandemic. The world is all at once shutting down and opening up, the velocity of change in opposite directions creating a vacuum for each of us.

"Last night my nephew was born, and I can’t help but think that he opened into the middle of history. Nine days before, my cousin Daniel’s body shut down."

"Before this week, we might have taken the phrase “shelter in place” as spiritual instruction. Last week, just before gatherings were prohibited, we traveled to a metropolis for the funeral where, to prevent further disaster, we tried our hardest not to hug Daniel’s parents and sister."

"Each of us who pooled our tears at the funeral last week is now in an isolated cell. Each of us in the United States now is in a cell, and countless of us the world over. Prisoners live in cells, but so do monastics. So does all of biological life, isolated and interconnected into the formation of organisms: apple, deer, human being. Cells are discrete but they are not separate; there is the larger body.

"The physical world escalates its refrain: nothing is abstract. Neither virus nor spiritual truth."

End Notes

The lead photo of Cecily Tyson at the age 94 is by Djeneba Aduayom, from TIME's 2019 issue, The Art of Optimism, edited by Ava DuVernay.

"While we live at a time when division is the norm; when biases and beliefs seem static and immobile; when hard science is debatable; when journalism is devalued; when humanity is stripped from those in cells, centers and shelters; when it’s all just too much to organize in our heads, art calls to the optimism within us and beckons us to breathe." (Why Art is the Antidote for Our Times, Ava DuVernay)