Should brainstorming be a daily process?

Group think, brainstorming, crowd sourcing, all are very popular methods for launching great ideas. I am not certain of the payoff. In my experience there seems to be a lot of thoughts bantered about and concepts shared but little work actually accomplished.

Sounding boards resonates more with me. I find it desirable to talk to other people, I often go to strictly talk with an individual and say “Look, I think there has to be something here. Here’s what I think I see”…and then begin to talk back and forth.

I recommend that you pick capable people, when choosing sounding boards. You want to get people to listen who are willing to do more than just say “yes, yes, yes” when you give out an idea. What you want is to get “critical mass” in action, this means that you get people who are actively engaged and saying stuff like, “Yes that reminds me of so and so”…or “Have you thought about this or this?”. When you get lots of stuff going, you have critical mass. When you talk you want more than just nice people saying “oh yea” and leave it at that, you need to find people who will stimulate you right back. These “yes” guys fill the whole space and they contribute nothing, they absorb ideas and the new ideas just die away instead of echoing on.

Yes, I find it necessary to talk to people. I talk to people and ask questions when I think they can answer me and give me clues that I do not know about. I go out and look. I think people with closed doors fail to do this so they fail to get their ideas sharpened.

You might also consider the fact that brainstorming with your colleagues doesn’t really force you to decode your message or your ideas sufficiently. You will benefit if someone from another tradition confronts you with the claim that some of your terms and communication processes are meaningless to the general population, or more specifically, to the people you most want to influence.

I came across the transcript to a talk Richard Hamming gave to the Bell Communications Research Colloquium in 1986, and was inspired to share some of his thoughts about great scientists and doing great work, as they mirror many of my own ideas about cultivating curiosity and curious explorers.

While at Bell Labs, Mr. Hamming worked in various aspects of computing, numerical analysis and management of computing. He is probably best known for his pioneering work on error-codes, his work on integrating differential equations and the spectral window which bears his name.

The greatest piece of advice that I took from this presentation was what Mr. Hamming speaks about in this way, “You can’t always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightening strikes; you don’t have to hide in the valley where you are safe.” This echoes my own ideas about planting the seeds for investigation and novel connections and that the best way to cultivate curiosity is to get out into the world and experience it firsthand.

The presentation given by Mr. Hamming centered on the concept that you need to know and manage yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults. How can you convert a fault into an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven’t enough tools to move into a direction when that’s exactly what you need to do? The successful individual changes the viewpoint and what was a defect becomes an asset.

Inspiring thoughts from this presentation:

”Yes, I would like to do something significant”- Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?

Luck does not cover everything. As Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind”. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. Yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

Hard work and drive count. Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results”. Solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far.

One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, are that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.

One success can bring confidence and courage. You get your courage up and believe that you can do important work, and then you can. Courage is going forward under incredible circumstances; you think and continue to think.

Once you become famous it is hard to work on small problems.

“Knowledge and productivity are like compounded interest”. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity-it is very much like compounded interest.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well! They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory.

Great contributions are rarely done by adding another decimal place. It comes down to emotional commitment. Most great scientists are completely committed to their problem.

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.

It’s not the consequences that make a problem important; it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important.

“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

“It is a poor workman who blames his tools-the good man gets on with the job, given what he’s got, and gets the best answer he can”.

It is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is; the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in it.

If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it! Don’t give someone the chance to tell you “No”. But if you want a “No”, it’s easy to get a “No”.

How much time should you spend reading? It depends upon the quest that you are on. There was this woman, a very, very smart lady. She was always in the library; she read everything. If you wanted references, you went to her and she gave you all kinds of great information. Into her later years, this very smart woman came to a distressing realization; she would never have a discovery or an effect named after her, no actionable idea credited to her because she was reading too much and not creating, acting and doing enough.

If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot off creative people do-get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you have thought the problem through on your own terms, how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

You need to read. You need to read more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solution does not seem to be the way to do great research.

“You will know me by my work”.  Doing, acting, experimenting and creating solutions, that is how you will get your name attached to things, that and doing great work! Contributing a lot of small things along with a lot of big things, that is how you build your legacy.

So yes, read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.

Read widely, but remember that reading is not what research is about. There is the danger of doing too much reading and potentially never doing anything worthwhile.

Here are some suggestions on reading for problems and possibilities:

• Read titles, skim the abstracts, look at the pictures and maybe the tables, and if there’s anything interesting, then consult the text, looking for that specific point you are seeking.
• Take a look at comments and letters in journals. Whatever the point is, it is made quickly. Furthermore, an area of controversy may be highlighted for you.
• Journals and manuscripts that are outside your specific topic of interest which are relevant to your topic. They may very well take sufficiently different an attitude to provoke thought
• Low prestige journals sometimes publish simple data on unusual questions.
• You can often find mental stimulation in journals from 60-80 years ago. Reworking, remixing and reanimating these treasures can often produce interesting possibilities.
• So much junk is published that a degree of skeptical hostility is appropriate when approaching most papers. Temper this with sympathy, a paper may be useless to you, and it may even be clear that by any reasonable standard the research was a waste of time, but yet the method may be useful to one reader, a detail in the results may just be what a second reader is looking for, a third reader may find her thoughts clarified by a point in the discussion.

Last night, my good friend Tara and I were having a very thought provoking conversation about Leadership and Management. We have know each other for over 10 years, spending most of those years working for Kinko’s in Management and Leadership roles. As we continued to talk about what management and leadership meant to us and how working for Kinko’s was the foundation of this knowledge, we both started voicing our desire to find out what people outside of Kinko’s had thought of the company:

What had business leaders thought of the business model and the upstart Founder, Paul Orfalea? What had outsiders thought of Kinko’s Leadership and Management styles?

Then all sort of questions and curious thoughts started to flow:

What had the Guest Speakers, who participated in our national Company Meetings, thought of Kinko’s? I was specifically thinking of Faith Popcorn who spoke one year to a group of managers at the meeting.

Would Kinko’s have remained a viable and relevant company, had it not gone the way of the Initial Public Offering?

Would Paul Orfalea have continued to be the innovator that he was at the beginning of the company through to the present time?

Culture was a very specific and special thing at Kinko’s, I wonder if the company would have been able to maintain that clarity of purpose in the business models of today?

Would the Democratic working environment at Kinko’s and the idea of the Citizen-Coworker be a good model for entrepreneurs today?

Of course all of us citizen-coworkers who helped make Kinko’s the company that it was, remember only the good and tend to forget the bad, although I must say there wasn’t much of that. So I am also curious to find out what our competition thought of us and how we were viewed in the greater scheme of things.

I think these questions will be the basis for my next curious exploration. Now that Kinko’s no longer exists, I might have some luck in my investigations. We will see how far I get and what information I can dig up and from whom. I will keep you posted.

Proceed with curiosity !

Books are crucial to our understanding of our place in time and space, because they are fundamentally composed of time and space. They carry with them the history of thought, of physical presence and of psychological evolution that created them, and moved them forward. To understand ourselves we need to understand our past. To understand our past we need to examine the artifacts we carry with us, which carry us forward.

Michael Shanks – “A lot of people think that archaeologist discover the past. And that’s only a tiny bit true. I think it’s more accurate to say that they work on what remains. That may sometimes involve, absolutely, coming across stuff from the past, but the key thing about archaeology is that it works on what’s left of the past. As we explore this stuff, we figure out how to bring it forward, into the present, through our interpretation of it.”

My vision of the role of the Literary Archaeologist is; to attempt to reanimate the archives, to recreate the cultural past through the cultural present by recycling, reworking and remixing artifacts and books that are left of the past.

There exists a serious challenge with material culture, artifacts once discovered are archived and placed in a repository only to be stored and preserved, becoming static.The trail and the remains of the past may be dormant, but they exist, waiting to be revived or resurrected into something else.The only way the past is going to stay relevant, is if it is taken up and reworked, remixed. We have to take artifacts and archives and revitalize them, make them live again, inserting them into the present,to give direction to the future. We need to give them new material forms that people can engage with. Unless there is a reason to reuse stuff, it’ll fall out of use or be stored away, and eventually destroyed.

“While you live, create your own beautiful bead, the jewel of a life intelligently and generously lived, so that you may leave it behind to be strung on the necklace that adorns mankind, time and history”

We are all a part of something, something truly great, a oneness that encompasses everything. The important thing is no to fight it! To understand your place in it. Once you see yourself as part of a whole, a clear ingredient in the universe, you will stop fighting so many things, accepting them and being enriched by them.

Accept the past. Learn from the good that was part of your history, that which ennobled and raised your people even higher. Don’t insist you were born rootless. Look at your history and pass in on to those who’ll come after. Think of it as a gift, saving them from an unattached and unexamined life, from waking up one morning and finding out there is nothing worth having or preserving or passing on. That you might as well not have been here at all.

You might think your life is your own, that you are free to do anything, think anything you please, unconnected to what came before and what will come after. And you might believe that this is a good thing, a wonderful thing, that freedom. It isn’t! If your not connected, your life is a fragment: a bit of cloth, a random page torn out of the middle of a book. We’re meant to be connected. We’re conduits. The past is supposed to pass through us, to connect us to the future.

“Like trees, we’re planted in old soil enriched by the lives and deaths of so many who have come before us. The nourishment is meant to flow through us, on to the newest branches, so that every branch grows a little taller, and blooms more beautifully. If you refuse to understand that, if you act as if the world began the day you were born and will end the day you die, then the branches wither, the tree dies.” Catherine da Costa.

Beads! by elasticcamel via Flickr

Connecting ideas to people and people to ideas.

People are fascinated with the past, whether it is their own family history, the history of their town, the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, or the Anasazi. There is a mystery and nostalgia associated with the past that captivates the imagination as well as the intellect-the desire to understand how we arrived at where we are today. Because of the intrigue of archaeology and the past, heritage has a ready and willing public constituency.

Our National Parks and other public lands, have premier sites, settings and experiences to offer.Yet, despite their successes with public programs, they are still not meeting the demand for quality heritage learning and tourism opportunities.They need the help of every curious explorer out there to breath new life into these very special resources. Forests offer an amazing range of heritage opportunities and experiences filled with learning, adventure, and fun !

Did you know?

Over 88 million people visit historic sites each year.

People don’t just travel to escape, they travel to enrich their lives.

Every other person you meet wanted to be an archaeologist where they were a kid.

Planting the Seeds for further investigation…

Develop a set of national products to highlight heritage opportunities (cabin rentals, heritage expeditions, fire lookouts, etc).

Involve local communities in exploring heritage tourism opportunities.

Make heritage volunteer and tourism opportunities available on the Web.

Glacier National Park by karynsig via Flickr

Connecting ideas to people and people to ideas !

A land without ruins is a land without memories.

As manager of almost 200 million acres of public land, the National Forest System is entrusted with the stewardship of a large share of the nation’s historical and cultural heritage. They can be proud of many of their stewardship accomplishments, including outstanding examples of historic building stabilization, rock art conservation, and adaptive use. Still, most of their stewardship efforts remain focused on protecting heritage sites from project impacts. While they attempt to deal with properties threatened by development or criminal activities, or surrounded by controversy, they find themselves increasingly unable to adequately care for properties threatened by years of natural deterioration, erosion, vandalism, and neglect. Much of the nation’s cultural heritage languishes, poorly-documented and largely forgotten.

Suggestions for curious explorers engagement:

• The Forest Service needs help to become recognized as a national leader in heritage conservation.
• Looting and vandalism need to disappeared from National Forest lands.
• Priority sites need to be stabilized and monitored to protect significant values.
• Heritage resources need to be fully integrated into land and resource planning
• Tribal relationships based on trust need to be fostered to facilitate resolution of heritage issues.
• Site and survey information needs to be accurate, up-to-date, and incorporated into GIS.
• Artifacts and records need to be appropriately curated and available for study
• Exciting knowledge about the past needs to be synthesized and readily available for public interpretation and natural resource management.

Did You Know?

By the 1960s, archaeologists estimated that in many parts of the country up to 90% of the prehistoric sites had been destroyed by development.

National Forests contain many of the nation’s best preserved heritage sites in some of the least disturbed natural settings.

Over 270,000 sites are currently inventoried on NFS lands.

Fewer than one percent of recorded sites have been stabilized or restored; most have not been studied or evaluated; only 3,000 properties have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Take Action!

1. The Forest Service needs to enlist public help by expanding Site Steward programs and giving national recognition to accomplishments. Get involved in your local Steward Program or start one if none exist currently.
2. Help with the development of a catalog of endangered sites, and become involved in an “adopt a site” program or start one if none exist.

3. Help develop a more effective framework to inventory, evaluate, and protect heritage resources, including a streamlined compliance process with more meaningful products.
4. The Forest Service needs to expand partnerships with researchers and scholars to begin to synthesize and fill the gaps in our knowledge about the history and prehistory of our forests. Bring your expertise, skills and curiosity to the table.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park by Ken Lund via Flickr

Connecting ideas to people and people to ideas !

The next topic on my list of subjects to pursue as possible launching points for life-long learning adventures, is our National Forests. I will spend the next few posts talking more about specific topics within the National Forests that could engage the curious explorer in all of us.

There are thousands of years awaiting review and reflection –waiting to be embraced by all Americans.

Awaiting discovery in the hollows, mountains and river valleys of our National Forests are the remnants of past cultures that confront us and remind us of the centuries-old relationship between people and the land. These heritage resources hold clues to past ecosystems, add richness and depth to our landscapes, provide links to living traditions, and help transform a beautiful walk in the woods into an unforgettable encounter with history.

The Forest Service Natural Resource Agenda provides a vision for the long term future of the Forest Service. It identifies several critical emphasis areas that need our immediate attention, including watershed health and restoration, sustainable forest ecosystem management, and recreation. The Recreation Strategy tiers to the Natural Resource Agenda and sets a new course for how they will deliver quality recreation experiences and services to the pubic. Heritage resources are fundamentally linked to the future envisioned in both of these documents.

As we embark on new efforts to maintain and restore the health of our watersheds and ecosystems, heritage resources offer crucial information and insights into the past that have bearing on sustainability. As National Forests place priority on providing premier recreation settings, experiences, and customer service, heritage resources offer the “tie that binds” people to the land. And as they seek to engage the public in all of their endeavors, heritage offers the keys to understanding that unique “sense of place” that can bring people together to help shape the future.

Suggestions for curious explorers engagement:

Help to protect significant heritage resources, share their values with the  people, and contribute relevant information and perspectives to natural resource management.

• help ensure that future generations will have an opportunity to discover the human story etched on the landscapes of our National Forests and Grasslands;
• ·help to make the past come alive as a vibrant part of our recreational experiences and community life; and
• help connect people to the land in a way that will help us better understand and manage forest ecosystems.

Help open windows on the past and thereby see the people and the land more clearly.

• Inform and educate people to look to National Forests and Grasslands for intriguing opportunities to touch, explore, and learn about their cultural heritage.
• As they travel through time, forest visitors make a personal connection with the past, sense the diversity of the human experience, and begin to understand the fundamental relationship between people and the land.
• Educating others on the value of each piece of the puzzle, the public is our strongest ally in protecting and preserving heritage sites.
• Educate and inform the public that Heritage stewardship and natural resource management operate in productive harmony to fulfill the social, economic, and spiritual needs of the nation.
• Contribute to the knowledge gleaned from more than twelve thousand years of history and prehistory, understanding of past and present ecosystems provides an expanded context for decision making.

Deschutes National Forest – Oregon by dougtone via Flickr

I have been compiling a list of Public Domain ideas, topics and subject matter that could be pursued as possible launching points for further research, investigation and inquiry. These topics offer extraordinary opportunities to explore ideas that you might not know existed, and subjects that have yet to be fully investigated or are not sufficiently known or understood. Many of these opportunities can be pursued freely, in any manner you choose, which could provide chances to do important work.

I encourage you to use these ideas to create and launch your own life-long learning adventures, quests, expeditions and investigations. Your enthusiasm, curiosity, dedication and experience is desperately needed.

Over the next few weeks I will be sharing this list of ideas along with real examples of needs that exist to be filled by curious explorers just like you. If you are looking to pursue a curiosity-driven life, I invite you to join the adventure. Go..Explore, proceed with CURIOSITY!

1. The following article identifies an area of need that I find to be a global dilemma, what to do with the incredible backlog of archaeological artifacts that have been excavated, rescued, unearthed during years of unprecedented development?

Why don’t we involve and engage our curious explorers and citizen scientists in helping to solve this problem? Why not encourage them to volunteer their time and expertise to assist in cataloging, documenting, recording and getting these items into the public view? I think this article documents a great example of an opportunity for curious explorers to take the initiative and become engaged in whatever way they find most interesting.

Irish Archaeology Near Crisis Point-Enda Leahy

THE unprecedented boom in property development and road building has unearthed thousands of archaeological artifacts but most of them lie gathering dust in warehouses, hidden from public view.

With nearly 200 times more excavations being carried out than in the early 1990s, new discoveries are no longer being reported and Ireland’s museums no longer have space to house them. As a result, academics claim the country is being denied an opportunity to learn more about its history.

A report prepared by University College Dublin (UCD) and the Heritage Council says an unprecedented amount of new information about Ireland’s ancient cultures remains unpublished because of “systemic failures” and pressure from developers to get archeology “out of the way for the next development”.

Archaeology 2020 says the treasure trove of knowledge and artifacts that should have accompanied the increase in excavations is not reaching the public domain.

Dr Muiris O’Suilleabhain, the head of the archeology department at UCD, and one of the authors of the report, said the entire archeology sector is on the verge of crisis.

“A generation ago you would have had a handful of excavations every year. These would have been looked after by the national institutions and artifacts would be handed to them. We now have 2,000 licences granted each year, the private sector has mushroomed, but the state sector has grown very little.

“We could be completely transforming our knowledge about Ireland’s past, but instead we’re not. There’s an overwhelming amount of material, but the people writing reports in many cases are totally unaware they have made finds of great significance.”

A backlog of some 4,000 excavation reports are unpublished and the number is growing almost daily. Meanwhile the volume of archaeological material being stored has grown so large that the National Museum has run out of space to house it.

Eamonn Kelly, the National Museum’s keeper of Irish antiquities, said: “We don’t have the facilities to deal with it now. We’d have to close galleries to put it all under a roof. We will reach crisis point.”

Kelly said archeology firms working for private developers or the National Roads Authority are storing huge amounts of material and there is no funding in place to care for it.

Valuable coins, jewellery and sculptures found during 250 excavations for an Office of Public Works flood scheme in Kilkenny are in storage in one of its warehouses in Laois.

The UCD report recommends reforming the tendering process for state building projects and establishing new national bodies to oversee the sector. However, this is not enough according to Kelly, who said many archaeologists are under qualified.

Recent discoveries as a result of the development boom include a set of wood pipes believed to be part of Europe’s oldest piped musical instrument. Dated 2137-1909 BC, they were found at Charlesland, Co Wicklow, during a residential development, along with other artifacts providing evidence spanning millenniums of town planning, architecture, battles and epidemics.

But legislation protecting such discoveries and making them automatically the property of the state has left little incentive for developers to stall work and pay increased costs for the excavations.

The Department of the Environment said a new National Monuments bill due before the Dail next year would “overhaul all aspects of archeology in Ireland and will reflect the problems highlighted in the report”.