In a time of rapid disruption, it’s more important than ever to live in the liquid space between building and dreaming — a place, awash in human need, where conceptual, innovative, and transformational leaps drive innovation and change.

This post comes from Gary Zamchick, an innovation strategist and co-founder of the WordsEye. Gary works with corporate and startup clients to widen product opportunities and accelerate speed to value. Gary has served as strategic designer in residence at Cornell Tech, adjunct professor at Columbia University, and will be teaching the Design & Innovation course this Fall at NYU’s MS-CEI program. Gary’s newly released book (co-authored with Tony O’Driscoll at Duke) is “Everyday Superhero.” You can connect with Gary here.

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What follows are some anecdotes that describe how to enable and benefit from these leaps — examples from work in industry and academia. At the heart of making these leaps is developing an innovative habit of mind.

An Innovative Mindset

It’s the third day of my “Creative Application Studio” class at Columbia and a student has chosen a grasshopper from a list of common objects. She is deconstructing the grasshopper into its physical and functional parts to help trigger new ideas at the intersection of Ecology and Tech.

This is essential to cultivating an innovative mindset: loosening the bonds between tangible things to allow for recombination and serendipity, ultimately arriving at valuable human-centered solutions (read Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation for a far more eloquent description of what he calls, “bisociation.”). When executed with a playful spirit, this mindset enables leaps or moments of scientific (aha!) aesthetic (ah!) and humorous discovery (haha!), for scientists, architects, and comedians alike.

Conceptual leaps

I’m sitting in the audience of a talk at Cornell Tech, part of a seminar series produced by the Digital Life Initiative focused on AI and ethics. I’m there to capture the thrust of Timnit Gebru’s talk and bring it to life for others.

The talk is provocative and concrete. But in my sketchy notes, her frameworks and insights are deconstructed into a kind-of personal sensemaking soup, with salient bits resized, regrouped, and given space to breathe.

I head home with a swirl of ideas in my head about unfairness, algorithmic bias, a mishmash of case studies, and ways forward. At about 4am the next morning something gels and I make the mental leap to a popular trope: a police line up. This reframes the talk into a visual amplifying Timnit’s focus on the unfairness of judging people of color with biased data.

The first question they ask new hires at the world-renowned design firm Rockwell Group is “How do you express your ideas?” I’m a quick sketch artist and my lingua franca — after years of illustrating articles, books, and designing experiences — is whimsical drawings; drawings that have helped design everything from parades, to innovation labs, to novel technologies.

Using whimsy to reframe a serious talk or articulate an experience may seem silly…but I take silly seriously.

Inventive leaps

Few leaps can be as world-changing as those between technical domains. Several years back, I wandered into the office of a computer scientist and saw an image of a shark floating about a rowboat on his computer screen. I said, “Cool, what’s that!?” He said, “I’ve developed an application that lets you type ’the shark is above the rowboat’ and it generates the 3D scene.” My jaw dropped. I had been illustrating stories for years and had never seen a picture conjured up with language. With WordsEye, Bob Coyne made the leap between natural language processing and 3D graphics, enabling the seamless melding of semantic understanding and spatial relations. Our no-code, language-driven world-building experience and platform will give millions of people a new form of creative expression. I continue to work on WordsEye, a kindred robotic soul, that listens to words and visualizes what they mean.

Transformational leaps

My new graphic novel style business book, “Everyday Superhero,” just came out. The story is built around a set of leadership shifts that describe how companies can manage disruptive change by putting their people first. Our heroine Mae, a middle-manager, is put in charge of manufacturing a tech product to save the world. The book first describes the failure of a heavy-handed, hierarchical organization to meet the challenge with incremental thinking. But after a series of shifts or leaps in thinking (aided by Future Mae), Mae re-envisions the organization as a flat, networked entity that can efficiently and inventively mobilize its resources and talent to save the world.

The essential thread that runs through the examples above is people. Every leap of imagination accompanied by a leap of heart. It’s algorithmic bias against people. People ravaged by COVID. People that need new, sustainable ways to live. People-centered transformation. During times of rapid disruptive change, it’s important for boundaries between ethical, social, and technical domains to be porous to allow for serendipity and recombination. This, and an innovative mindset, will enable the leaps that drive the creation of valuable new new things.

Related: Note What’s Funny
Related: Put Yourself Out There

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