Aditya Chadha

Wow.  The more I read about Honda, the more impressed I am. This is exactly how you should run a company, find the smartest people you can find and then let them figure out what needs to be done. A sample from the second article above:

A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3 1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge. See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that.

That’s all there is to it.  Maybe you need more self-directed individuals than your average college grad but I think its worth it spending the time to find such people, and then helping them flourish both professionally and creatively. Don’t you?

If you haven’t seen this post from Chris yet, you have to check it out. Awesomely inspiring!

It is very hard to express what you’re thinking. Your brain wakes up, a few neurons fire, a pattern emerges trying to penetrate your subconscious, fighting a million other synapse connections to break through to your subconscious. Then, something that feels like a thought – bubbles up into your subconscious trying to attract the attention of your conscious brain and if a few factors combine and you spend some brain cycles, a final coherent thought is formed.

If you’re to believe Jeff Hawkins, the brain functions by running a massive prediction engine based on matching patterns that it has seen before. So, for example, you know how to open a door because your brain sees a doorknob and matches it to a previous occurrence of seeing a door knob and watching a door open by turning the knob, so it predicts that the same thing will happen (the door will open) if you turned this door knob. This is obviously a very radical way of thinking about the brain and the way it functions.

If I was to extend this theory to how the brain expresses new thoughts or how you create new thoughts, you get the model where your brain has actually had a thought before and when you think about something similar a pattern emerges. But, the pattern is incomplete, you’re not thinking about the same thing you thought about before but you’re trying to map this new thought to a thought that you’ve had before. So to create this new pattern the brain fuses the older but similar pattern with this new pattern that you’re experiencing and forms a new (as yet) untested pattern. Once you test this pattern multiple times, your brain ‘remembers’ the new pattern and uses it to repeat the process. An example of this would be to extend the ‘doorknob’ experiment above with a new ‘doorknob’ that looks different or is placed in a different part of the door, or to make it even more complicated we could replace ‘doorknob’ with a completely different ‘door-opening-mechanism’. This is all pure conjecture on my part, of course, but something to think about as I ponder creativity more.

Going back to writing about expression, we have the fact that once you have a blob of neuron connections, and it goes through a few layers of brain tissue and emerges as a coherent thought it looks very different from the real blob that you started thinking about. This depends on how much experience you’ve had in expressing a similar thought, or to put it in Jeff’s terms how many stored patterns you have that approximate this new thought you’re having now to articulate it in the best way possible.

So, then the most articulate people should be those that have expressed as much as possible. But that’s not true, because mere expression doesn’t tell you if what you’re saying is what someone else is understanding, that’s where communication and the feedback loop come in.

So, in essence, the most articulate people are those people that have expressed as much as they can but also received as much feedback as they can to understand if they’re getting through to the rest of humanity, thus improving their pattern matching algorithm to express every single thought as clearly as possible.

I think that’s why most people write, to get their thoughts out there, but to also affect the thinking of everyone that understands their thoughts.

Food for thought, yes?

[This is a new series of posts on thinking about creativity to better understand it, next up will be On Mediums of Expression]

Video of Jeff Hawkins’ talk at TED:

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Tags: creativity, thinking, the brain, expression, changing_the_world

Neat way to turn your images into ‘A Scanner Darkly’ funky 2d animation. Need to try this out, and share results!

via Photojojo

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Yesterday, I quit my job. But that’s for a later story.

This story, being the obligatory introductory post that it is, is an indication of the things to come!

First, some background… I’m a 26 year old wannabe entrepreneur interested in technology and design culture and that is what I’ll be talking about on the blog. But more than that, this blog is going to be about self-expression and creativity. In the next few months, I will try and answer the one question that is driving to me to completely turn my life around.

“Am I creative? And if I am, why am I not out there? Building brilliant new things? Changing the world?”

So, there you have it! And, to begin, some brilliant reading material:

How to Be Creative – by Hugh MacLeod

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