15
You Said Reality? Which Reality?
"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
John Lennon
15.1. The chasm
Reality distortion field (or RDF), has long captured attention about a mesmerizing Steve Jobs. Bending the understanding of “reality” in the face of others. Albert Einstein said "Reality is an illusion, although a persistent one."
To think is to observe. What is the difference, if any, between a thinker and his/her thoughts? What if we can overlap the two?
Communication is a language. Considerable research has long shown that language and thought are quite entangled.
A linear thinking dominates our business world. Quite often, thinking is but a mechanical manifestation of a dualistic logic: right or wrong, good or bad, certain or doubtful, agreement or disagreement, etc. And this is a trap where entrenched positions tend to be then defended forever. This leads to dominate designs, which are arrangements that industry seeks to organize itself and perdure. For a breakthrough innovator, a dominant design at best bounds creativity and at worst blocks it. The “enemy” is not the competitor to beat, it is the dominant design to break! A whole new way of considering business, competition, and societal progress.
Is duality, then, not to be overcome? But how?
To communicate effectively requires choosing the right arguments, the right frequency that is suited to convince others. We impose our thoughts. An alternative would be to create a dialogue based on listening, a method that may remind us the Ancient Greek philosophers. And one issue is how do you stimulate creativity among others?
Leonardo Da Vinci elaborated a specific painting technique that brings about a sense of haziness, as if tones were “in between” known intensities. Indeed, the sfumato technique was his way to shift reality and induce subtle feelings in the observer who immediately experiences a distortion of plain evident facts and embarks into a distorted consciousness zone when glancing at the painting. The sfumato technique exploits peripheral vision by mixing colors and hues. It has been copied but never with the same level of expertise as demonstrated by the Gioconda painting. Does this technique not remind us of the so-called RDF ability of convincing which Jobs employed in the face of objections from peers and staff?
Influencing your staff means first understanding their reality and seeking ways to alter it. For such an ability, you need a dose of flexibility in retaining various points of view. Your goal is to reach the production of common meaning.
15.1.1. Business school
You think and you communicate your thinking. But communication is done in a duality. Players have a tendency to play rigid positions, and argue in favor of one camp, justifiably their own.
Brainstorm and do creativity sessions: innovation is, before anything else, creativity.
15.1.2. Apple
A surprising Leonardo Da Vinci was known to master the most advanced communication techniques. François I, King of France, “appointed him ‘First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King’, but also master of festivities. A legendary director and designer of prodigious special effects, the king’s protégé did indeed have a talent for dazzling an audience, according to many eye-witness accounts” says a comprehensive exhibition brochure [MAR]. In France, and particularly at Le Clos Lucé in Amboise, Leonardo da Vinci designed and arranged magical shows and extraordinary spectacles, becoming a master in the art of special effects. As a result he became the grand organiser of royal festivities. Thus altering reality and inducing virtualities.
With respect to the status of reality, Steve Jobs was also a pastmaster in the art of communicating. He did not envisage reality as we customarily do. His early days attraction to Eastern and Indian philosophy, as well as his works on a number of occasions denoted a penchant for seeking alternate realities instead. Detached from ambient noise, ambient thinking and saying “no” to usual common ways of seeing things. Innovation is to say “no” to things.
Jobs warped reality. To do so, he escaped duality – the confrontation of opposite arguments – and eliminated the communication pollution brought about by egos. His arguments are “vertical", not “horizontal". By this we mean that they fall down from above with unique intensity.
In so doing, he developed a thought modulator whose process can be described as follows:
- 1) To gather to an observation and exhibit it. Appendix 3 details the science of observation demonstrated by Leonardo Da Vinci and establishes similarities with Jobs. Such observation amounts to intense, systemic and repeated thinking. Evidencing the observations is the root of the next step.
- 2) To produce a collective meaning. Jobs does this by soliciting his staff, which enables him to provide feedback. Feedback is what produces consciousness, in this case collective consciousness. The observation becomes shared meaning. In C-K design innovation theory terms (see Appendix 4), this is acquiring a common knowledge base K. This knowledge de facto becomes shared knowledge from which to build a new, usually crazy, concept that disjuncts from the K base. He forces out a new way of seeing reality. This action alone shows signs of a genuine innovation act.
- 3) He qualifies the new concepts, imprints it on others’ consciousness as the thing to look at and leaves his staff figuring out how to expand it in order to find workable and implementable solutions.
In so doing, Jobs followed a typical C-K way, as did Leonardo Da Vinci. Appendix 4 explains the steps in more details. By changing the perception of reality, Jobs was capable of changing people and this is what he did repeatedly, inside the firm and outside with partners and the world. Even the market perceived a new world upon the introduction of say, the iPod, or the iPad, or services like iTunes, to name only a few instances. An iPod was much more than a product. It was a fresh new behavior that allowed me to carry a thousand songs in my pocket, my songs, and to listen any of them at will, in any environment and so on, with the rest of Apple’s products since the iMac.
Apple does not make products but generates meaning. By changing the perceived meaning, you change people, you change the world. A stupid product brings no meaning. A new meaning must be brought by a new product.
This also explains why Jobs went away from focus groups: these tend to restore the dominant designs through dual exchanges. The thinking line becomes “horizontally discussed", it may develop into opposed views, perhaps to be resolved by majority rules.
15.2. Developing the chasm
With respect to the status of reality, Apple is not a regular enterprise. It is first a thinking machine. It aims at perceiving the future from the weak signals observable today from the world and connecting them. Furthermore, its thinking is a collective process which generates a sort of global way of thinking.
Engage engineers as designers to generate new meanings in concept generation. The meaning of a product induces a profound psychological and cultural reason why people use a product. A question is “where is meaning niched in products". The original meaning resulting from such design-driven research is often compromised when handed-over during concept generation (Dell'Era et al., 2011, cited by [FAB 15]).
“Engage engineers as designers to generate new meanings in concept generation”; “What is an effective marker event of radical innovation of meaning in concept generation?” [FAB 15]. These authors answer by pointing to significant bridges between functional innovation and design-driven innovation.
When Apple engineers and designers experiment a multitude of versions of the same prototype, it is not for the purpose of entertaining dualities. Like Leonardo routinely did with his plentiful versions of a same functional drawing, as an example, it is for experimenting, that is confronting with the 3D reality of operating machines. For instance, to factually determine which version brings better user satisfaction, simpler operation, or lesser spurious steps, etc.
So, it is about connecting all pieces of experience in one understanding. The surprise comes from previously unseen corrections. Yet, brainstorming and other classical creativity techniques (Six Hats, Delphi, etc.) leave you with ideas. Problem is that people do not know what to do with more ideas. Everybody is full of ideas (at least they are at birth). Avoid doing too much (in many directions). Concentrate on important things.
Apple’s thinking process goes around both brain hemispheres (left: analytical; right: global) and transcends them by initial intuitions that preempt the whole process (Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1. Escaping from dualistic views requires a ternary model
The above discussion tends towards become holistic. Leonardo Da Vinci had a remarkable humanistic stance in everything he was thinking, even if he designed incredible war and damaging machines. But, as both artist and inventor, his thinking was an integrated thinking, on Nature, on Man, and about art. The same as Erasmus before him, or Montaigne after, and many others. As a matter of fact, like Jobs, as we begin to understand the biography of the latter better.
A further development might implicate some notions of quantum mechanics. Here, an observer and the thing observed are the same thing. This leads to the notion of (quantum) entanglement whereby two distant elements form a unique system. This is yet a further understanding of Job’s motto “connecting the dots.” Jobs instantaneously perceived the world in a holistic way.
Have you yet noticed that the Apple ecosystem of products (and services and processes) constitutes a whole system? Most probably you already have. Yet, have you ever noticed that the ecosystem behaves as a hologram? In the words, any device therein, can light up, in essence (of course not in functions) the whole ecosystem?
Take one piece of software, say the iBooks author. As you learn by using it, you begin to notice that many features are working the same in, say, pages and so on. What you learn here, serves your there. Nothing is lost on your learning path: each piece of software opens your mind to others, as if it were containing them.
Apple, a holographic company? We believe so, and that is why it foretells a future way of entrepreneurship. By not accumulating myriads of products, of services, of processes in our everyday life – often confronting and consuming themselves. By creating and encapsulating a myriad of new services within an amazingly limited number of products. The future value of business is meaning and Apple has already shown it to us.
In Figure 15.2, we show a diagrammatic view of how the traditional way of doing business leads to fragmenting it, while a holistic approach regenerates the global dimension. It may also explain why the Apple ecosystem is not primarily open to other heterogeneous elements.
We tend to think that Jobs, in as much as Leonardo Da Vinci, developed a sensory experience of the world that freed itself, and to a high extend, from the bias of the dominant thinking of their times. That they are born five centuries apart and the technologies have vastly evolved is no objection to that. For Steve Jobs may well prefigure, as a new Leonardo himself, a future way to envisage both technology and commerce, processes and engineering, and philosophy and consciousness as Leonardo did by then, in his notebooks [RIC 98].
Figure 15.2. Antagonizing classical and holistic modes of thinking
Learning never exhausts the mind said a Leonardo who can be well-echoed by Jobs reportedly always learning all his life. The extreme perfectionism of both personalities is well-known. In its new History magazine, National Geographic [NAT 15] beautifully illustrates the X-ray vision about minuscule details of Leonardo, and at the same time his global method of thinking (thinking not shouting). Who can say less of Jobs’ way?
Both designed artifacts, and in psychology, an artifact is an artificial psychic fact that probing consciousness may bring about. Jobs has more knowledge bandwidth than his peers have, or, better, less filtering out than what cultural conditioning lets in others’ consciousnesses. A trait that allows the forging of “crazy” concepts apparently out of the blue, beyond market expectations and market segments beliefs. This stifles the classical market analysis approaches when doing radical innovation, as we have expounded in Part 1 of this book.
Hence, Jobs is literally a sensory magician. Yet, by consistently pursuing the tracks he envisioned (against all odds), he shaped a molded reality that followers embraced (and others despised). The Apple way is one possibility for molding worlds, there perhaps exist others bringing different technologies and products. Yet, Jobs über alles contribution might have been to open ourselves to a field of multidimensional possibilities.
It seems that a person who lived “with Windows” for 20 years sees the world quite differently than another who one day resolutely embraced OS X. For, again, the experience is different.
15.3. It’s all about perception
After all, this is the story of perception. Perception roots our lives. Perception is everything and everything is perception. Here (Figure 15.3) is a systemic diagram expounded by Gérard Gigand [GIG 15] for the root concept of perception. Commenting on it requires the help of the methodology introduced in Appendix 5. For the purpose of his chapter, we project three reflections of the word:
- – About incompleteness. First, any perception, a partial phenomenon is intrinsically limited by its unavoidable dead angle or limits to its observation. Hence the word “abridgment” to express this first partiality.
- – About self-referentiality. Second, any perception is subjective. It is prone to auto-persuasion, appropriation and implication. Hence the word “bias” to denote this second partiality.
- – About indeterminacy. Third, perception can be considered as a selection, a focusing, or leads to circumscribe. Hence using the word “fragmentary” to convey this third partiality.
Figure 15.3. A Trialectics model for “perception"
Beyond the cross-influences of the three new words (not detailed here), the process ends up by having the three “including thirds”:
- – “contextualization” at the action level,
- – “experimentation” at the attitude level,
- – “scheduling” at the management (adaptation) level.
This expresses the genuine process of any perception. It is clear Jobs played all three and simultaneously, which seems a rare feature. One anecdote is revealing. One day, to make the observation (perception) that the internal iPhone design could still be improved, Jobs provoked a self-evident test (experimentation). He barely plunged one model into water (organization of the observation, hence scheduling) just to make his engineers conspicuously aware of the lost and available free space inside, as revealed by the bubbles gradually rising (contextualization). What an appealing lesson, through a mediating perception (hence the synthesis: apprehension). What a management lesson, and a motivating force: what would you do then, as an engineer, if not turn your back on any fear, being struck by the evidence of a situation?