FutureSmiths

Can innovation be taught? I think so. I have been teaching myself for a while now and it seems to be working at some levels. So here are some personal ramblings on the topic that I think could be helpful to others wanting to teach themselves to create the future.

You first need to have a vision of the future. Just grab yourself a teleport and go there - do some prolepsis for a while. Daydreaming is nearly as much fun as the real thing if you give yourself the time and permission to indulge. Silly as it sounds though, you may need to teach yourself to daydream again. We all start out with the ability to daydream freely - a free wheeling Alpha brainwave state where we are still alert but mentally playful and detached. Meditation techniques may help if you have lost your natural childhood abilities to daydream. I have never used meditation as such it but it could possibly help, I think. What works for me is to go to sleep with a puzzling or confusing thought or challenge on my mind. I usually wake up very early with some interesting insights, so I get up and scribble or write about it.

Your vision doesn’t have to be a grand unified "theory of everything" kind of vision of the future. That kind of "future-worldview" will only take shape over time and as an individual you should probably accept that you will never really get it together in a way that is completely satisfying before you die. Come to accept that this is more than okay. It's good. The future should always be the future. You never actually get there so don't set yourself up to be disappointed. It's enough to just be a FutureSmith - your contribution still counts. No matter how small or seemingly irrelevant, it is important. Think of what a wonderful communication and play tool the smart phone is. Would it have been possible without the thousands, perhaps millions of people who have played big and small parts in creating modern electronics or more fundamentally, modern physics? Would it be possible without those wonderful anonymous people who beaver away at developing the latest materials and manufacturing techniques to use them?

Every person on the planet can be a FutureSmith if their "work" involves living their dreams, playfully, in the moment and with passion and enthusiasm. Who actually knows what is, or will become, really important? Who would have predicted that someone playing around with silicone and discovering its semi-conductive properties, would eventually lead us to the smart phone?

Play is the way we really learn. If it isn't fun, then it probably isn't important, not to you, anyway. If you are not passionate about it at the time - don't do it. During your lifetime, if you're an average healthy human, you only have about 250,000 hours to play with, after you take out sleeping, eating and daily routines like washing and cooking. If you learn to enjoy these daily rituals early in your life and make them a fun part of your existence, you get a bonus of about 130,000 fun hours. The quality of your life and your contribution to posterity is going to depend totally on what you choose to do with those 250,000 hours available to you to learn, play, talk, read and connect with others. If your work is not play then do you really need it? Working at a job you find boring, demeaning, life damaging or life denying is crazy. Every hour you work like that could be destroying you, your friends, your neighbors, or the planet. If that is your life now, then you need to stop working immediately. It takes some faith and courage to live a life worth living, but you owe it to yourself and the planet to do what you believe in.

My Dad has an aphorism that he repeated often when my four siblings and I were growing up, no doubt in the hope that it would become a motto for our lives.

"If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well."

It's not a bad motto because it implies a critical evaluation of what you are about to do. Is it really worth doing? This is a personal judgment and not necessarily a moral one. It may be worth doing for someone else but not for me. So it gets back to passion.

It may initially take a bit of self-confidence to see yourself as a FutureSmith. You need to genuinely believe that what you have to contribute is actually worth something. If you don't have that confidence then perhaps just stop trying for a while and start to research on something else you are fascinated by. You will eventually know enough about it that you will want to start playing around with it. When you want to start pushing and pulling it to test its limits, then go with it. Just play around to get a feel for it. (I'm not just talking about physical stuff here but ideas too.) There is of course the possibility that once you understand it, you will lose interest in it. That is all right too. Your interests would have moved on, most likely. So just start over with another idea. With the right attitude you will be learning throughout your whole life.

My experience is that it's the things that bug me that spur me on to do something about it. I hate waste in any of its many guises - wasted time, effort, emotions, materials, opportunities, lives. It’s a fairly common human behaviour actually. It's not surprising that it’s a tool to identify the locations of rich veins of innovation gold for FutureSmiths. In De Bono's six-hat thinking terms, humans are naturally quite good at "black hat thinking" - identifying when something is not right, awkward, clumsy to use, illogical or wasteful or simply inelegant. If you have any of these perceptions about something, then you’re a potential FutureSmith. All you need to proceed is to get the confidence to play around with potentially better ideas.

One innovation trick I use habitually is to role-play the arrogant know-it-all who always has a better way of doing something. It doesn't matter if the subject of critique is an existing idea or a way of doing something, or your own earlier iteration of a potential solution. Treat the existing solution as a provocation, that it is half baked, ill-conceived or not necessary in the first place.

Just assume that you have come up with a more elegant solution. Identifying how it is half- baked with the "black hat" is disconcertingly easy; it seems to be a talent homo sapiens have in abundance. Somehow when I role-play the provocation with the black hat as the the arrogant innovator it makes coming up with a smarter alternative easier. Don't ask me how this works and what role the ego has to play in it, but it just seems to work for me. Often, good improvements can come thick and fast with this. Sometimes of course they are not improvements at all but steps backwards, and sometimes the improvements have reached the point where it's just nitpicking and either solution would work just as well.