By now, you’ve probably heard about Beeple’s record-shattering sale of “Everydays” for over $69 million. According to Christie’s, the auction house that sold the digital-only NFT, the sale put him in the echelon of “the top three most valuable living artists.” But do you know how the sale came to pass?

Perry and I had the good fortune to talk to the team inside Christie’s who pulled off the landmark transaction, which was not only the first purely digital work to be sold by a major auction house, but was also the first transaction to be consummated using Ether, a cryptocurrency.

We’ll be revealing more in our upcoming book, ideaflow, for sure, but it was such a fascinating and illuminating conversation that I wanted to share a few highlights while they’re fresh.

Probably the most shocking thing is how the opportunity came on Christie’s radar in the first place. It’s actually thanks to the curiosity and spare capacity of a junior-level cataloguer, who had some spare time on her hands between auctions. She told us that, “If I was more senior, and dealing with more substantial lots with proven track records, I never would have had time to take a random call from a crypto expert in San Francisco, which started me down the whole learning journey. The email sat for months in my inbox as it was, and I finally only dealt with it once I literally had nothing else to do. To be honest, I had no idea what an NFT even was when we got started.

She told us how, because the transaction involved so many firsts for Christie’s — entertaining lots from entirely unknown artists, for which there was very little precedent, and overhauling the entire financial infrastructure to handle crypto payments, for example — it really only ever made it into an actual auction because she had the bandwidth to attend to a highly unfamiliar possibility. But because she had the bandwidth, and was intrigued, she kept pushing, and mostly, simply wasn’t told no. “We can always bury it in the back of the lot and hide it if it doesn’t get any interest,” they figured. (!!!)

Her story is a great example of the power of a novice’s perspective, and especially the value of having a little slack in the system. Speaking with a senior leader at a technology company just earlier today, I asked “Are there any junior folks with a little more bandwidth who could undertake this riskier exploration?” she said, “We have ZERO people with any spare bandwidth.”

The thing is, it’s spectacularly useful to have folks who have some cycles to spare, when a new opportunity arises. If your organization only has capacity for existing operations, then exploration takes a back seat. And if novices aren’t ever given a little bit of leash to explore new ideas, the organization can’t expect to discover much more beyond its known horizons.

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