Elaine Rumboll

Noticing is a skill which is seen as central to creative literacy. Could it also be that it is a practice which is critical to business success? I think that it is. The problem though with the rate of change happening faster than our ability to respond to it is that many of us just seem to want knuckle down and get on with it, using the well worn filters and models which worked in the past and pray they serve us well in the future. The challenge is that we are living in a world where “time sickness” (the belief that there is not enought time and that it running out for us) is a real anxiety generator and thus any extra time required to practice a way of seeing things differently is viewed by many as just too overwhelming.

In an informal poll done with delegates on our executive education courses at UCT GSB, many stated that they were working longer hours, taking shorter breaks and multi tasking just to try and keep up with the sheer volume of information they were confronted with daily. As many of you will know, I am working on the notion of Curiosity as an enabler of learning and as a filter for our attention. But what of the art of noticing? What has become clear for me is that conscious noticing is not easy. It requires energy and practise. In it’s own right, noticing is an act of attention. Noticing, like Curiosity, is an appreciating asset. What I am particularly interested in is the way in which how we notice things differently will start informing our own leadership practices.

It is my belief that other discplines often provide extraordinary insight for crafting and understanding questions we might not have fully birthed. In the current world of augmented reality, designers craft avatars and characters that live not in the full focus of one’s vision but to the side – at a glance (Slavin, 2009; Cerveny, 2009). This can be much more efficient than fully parallel approaches to pattern recognition. The art of the glance is a useful exercise to practice when attempting to notice things outside of one’s normal area of perception. In fact, according to Schmidhuber (1991), humans and other biological systems use sequential gaze shifts to detect and also recognise patterns. This peripheral vision gives rise to residual objects which exist alongside of us but which are seldom noticed. Simply put, what are you noticing from the corner of your eye that you would usually filter out, but could possibly give opportunities for seeing differently? How can this way of seeing improve your capacity as a leader - when so much of the literature tells us to have a clear and uninterrupted focus.

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I am priviliged to be working with Dave Bond, who is the Director of the Leadership Centre at Ashridge Business School in the UK on a new three day programme entitled The Art of Noticing - Fresh Eyes for New Opportunities which will be run in October at the GSB and explore some of these challenges. 

I am genuinely excited by the possibilities this can generate for more effective leadership and the opportunities it can help us as leaders  generate in our own businesses and practices.

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When you leave South Africa
I will sit in the fruit-laden streets
in the brightly painted cafés
in the maze-like bookshops
and play once more
with the stories we created

I will throw your laughter
high into the pine trees
as I drive the same roads without you

I will send you postcards of Sunday morning Africa
with its Gospel voices
and street-corner gossip
through richly patterned curtains

But I know
that all these are scenes
you may well find
in other cities

And so
I will wish
with other things

The energy of men
dipping and soaring
with outstretched arms
down Lily Avenue
as children drum their laughter
on municipal dustbins
and hope chants
from flat windows and balconies
after each World Cup soccer qualifier

And perhaps these images
of pride and love
and strength
will draw you back 

————————-

I wrote this poem in 1996, fourteen years ago. Halcyon days.

(This poem is from a volume of poetry entitled the The Child Machine)

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I have always held the belief that a more creative workforce can change the world. This view was challenged in the best possible way by one of the most extraordinary thinkers that I have yet to come across at the Design Indaba. Alejandro Aravena is creating the impossible in the low cost housing environment by challenging assumptions about what it means to build architectural structures for the poor. It is worthwhile to have a look at some of the work that he has been doing on this in Chile. It is inspiring and perhaps the solution we are looking for in addressing our own low cost housing challenges in South Africa.

The ‘dotank’ work he is doing is exceptional but the tenet which underlies his thinking is for me even more hard hitting. He has to my mind reconstituted the notion of creativity and the kind of work it can do for us in multiple disciplines.  Here is how some of that thinking goes:

It is not because ideas have not been developed that people are galvanised to action, but rather that what has been proposed does not seem to be sufficient. This is what inspires and drives people to creativity. Therefore it is not that creativity changes the world but that the world changes and we therefore need to be creative.  Creativity, according to Alejandro Aravena, is what emerges when there is not enough available knowledge to provide a solution. If there were sufficient knowledge there would be no need to be creative. Creativity can’t change the world. It’s because the world changes that we need to be creative. Creative is thus not a goal but a consequence.  And for it to be an elegantly crafted consequence, the key elements must be constructed around the three key elements of relevance, precision and irreducibility.

It is for this very same reason that creativity should not be propounded as a drive for solutions but rather as a place to craft incisive questions and provocative possibilities in a world where the rate of change is happening faster than our ability to respond to it. And it is this reality which demands an ongoing construction of the possible.  

After all, answers never change the world but questions certainly do. And it is creativity with its muse of curiosity which does this so very well.

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I have had the good fortune of attending Talking Heads for the last two years that it has been running in Cape Town and it is truly one of the highlights of my year. If you are around try and get to go. I always leave feeling TOTALLY inspired. I have pasted the details below. They only have one hundred places annually so if you want a ticket, best to get ‘op it’ now.  

Talking Heads: “This information could change your life”

Speed dating for the brain: spend an evening in the living archive of Cape Town

When and Where: Thurs 18 At 19h30, The South African Natural History Museum

Duration: 120 Minutes

Tickets: R100 – Call Felicia on 021 422 0468 to Book

A vast wealth of knowledge, wisdom and trivia is stored in isolated pockets in the collective consciousness of Cape Town. For one night only, you are invited to interact with an encyclopaedia of fascinating people in a beautiful location. 60 experts from a wide range of fields and backgrounds gather in the depths of the South African Natural History Museum to share revelations with you. Their brief is to respond to the topic “This information could change your life”. A bell marks the time and you move from table to table engaging in four intimate 20 minute conversations with … a cosmologist, a trends analyst, a sex worker, a nuclear physicist, an ecologist … who knows who you will meet and how your life might be changed. Only 100 tickets are available for this opulent affair. Dress with flair. Spier wines will be served. This event is made possible through the generous funding of UCT’s Graduate School of Business. The venue has been donated by IZIKO.

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I had the good fortune to attend the Geekretreat (Stanford Valley) on the weekend. I must say that I was rather sceptical to begin with. It promised to be a convergence of likeminded people carefully selected to share their ideas, insights and solutions for education and techonology in South Africa. I must say that after having attended I am, to be frank, rather blown away. What has really piqued my curiosity is how the space was used to get the most out of the attendees. What I really liked was the idea that no one was there as a tourist. So often at events, the critic in one’s head plays a running narrative on what’s not working and what is failing to land. It is remarkable how getting every voice in the room changes that.

Each person had to volunteer to contribute something. It was  set up in  manner which is called Unconference.

Instead of the usual predetermined slots with speakers and topics confirmed, delegates were encouraged to choose from a range of areas they could contribute to. Choices included being able to give a Lightening Talk ( a 5 minute impromptu speech on  a topic which you considered worthwhile to share), a skills share (20 minutes on a skill which you could teach those attending) or a talking heads session (where you spoke for 20 minutes on a topic that was close to your heart - participants were given a piece of paper with three numbers on it - one number per talking head so talks attended were based on a random selection). I am an ambassador for the Talking Heads event which is part of the Infecting the City Project in Cape Town so I must say that if there was any criticism of the use of the Talking Heads concept it was that it didn’t come close to the calibre of what is presented at the real deal. But this is an aside and pretty irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. I have returned to work invigorated by the possibility of being able to use a mobile enabled learning platform for executive education courses at the GSB and all fired up to run an open course on Curiosity as a Leadership Practice at the P2P University this year.

I also got to meet some really insightful people and I feel hopeful, really hopeful about the future of technology-enabled education in this country. Thanks for the invitation - it has truly been worthwhile.

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Agility is being viewed as a critical skill for 21st Century Leaders. One of the components that helps create an agile mind and attitude is curiosity. But how exactly does one go about creating a curious state? Here are three useful mantras which might enable your journey of discovery – one, be fascinated by your own ignorance; two, answers don’t change the world, questions do; and three, go slow to go fast.

Be fascinated by your own ignorance

Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, “I am fascinated by my own ignorance”, and he is believed to have had a practice with his team where they had to report back daily on what they had observed that they were previously ignorant of.

This activity of noticing what it is we do not know is driven to a great degree by curiosity. Albert Einstein himself is said to have remarked, “I have no particular talents, I am just passionately curious”.

Fascination with what we don’t know, however, is to many executives a daunting and frightening proposition.

The demands of business today are such that decisions need to be made quickly – there is no time to explore all possible courses of action, and people therefore end up doing the same things again and again, limiting the possibilities for innovation and change. The executives in charge of making hasty decisions of course prefer to feel secure in their own frames of reference, rather than stimulated by new ones, as this makes quick decision-making much simpler.

But as Dawna Markova points out, “the first thing we need for innovation is fascination with wonder [curiosity in its particularity], we are taught instead to decide… to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities”.

So curiosity can lead to innovation. Great.

A lack of curiosity, on the other hand, according to author of the 2009 book Curious? Todd Kashdan, is a breeding ground for stereotyping and discrimination, inflated confidence and ignorance that can actually lead to poor decision making, dogmatism and rigidity of thought.

Becoming stuck in one paradigm, only seeing the world through a single lens and ignoring multiple perspectives puts a severe limitation on our ability to innovate.

Closing the door on creativity and diversity in the name of speed also poses a threat to businesses constantly on the look out for the next competitive advantage in the 21st Century. If you aren’t being curious, you can be sure that somewhere out there someone else is at your expense.

Answers don’t change the world, questions do

The world we now operate in is now so full of uncertainty and change that it is impossible for anyone in business to hold all the answers. And even if you have the right answer today, it might not be the right one tomorrow.

There is such a wealth of information now available that answers of all kinds exist in abundance. Today’s more valuable skill, therefore, is the ability to steer a way through this information-laden universe by asking insightful questions.

Take Google as a simple example. Using different keywords or phrases to search for the same thing can bring up vastly different search results. What you ask for is directly related to the quality of information and the answers that you get back.

So, it is the ability to ask the right questions that is emerging as a key leadership competency in the 21st Century and recruiters are increasingly listing it as a capability they value.

Go slow to go fast

Easier said than done, one might be inclined to think.

However, slowing down is probably one of the most important things we need to re-train ourselves to do if we are to cultivate a more curious state of being. The frenetic pace of life today doesn’t seem to allow for it, but going slow essentially means having time to think.

According to a recent article by Carl Honore titled, “In Praise of Slow Thinking” published in the Huffington Post, “the greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting into a lower gear. Milan Kundera talked about ‘the wisdom of slowness’. Albert Einstein spent hours just staring into space in his office at Princeton University. Charles Darwin described himself as a ‘slow thinker’.”

All these great minds recognised the importance of having time to think, to mull things over, to consider all options. If they didn’t, we might never have had the opportunity to enjoy the results of their world-changing work.

Leaders and executives, therefore, need to integrate a space for thinking into their daily working lives in order to realise the benefits of a truly curious state of mind. Without slowing down, they will continually fail to innovate.

So what now?

Reflecting on the way of being in the world that many of us now unconsciously and automatically inhabit reveals that, worryingly, we are slipping into a robotic way of living and working where the emphasis is on keeping up, rather than setting the pace.There is no time to plan, no time to reflect, only time to do – and this is manifesting itself in something akin to a “flight or fight” response to life’s demands.

In the process we are missing so much, including the discovery of our own true potential and possibilities for innovation.

Rather, let’s slow down a bit and get really curious – we may find ourselves joining the realms of great thinkers and innovators who certainly knew how to do so.

cons

This is an abridged version of the blogpost by Elaine Rumboll for Thought Leader

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A Song of Hope

When deceit is rewarded
When betrayal is customary
When enemies gain power
When dreams are burnt by malice
When the chatter of others is alien
When hope is a foreign thing
When beauty ceases to be gentle
When there are no longer mornings
textured with familiarity

When despair remains despair

Be still and watch at your window

Listen for the sounds of richer times
gathering and conspiring in a revolt
with a might which will flood the mountains
and overthrow this season

Click here to download the entire manuscript of The Child Machine for free.

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It has been mooted that the ability to learn is far more important than any one nugget of knowledge (Near Future Laboratory, 2009). Increasingly, the assumption that the ability to learn faster than anyone else will be the key competitive advantage for those wanting to succeed in the 21^st century is becoming commonplace. This kind of thinking is being reflected in practise where many are working longer hours, taking shorter breaks and multi tasking more than they have ever before. In fact, research on urban behaviour reflects that we are walking 10% faster and talking 20% faster than we did in the last decade.

What are the consequences of this drive to ‘go faster’ for the future of leaning? Already we are seeing organisational requests for contact hours to be shortened significantly, on leadership development programmes. Much of the responsibility for the uptake of knowledge is becomingly increasingly the responsibility of the learner in their assigned projects back into the work environment.My response to this is that going Faster kills Innovation. It forces us to focus on what we know. It creates Killing Fields. People who Know there is a different way are frightened  to voice their opinion, and in this system, cut themselves and their vision off from what could be possible. It is a desperate and ill-informing response to the Attention Economy - a newly understood space which should really generate collaboration and collegial support. Innovation  is concerned, or should be concerned with the Fascination with Wonder. Anything else lacks courage. 

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This is the abstract for a paper I am currently writing for a conference on The Future of Learning - What excites me about the notion of curiosity as an area for study is that it is an arena which is so often spoken of as something which re-enervates but is also an area which has so many conflicting opinions about what really consitiutes its becoming.

I suppose that if one is going to undertake an investigation of a field of study it is important to put a stick in the ground. For me, curiosity is something which helps to increase the quality of our attention. Interestingly enough I found Todd Kashan had the same idea in his 2009 book on Curiosity? I would really appreciate comments and recommendations for where else to start looking for material on curiosity as a filter for attention.

ABSTRACT
Information consumes attention. In an age of information overload and ‘filter failure’ (Shirky, 2008), human attention has become a scarce resource (Lanham, 2007). In the realm of this attention economy, it is argued that the notion of curiosity emerges as a necessary regenerative foil to this attention deficit. For we enjoy our curiosity even when it is not sated (Schmitt & Lahroodi, 2008). Curiosity heightens levels of engagement with information (Harvey et al, 2007) but is paradoxically an effective response to regenerating attention, specifically in organisational contexts where attention is constantly under erasure. Thus the very nature of curiosity is a paradoxical enabler of learning. It requires the subject to both suspend judgment in the sense of Otto Scharmer’s Open Mind (2007) and simultaneously stimulates critical thinking through engaging with what is perceived as “the spiral of curiosity” (Harvey et al, 2007: 44). The paper concludes by evidencing ways in which curiosity can be construed, harnessed and applied as a continuous enabler in the learning mix. The Attention Audit, undertaken on many of our leadership interventions will be discussed to illustrate this point.

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