Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
“Since the time when man began to control the environment he has been plagued by his limited ability to speculate..."
The first 2:30 of this video might be my favorite description of human limitation, design, and innovation through exposure for quite awhile.
If there's one thing modern humans have had 35,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to spend developing, it's our ability to recognize patterns. Patterns tell us how our actions will impact the world. Patterns tell us what we can expect from our environment. Pattern recognition is a primary prerequisite to learning.
Pattern recognition in this sense is constrained by at least two conditions:
First, we must be able to observe the events that make up a pattern. We call this experience, and naturally, experience is limited by our ability to sense the world and by our ability to act on it.
Second, we must be able to intuitively link the events we observe. This is easy in the case of flipping on a light switch, or in the case of putting our hand on the stove. It is not so easy to make an intuitive link between smoking a cigarette and one's poor health later, or waking up early for a test in high school and being successful in one's career later.
These examples reflect our trouble thinking about temporality, but the two conditions above are muddled severely in any number of ways outside of our difficulty with time; for a primer, consider stopping by my favorite page of all the internet: this wonderful list of cognitive biases.
Exposure
When it comes to interpreting the world, we are limited by a third thing, which I'm calling exposure. Exposure represents the whole of all things you've experienced - even those things that just sit subconsciously in the back of your head, waiting to be combined with other ideas. Exposure includes those things that you cannot intuitively and consciously comprehend, but exposure is limiting in an absolute sense - one's cognition can only draw from the pool of things that it's been exposed to.
This is pretty intuitive on some level, but it's important to note that it means that ideas do not come from nowhere - this idea can potentially get controversial.
It means that every idea - no matter how novel it seems - is in fact the result of two or more disparate ideas coming together in a novel way. An idea is created, but not from nothing.
As such, our interpretations of the world are limited to our exposure to it; I'll reference this image again:
Predictions
The primary function of learning is so that we can make accurate predictions about the world. To that end, we've developed a superb ability to make predictions using linear, short-term models.
Our primary challenge is that reality doesn't care about our human limitations. The world couldn't care less about what we'd like to think about it, and the long-term world is non-linear no matter how good we are at intuitively predicting patterns linearly. Hence the model at the top. When it comes to long-term thinking, we are consistently thwarted by the reality of the world.
So clearly, the problem is a bit more complicated than I've illustrated above. What I'd most like to get across right away is that we factually cannot even conceive of ideas that lie outside of our experiences (again, ideas do not come from nowhere) - and we're often too shortsighted to wield the long-term thinking necessary to recognize non-linear patterns. This complication can be illuminated by the idea of perspective, to be covered in part 2 of this series.
Religion has a surprisingly high correlation with poverty, according to a Gallup survey conducted in more than 100 countries. The more poverty a nation has, the higher the “religiosity” in that nation. In general, richer countries are less religious than poorer ones.
The above of course paints a different story. It's a story I'm familiar with, because I found myself asking, if you grew up in a different part of the world - on an island on the opposite side of the world - would you still believe the things you feel so strongly about now?
My experience is that people find it hard to reasonably argue they would. What you're exposed to plays just far too large a role in what you believe. If in no way else than in the limited range of concepts from which you have to choose whether to believe in or not:
We sometimes like to believe that our ideas are our own, but ideas don't come from nowhere, and beliefs even less so. They come from exposure to the ideas of others.
(one dilemma to consider for another time: On the surface this seems a bit discouraging, that our ideas are not our own, though taken one level deeper, we can see that as sentient beings we are the architects of the environments we put ourselves into and the exposure that results. Except - and this is the dilemma part - we have no control over the environments in which we've been initially placed (conditions of our birth and growing up, etc), which have a lot if not everything to say about how we go about constructing our environments later. hmm. Not sure how to approach this yet. You?)
I ran into this video the other day on I Luv Juice, caught by the environment quote captured in the title above.
It reminded me that once upon a time I was reflecting on acclimation, a thought that I find worth considering often:
"I find it important to remember that humans acclimate to everything.
This means that things we think are bad/painful/ridiculous become ok after enough exposure and time. It also means that the things we think are good/exciting/worthwhile become ok after enough exposure and time."
It's important to note that I'm talking about acclimation in that post, which is closely related but is not the same as normalization. Both are about perception, but acclimation is concerned with affinity while normalization is a bit more complex, concerned with one's perception of how the world should function.
When I talk about acclimation, I talk about how one's affinity for a new emotional state eventually shifts away from like/dislike with exposure; this is one's affinity for a new job, new city, recent breakup, or disliked food. In the post I help qualify with the statement "this is not to say that things stay that way; I'm talking about a relatively short timeline."
Perhaps author Bernard Benson captures part of this with the following thought:
"All we really want is otherness, tossing from side to side, greeting each toss with shouts of welcome, and contempt for the previous toss."
As you see in the video above, normalization is a different beast, and a bit more complicated. Normalization is concerned with one's expectations from their environment and the world, captured best with the intension (linguistically speaking - not 'intention') of the word 'should.' That is to say that normalization is the state of subconsciously assessing your environment as operating as it 'should.'
Normalization is entirely environmental, and helps explain why you have the beliefs, values, and worldview you do. It helps explain how others have developed those things as well. It helps explain why when those things clash between you and others, only by exposing each other to new environmental norms (either directly or cognitively) can your differences be resolved. I started exploring this once with the idea that the only cure is exposure.
On a more entrepreneurially inspiring note, it helps to see how Brian in the video above uses this understanding to change the lives of students in the disadvantaged environment of New Orleans' 9th Ward.
This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that’s going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in. You’ll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe—teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.
Grazer has had one bad attaché experience. “A few years ago, I hired this really smarty-pants Harvard guy,” he said. “He was just remarkably lazy. If he didn’t get the Wall Street Journal on his desk, it was like it didn’t exist.” Still, he said, the experience came with a lesson: “Under no condition can you teach curiosity.”
The thought that "under no circumstances can you teach curiosity" is particularly interesting to me. It's something I've thought on quite a bit, ever since first being a part of this world of planners/strategists - all my best conversations about what it means to be insightful in these kinds of roles ultimately end on the idea of curiosity.
“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture.
Watch the video here.
Oliver Laric does a lot of good thinking on the nature of images, in the "images as reproductions of 'real' things" sense. Click the link above for the video essay in full.
One question to ask here is: given the nature of how humans engage in and and experience the world (primarily through mimicry, the social creatures that we are), how should we measure the relative values of things like authorship, creation, motivation (in the "foundation of copyright law" sense), volition, experience and individuality?
These things (and surely there are plenty more) seem to all point to why we intuitively think some things are more "real" than others. Like Oliver and many others I find myself exploring the validity of these instincts a little deeper as well.
This little guy's name is Jason Cordero, and he goes by the title of Pianist/Music Star/World's Happiest Boy.
Watching young kids play music well always reminds me of how deeply interconnected we are as humans - this manifests itself particularly well in how children learn through mimicry. As you watch children like this play, you see all the minute and sometimes imperceptable details/behaviors expressed by their mentors, tutors, instructors and role models, captured perfectly in the way these kid's perform. Was actually in an interesting conversation about the motivation here just yesterday, watching a seven year old masterfully play a couple of violin pieces. I started talking about the critical role of exposure - the idea being that for kids like these, if all you're exposed to is the violin, it makes perfect sense that you grow up loving the violin and being incredibly good at it at an incredibly early age. Very much a Gladwell-esque 10,000 hours kind of point. My intelligent friend brought up the question of distinguishing between kids who are exposed to a particular craft at a young age and go on to practice because they are intrinsically motivated, and those that find themselves repelled by the craft, resenting the parents for making them go through it, etc. I haven't done a great deal of thinking on it, but my reaction was along the lines of "you only love or hate those things that you're exposed to (and those things make up an incredibly small set of all the things that actually exist in the world), and you do so by comparing the relative worth of each to you (and only compare with items within this set)." Essentially the point is that is you love violin this much as a kid, it is precisely because you have been exposed to no [few] other activities to compare it with that you might like more. This is a completely different point from my friend's argument, that activities contain - intrinsically within them - properties that individuals do or do not like, and these are accepted or rejected accordingly upon exposure. A lot more thinking can be done and expressed on it of course, I just find it fascinating and important to think through how we come to like/ dislike/value/find unworthy activities and challenges. Other important questions to ask are: "where is it that you think this talent comes from in the first place (if you think that such a thing exists)?" and "what then, is the best (optimal) set of decisions these parents should make for their kids?"Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
