Ideas are the beginning of strategy: fascinatingly, the process of their discovery is quite parallel, though not identical, between individuals and organizations. One informs the other. Fundamentally, the continuous discovering, planning, and implementing of ideas is the way innovation becomes sustainable.

Just as Parts I and II moved between the working life of the individual and that of the organization and tried to show the interlinking of the two, Part III will map the way a concept can mature into its reality both for individuals and for groups. This, we hope, will empower the way you work within yourself and the work you do within a team.

When your authors were first discussing which individual to frame this idea-to-reality process around, there were naturally thoughts of contemporary entrepreneurs and their well-worn trials and travails—Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and the like—but after some consideration, we decided to go with a much more alterative, though perhaps even more central, figure: Leonardo da Vinci. Why? There are a number of reasons. First, as Nassim Taleb would argue,¹ things that have remained relevant for a long, long time will most likely remain relevant into the future: consider the way sandals and kitchenware haven’t really changed since the ancients or how the fundamental problems of philosophy—the existence of the divine, the meaning of life, the nature of goodness and suffering—remain unresolved, whereas a Nokia phone, a PalmPilot, and a Motorola pager are all little more than paperweights now. If we’re trying to explore something fundamental about the way people and organizations create, it makes sense to study someone who’s timeless—and yoke his timelessness with the timely.

In this chapter we will be taking a deep dive into understanding how to find, capture, and organize concepts. In the same way that only a single sperm among many finds an egg, only a single concept from a whole harvest of ideas will one day be born into the market. This is why we need to create whole crops of ideas that can then be funneled into reality, though as we’ll see in Chapter 9, insights may need to be reborn.

RIGOROUS CHAOS, ORDERLY EMERGENCE, AND FLORENCE

We often tend to think of creativity as a reckless, messy process, the enemy of order, a rebellion against the structures of life. But as we mentioned earlier, you can think of creativity as a volatile process: it is a sort of randomness, an unknowability, that you are welcoming into your experience, the raw vulnerability of the previously unknown soon being made known. Since creativity is a sort of vulnerability, we must, in a way, guard it. With the right kind of security, creativity may be nurtured.

When we do this, discipline becomes nourishing. Rigor becomes constructive. As we discussed in Chapter 3, at an evolutionary, neurophysiological level we read volatility as danger. This is why, as a sort of unexamined adaptation, people who work in insecure environments—if their job, power, or salary is in danger—cannot possibly want to invite further volatility into their experiences. And since they can’t accept any volatility, they unavail themselves from the unknown, from the creative act.

As we have quoted the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, discipline is creating the situation. To expand on the agricultural metaphors in Chapter 7, one person cannot force another person to grow, to create, to offer up something new. One can only help provide for the situation that allows the growth to arrive.

The first element of systematizing discovery, then, is to ensure that a system of security is already in place for people to work in. This requires that they be financially, emotionally, professionally, and spiritually stable so that they may be able to bring in the instability of stretching their ideas and stretching their performance. As the neuroevolutionary scholar Stephen Porges told us, if you want bold thinking, you need a safe space. Taken together, having a nuanced understanding of—and an equally nuanced application of—the reciprocal relationship between security and volatility in creative work is one of the necessary conditions for systematizing discovery.

Discovery is an emergent process. Although you can be deliberate in the way you arrange for discovery to happen, you cannot command new ideas to emerge since by definition it is an entry from the unknown into the known. But you can court the unknown in the way the bee courts a flower. Let’s systematize the courting.

ROOTING OUT IDEAS: CULTIVATING CURIOSITY

If an idea is the seed of strategy, what is the seed of an idea? It is experience, but can there be qualitative differences in experience? There can: research has shown that the reason time seems to speed up as you get older is that the world is not as novel as it was when you were young.² The more familiar you are with a situation—or you perceive that you are with a situation—the more quickly you will experience it. This is an argument for varied experience—a predictor of creativity, as we’ll get to in a second—but it is also an argument for mindfulness.

How? Because, we think, it is a matter of attending to your experience. The less we’re wrapped up in our thinking, the more we notice about the world. What do you call this attending to experience? Curiosity. As Einstein famously said that he had no special talent beyond being passionately curious, we can say that there is no other avenue to cultivating creative work aside from impassioned curiosity. Thankfully, we have models for this way of living, with Leonardo da Vinci as one of the foremost.

Upon our getting to know him, which we hope will happen over these next few pages, something strange will happen: with familiarity, the myth that cloaks this man who has been made immortal will begin to dissipate, and the complex, anxious, beautiful mortal who actually lived will in some small way be revealed. This is a little like falling in love: knowing another’s insecurities and mistakes somehow brings you closer to that person—there’s an intimacy in failure. Leonardo da Vinci, with his titanic successes, also knew great failure; on his deathbed he regretted not giving enough time to his art. For the main framing of his life, we are indebted to the foundational scholarship of the French writer Serge Bramly, who spent five years writing a 400-page portrait called Leonardo, a book of grace and depth without which we would not be able to mine the deeply lived wisdom of this Renaissance man’s life.³

Da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452. In the range of his time on earth, a new continent would be discovered and much of modern life would begin to take shape. Dante’s Inferno would become popular throughout Italy; later on, da Vinci would meet a young courtier named Niccolò Machiavelli, and we can be reasonably sure that some of the artist’s ideas made it into The Prince. As the word Renaissance suggests, a resurgent interest in the arts and the natural world would take hold, supported by religious, public, and private wealth. However, this was in many ways still the Middle Ages, as calamities such as the Black Plague and unnecessary warfare were all to be expected. But the time was also not so unlike our own: da Vinci, in order to make his works, would find “protectors” in the form of dukes, princes, and a pope—not too different from the way an entrepreneur seeks funding today, whether from venture capitalists or from banks. More deeply, that time saw the same hierarchy of needs that entrepreneurs tend to today—to survive financially, to create wealth, and, finally, to make an impact upon their world.

Beginning as a painter before he became a sculptor, an engineer, an anatomist, and a painter again, da Vinci was long trained in experiencing and appreciating the natural world—thus the power of his representations. His core skill and greatest passion, then, was observation. This enthusiasm informed all his work: if you were to peer into his notebooks, you would find sketches of the movement of water, evidencing his lifelong preoccupation with hydraulics, drawings that became foundational studies of the workings of the human body, as well as portraits of the faces of the ugly and beautiful people he encountered in Florence, Rome, and Milan. Many people look, he said, but few people see—and that mindful seeing is the foundation of direct experience, itself the foundation of direct knowledge. As he once wrote:

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life.

His emphasis on observation was so great that he would reconceive the way we perceive perception. As the drawing from his notebook shows, he looked closely at the looking itself: his understanding of the way light alights upon the eye pushed against the prevailing theories of optics passed down in the Platonic tradition and held by his contemporaries. Whereas the old way saw the eye as sending a beam of vision into the world, da Vinci saw the eye as something that received light, as illustrated here.

That is the power of curiosity and of observation: under examination even the most respected received wisdom can give way. We can see this in our present work: Innovation springs from having an insight born of close attendance to people’s behavior: the Swiffer was born after Continuum, the consultancy that Procter & Gamble called in to discover a new home product, studied the way people cleaned their homes and found that people spent as much time cleaning their mops as they spent cleaning with their mops. They moved to solve that pain point, and sprucing up your kitchen now takes only minutes with a good Swiffering. In another domestic example, Febreze took off when marketers realized that people felt proud after finishing their chores and supplied a ritual to conclude them, a satisfying spray that now makes more than $1 billion a year.⁴ Clearly, persistent inquiry has its payoffs.

DIVERSE EXPERIENCE

As da Vinci’s observation-filled notebooks evidence, the first phase of taking a concept to fruition is to arrive at a concept in the first place. As we have talked about before, most of creativity is combinatorial. New things are found by combining (or finding the relationship) between two unrelated things; consider again the way P&G founded the Crest Whitestrips product line. This suggests that the heart of the innovation process is attending closely to the various events that are occurring around you and plotting the connections formed by them the same way the ancients mapped the constellations. We’re trying to find just how everything connects, then spying the value residing in those connections.

The creativity-spurring benefits of diverse experiences (and diverse individuals) can be realized at both an individual and an organizational level.

What is it that makes some people more creative than others? A 2013 study in the Creativity Research Journal helps shed some light on this subject. Researchers Edward Nęckaa and Teresa Hlawaczb wanted to test the effects of temperament and divergent thinking on 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers.⁵ Temperament, in psychology, is thought to be the part of personality that is innate rather than learned, traits such as introversion or extroversion. Divergent thinking is a process in which you’re generating ideas by exploring many solutions such as by freewriting and associative thinking, unlike convergent thinking, in which you’re taking logical steps to arrive at a conclusion. How did temperament and divergent thinking affect creativity?

As Scott Barry Kaufman reported in Scientific American,⁶ the bank officers were about average when it came to divergent thinking, whereas the artists were top-notch at creating new pictures and words.

What’s more fascinating, though, is that the artists were quite similar to the bankers in their temperament, although a few artists had high scores in both divergent thinking and temperament. Those with the highest scores had the following temperament traits:

• Briskness (“quick responding to stimuli, high tempo of activity, and the ability to switch between actions”)

• Endurance (“an ability to behave efficiently and appropriately in spite of intense external stimulation or regardless of the necessity to pay attention during prolonged periods of time”)

• Activity (“the generalized tendency to initiate numerous activities that lead to, or provoke, rich external stimulation; it is conceived as the basic regulator of the need for stimulation”)

For the researchers, the most crucial of these traits was activity. Postulating that temperament is a foundation for the development and expression of a person’s creative potential, they found that people with a high activity score often “have many diverse experiences that may be used as a substrate for divergent thinking and creative activity.”⁷ We love the idea of diversity forming a substrate.

In biology, the substrate is the base an organism lives on: plants have a substrate of the soil. Our experiences, then, are a kind of substrate from which we can draw our connections and base our convergent and divergent thinking and are the source from which we can empathize with others; when we “go through something” with someone, we’re sharing the same substrate. In this way, creativity isn’t only about outputs, but also inputs—and thoughtfully arranging our inputs by thoughtfully curating our experiences will allow us to become more creative.

Although da Vinci traveled little, he had a breadth of closely attended experiences. His curiosity drove him to observe and discover and in turn create. His studies in anatomy (for which, late in his life, a rival would accuse him of practicing necromancy) informed his breathtaking representationalism. In some cases, his representationalism was revolutionary: If you saunter through a gallery of Renaissance paintings, most of them show the Christ child as a small adult, lending the viewer’s experience an unsavory cognitive dissonance. But da Vinci, in one of his era-defining innovations, did not follow precedent and instead painted from life: in da Vinci’s depictions of the holy family, Christ actually looks like a baby. If you consider the earlier Annunciation, as Serge Bramly does in Leonardo, you will notice that whereas previous depictions of angel’s wings appear to be cumbersome “theatrical accessories,” da Vinci’s grow from shoulder blades, “naturally prolonging the line of the arm.” As well, da Vinci employed the game-changing Renaissance technology of perspective. If you take in The Last Supper, you will find that Christ’s head is placed precisely at the picture’s vanishing point, giving the fresco a profound unity of composition. These and other paintings—not to mention his engineering work—evidence a substrate of experience of legendary health, for his knowledge of birds informed his work with angels. So how do we tend our substrates? Let’s consult an expert in living omnivorously.

INTENTIONALLY OMNIVOROUS

Brooklyn: Friday, 8:30 a.m. It’s an early summer rain: there are puddles, cobblestones, iPhones. A gaggle of young designers, entrepreneurs, and advertising folk gather around a small hall with a vaguely Grecian facade. We’re at the edge of Dumbo, the geek-chic neighborhood just across the East River from Manhattan. This morning, we’re assembled for CreativeMornings, a lovingly curated global series of breakfast lectures regarding all things creative.

After gathering the requisite coffees and sleepy conversations among one another, the crowd welcomes to the stage an ethereal, energetic woman: chef-designer-photographer-philosopher-entrepreneur Emilie Baltz. With her bounding across the stage and light hair cut short and swooped to one side, she looks bit like a comic book heroine, and as she tells us about her life—of being raised by a French mother and American father in the Rust Belt town of Joliet, Illinois—she becomes more and more heroic, for she makes food that reshapes the way we think about food. In so doing, she is a case study in the way the experiences you invite become the work that you produce.

In the simplest, most profound of ways, her Junk Foodie: 51 Delicious Recipes for the Lowbrow Gourmand, is a representation of a hybridized upbringing: sangria made with grape soda, Fun Dip, and Kool-Aid; pralines made of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Fruit Roll-Ups; and a napoleon, the traditional French confection, made with potato chips and a highly finessed Twinkie. As a consultant, her clients have included AOL, eBay, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Vogue magazine, to name a few. The work she creates is many things all at once. As she explains in an interview weeks after her talk, much of that highly differentiated, highly innovative output comes from having a range of inputs. This, Baltz says, is a mark of omnivory, the practice of “eating all.”

Echoing our finding that part of creativity is discipline, Baltz first started describing her process as an omnivorous one in the fall of 2009. Searching for a mission statement, she came up with omnivorous: it made sense, since she grew up eating anything and everything.

As she says, “Omnivory is about balance, it is about openness, it is about curiosity, it is about responsiveness, and within all of that it has to do with flexibility, so the fact that one is omnivorous means that one can go to many places and experience many people at many levels. I don’t love to eat a lot of meat, but I can travel through many cultures. The choice of omnivory is a choice to communicate and have a choice with people.”

This ties back to the discussion we’ve been having throughout this book: people connect with people—and create things for people—when they feel a sense of kinship, of shared experience, with one another. Empathy, in other words, is the most direct understanding. In this way, entrepreneurship, if we are to be creating products and services of value to a range of cohorts, is an omnivorous endeavor. As Baltz describes it, being intentional about the breadth of experiences you give yourself allows you to better understand yourself, which helps clarify the foundation of this process. Whether we’re designers, cooks, project managers, or writers, sampling a range of experiences helps us identify ourselves within a novel context and find, again, our place in the world.

“Being able to taste many different ways of writing, all these different mediums, allows you to get out of yourself and see yourself,” she says. “Being an eater of everything, it’s a form of identity building: if you touch on everything, the dots do start to connect.”

Baltz is reminded of her drawing professor back in school telling her that it’s not about the lines that emerge from her pencil but the space in between the lines where the image is made. That absence is presence; negative space is most ripe with meaning.

With the tasting of all, she says, “it’s not the all that defines the end product.” Rather, it’s that negative space “in the chunks in between A and B and Z and K that suddenly you start to take shape, between no one individual, brand, or culture. But by being open to those influences that come and go, they ricochet off of pieces of you and you see what you are made of.”

An ongoing part of identity building—both in our individual working lives and as part of a team—is to practice inviting a breadth of experiences, a pool of experiences from which we can draw on later in life. When journalists ask artists the lazy question “Where do your ideas come from?” the answer can only be this: their experiences.

“The natural human existence is not monosyllabic,” she says. “We must lead omnivorous lives: every ecosystem is like that, from micro to macro.”

DATING IDEAS: GETTING PRACTICAL ABOUT COURTING EMERGENCE

As the lives of Baltz, da Vinci, and the Swiffer mop suggest, there are great benefits in closely attending to a varied life and noting your discoveries. It behooves us, then, to start turning that aspirational curiosity into knowledge-discovering action both as individuals and in groups.

If we take Baltz and her confections as a model, we can make our lives more omnivorous by deliberately diversifying them.

Drawing from Baltz’s insight, we can arrange for more innovation-generating omnivory in our lives by diversifying the following:

• The media you consume. Taking in a range of art, news, and scholarship makes you more vulnerable to cross-pollinating insight. If you normally read about business, take in the arts. If you usually watch serious documentaries, grab some popcorn and catch a blockbuster. If you’ve never seen a ballet, see one; if you don’t get the point of botanical gardens, go to one and find it.

• The people you see. Network theory has found that the success of a team is predicted by the quality and quantity of the connections its members have, especially across disciplines and silos. To apply that to our personal lives, we’d benefit from growing diverse partnerships within our lives. Yes, a true partner is a rare thing indeed, but that preciousness is part of the reason to vigilantly care for them.

• The events you attend. Finding those partnerships—the members of your tribe, if you will—is as difficult as it is life-affirming. The question, then, is where do people in your interest and priority circle congregate? Conferences, talks, and readings are all examples, and so is your friendly neighborhood bar. It’s the same with parties, dinner or otherwise. The idea is that conferences and parties are places where serendipity makes itself available, ready to be realized by a friendly smile and a heartfelt handshake.

But these are only three ways to enrich our lives with broader, more closely attended experiences. We can also become more deliberate about training ourselves to directly participate in our experiences, that is, living a little more mindfully. In the United States, at least, yoga has become normalized and meditation is following that process as well. Beyond helping us gain a greater intimacy with our minds, pursuing such practices in a group setting opens us to another asset: the companionship of finding fellow travelers along the path. Buddhists call that community of truth seekers a sangha; in reading this book, you are a member of ours.

BREADTH, DEPTH, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Just as da Vinci came to make realizations about his world by attending closely to it, we can make realizations about our organizations by attending closely to them. We can look for the realities sitting adjacent to what currently is and in this way root out possibilities. But this is not only done by sitting alone in your room and pondering, though that’s certainly part of the process. In the same way da Vinci would wander about the squares of Italy inquiring what was there, we can make inquiries of the places, people, and processes with which we work. This kind of organizational mindfulness is born of implicit and explicit knowledge sharing, the kinds encouraged by the clustering tactics we discussed in Part II. But regardless of the degree of habitual functionality you have, it can be productive to make a direct inquiry into these aspects of an entrepreneur’s reality, as Ideo helped the Mayo Clinic to do at the start of our journey.

As we’ve discussed before, innovation springs from—and is shepherded by—people. In Chapter 7 we described the potential value promised by unshackling people from their job prescriptions: by removing the boundary boxes of what a person is capable of, that person will naturally be free to do more (so long as there is proper alignment to a shared goal, as agreed upon by the group). What this leads to is a democratization of idea generation. Although not everyone is going to be a part of the visioning cluster, everyone should be thinking about the vision of the organization and her place within it, and everyone will be doing so if the proper architecture is assembled.

Thus, the systemization of creativity is actually a democratization. Recall how Yammer’s ephemeral organization structure, by virtue of its rotationality, disattaches people from their one job and exposes them to other roles, both in implementation and in leadership. Adam Pisoni, the CTO, told us that the rotational structure “gets everybody thinking about the system,” and that sort of organizational awareness—and the experimentation that can follow—frees people from assuming that the role prescriptions they’re working in fell from the sky, that it’s “just the way it is.” In this way, that unending curiosity that da Vinci needed to tinker can be opened up within each person in an organization, with permission to create radiating out from the leadership.

But before you can structure an organization, you need an organization—that is, people. Continuous idea generation, then, is an aspect of being a curator of talent: we need to find and welcome wide-ranging minds and give them the freedom and the motivation to range about, as Nihal Mehta and Teresa Amabile might say. You cannot tell a flower to grow—let alone to have an appetite for knowledge like that of a Renaissance master—but you can find those passionately curious people. And it is with these fine individuals that we make partnerships and alliances, as the Medicis, Ludovico Sforza, and Cesare Borgia did with da Vinci. When we are lucky enough to find talent in ourselves and in others, we nourish it.

KEEP RECORDING

If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it would be unconscionable to not wander into the Egyptian portion of the museum, where the most staggering message from the past stands freely in an open atrium: the Temple of Dendur. Dating from 15 BC, it is 82 feet in length and decorated with lotus flowers and images of Isis, Osiris, and other deities. The temple is powerfully preserved; you can’t help but be taken aback by it. Fascinatingly, the “king” at the time was Caesar Augustus of Rome, who naturally had himself depicted as a pharaoh. This is a house handed down through the millennia—an artifact.

As the rest of the museum attests, all we really have left from former times are their artifacts, or, as the Latin root of artifact suggests, the things that were made. When we say that talk is cheap, we really mean that talk disappears; it’s the artifacts that stay with us. Although something about the bubbling bursts of creativity is ephemeral in nature, professional creativity finds ways to be lasting. What we need, then, is to be constantly generating artifacts of the concepts we come up with or, as Google Ventures says, to “always be capturing.”

It’s like what Joshua Porter, HubSpot’s director of user experience, described in his interaction with Google Venture’s design studio. During all of their ideation sessions, they made sure that their ideas would remain:⁸

“Always be capturing” is about the habit of continuously recording the value from your conversation. For example: If you’re talking about a new concept, you should be sketching it as you talk so your team has a shared understanding and an artifact of the conversation. As you talk about something, draw it—so people can literally see what you’re talking about.

In this way, the ideas that are flying between your consciousness and your voice and your colleagues’ minds and their voices can be recorded, can be taken from the air and put down on paper. The more artifacts that are created from a conversation, the more value you get out of a conversation. Since ideas are the start of strategy, we need to harvest them as well as possible.

One way is through the joys of analogy: having your creative space full of writing surfaces allows you to get the ideas down on paper. As Porter suggests, if you’re comparing two ideas, make a diagram of them, since that will jog both your conceptual and your spatial intelligence. In addition, you can be liberal with Post-it notes or note cards: this will let you form the component nodes of an idea, ready to be assembled later.

But the digital can help you, too: as we found out in the birth of Indiana Jones, recording the transcript of a conversation allows for unforeseen value to arise later on. In addition, you can use your smartphone to back up your analog assessments: snap photos of the note cards and the whiteboards and upload them to a shared cloud account, allowing the team to access (and build on) those visualizations down the line. In this way, we can create a wealth of knowledge.

In the final two chapters, we will discuss how to put that knowledge into practice.