NETTING IT OUT

Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack’s book, The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success [1], published in 2013, is a must read for anyone interested in fostering innovation. This book is extremely well-written and enjoyable to read; full of good stories as well as scientific grounding. Unlike many business books, there’s a plot that keeps you turning pages as Ori tries to inject “contained chaos” into the U.S. army.

The take-aways stick with you and can help you create the conditions for innovation in your personal life as well as in the workplace. I found this book both reassuring—because it explained WHY the things I find useful actually work—and enlightening.

My take-aways are:

• Inject more white space into your life
• Nurture organized chaos
• Embrace unusual suspects
• Engage the whole system
• Organize serendipity

Here’s how these elements fit together to foster innovation, according to the authors:

“Chaos creates white space, which in turn allows unusual suspects to sweep in. The result is a kind of organized serendipity, or what I call contained chaos.”

~ Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack, The Chaos Imperative, Kindle edition p. 21

Why Taking a Shower Works

Whenever I am stuck, or my mind is full of a complex problem and I don’t see a way forward, I take a shower, take a walk, go work in the garden, or cook something. I’m sure that most of us do the same things. Everyone who has ever worked with me knows my “take a shower” prescription.

What I learned from reading this book is that that shower-taking, or taking a break to clear your mind, is precisely what our brains need to foster creativity. And we need to do a lot more of it; not less. How refreshing! 

The Neuro-Science Behind White Space. There’s an invaluable (to me) section in Chapter 4 in which the authors delve into neuroscience. They explain that, for years neuroscientists studied, using MRI scans, what areas in peoples’ brains are activated when they perform different mental tasks and focus on different things. But, also for years, Brafman reports, brain scientists weren’t paying attention to what the brain was doing when it was “at rest.” There was activity elsewhere in the brain, but it wasn’t task focused, so it was largely ignored. That undefined activity was referred to a “white noise.” Until someone decided to study it.

Lo and behold, they discovered that when our brains aren’t focused on a particular task, they are…(more)

(Download the PDF to read the entire article.)