We all work; for a company, a client, a friend, a boss. I’m hoping we all read quite a bit. And I don’t mean fiction, only. What about your ideas, how they sit amognst your industry, your craft, your peers? How do you generate ideas without reading? No one has thought of anything, from nothing. Which in our surprised egocentric western-world means, we’ve never thought of the idea ourselves — we all stand on the shoulders of giants, as it’s been said.
Reading into Kevin Kelly’s new book, “Inevitable” (sorry Kevin, I wasn’t screening), a few moments have struck me within my current workspace — feeling a little child-like, curious, confounded, and sometimes out of my realm. And my task(s), in work, have been to “discover new ideas” or at least take what leadership or stakeholders find important and try to make a real world constructs of said idea(s) — implementable and sellable constructs, mind you. Now, because of Mr. Kelly’s book, I’ve realized something interesting, particularly inside the healthcare space and pertaining to a few chapters on “Accessing”, “Interacting”, “Tracking”, and “Cognifying” — these being our ability to search/find/sort anything ever, interacting is what it sounds like, but imagine anything that isn’t interactive as “broken”, tracking is also what it sounds like, accept about everything, and cognifying is how we but all kinds of different brains into, anything (forget the unfortunate concept of the Singularity here). I’m not sure technology wants us to advance at the pace we’d normally expect from start-ups, connected devices and all things Internet Age.
We can devise as many ideas as we’d like. Mainstream newness (say, for the passed 60+ years) Science Fiction has lead us to believe in the idea of possibility — a beautiful reaction. Humans have contemplated the impossible forever, but think on a more current context. We can only implement new ideas by manipulating the stock of tech we have now, otherwise it’s all expirement. There’s nothing wrong with experimentation — that’s how we validate and invalidate those SciFi possibilities. But inside a company, when you’re tasked with making up new ideas, one can’t just will the product to happen, will it to be successful, and coming from User Experience — I can’t make a person do a damn thing.
What I’m finding is unless you know enough (however much that is to create something worthwhile + make it successful), you’re always experimenting and learning. I’d love to do that for my company, but there’s literally no time and budget for it (as is always the excuse, right?). We are a software company and we don’t have a science devision that can wait to crack codes and behaviors and institutions stuck in healthcare. What’s complicated, and maybe you felt this too (so I’m very curious how to change minds), is keeping leaders excited about problems to solve, today, when those ideas aren’t as sexy or excitingly or seeminly less revolutionary than Hyperloop or Snapchat. How can we continue to show them the future of our work with babysteps into that future — when technology will finally and obviously allow us to “do what we want”?
So what are better questions to ask ourselves and our teammates? What are products worth making because, today, we can solve a problem with what we’ve got — and truly be ok with those small wonders?
I apologize for not being specific. I cannot discuss my ideas here — we aren’t a pubic company, but I am very curious how the world goes from experimenting to the real thing? Can I track that in my own company and help guide them?
I feel as though I’m asking more questions, here, than providing answers. But I want to spark the discussion. I’m tired of having ideas pushed on me as though I can just “make a thing”, when these higher thinking questions need answering today. I’m not seduced by the blue sky ideas as immediately as some — if anything, like with Mr. Kelly’s book, blue sky helps me see what’s in front of me now and what can be captured as problem solving, today. All the while, seeing that North Star in the timeline waiting to be encapsulated in a tiny test tube of light showing the world that it was never science fiction to begin with.