In the Space-Time continuum, there are moments when the stars align, worlds collide, strange attractors form, dimensional slices interface …and a federation of exceptional, imaginative, electrifying, dynamic individuals coalesced to form Alsion’s 2014 graduating class. I can only say that Ender’s team in Ender’s Game have nothing on you all.

It’s been a serious, hilarious and awesome honor to have had you in my classes. So I thought for several days about what I could possibly say to you that hasn’t been said before and that you don’t already know. I mean, I could say, “Be yourselves!” But you already are. I could say something inspirational, like, “Blaze your own trails!” But you will anyway. Or I could say (you knew there would be a third option because the paradigm demands that everything happen in threes) (by the way, that was an example of the subjunctive in English) (But I digress,) I could say, “You are the future!” But actually you are the “Now”.

So I kept thinking.

And then I remembered my dance training. When I studied dance, I paid for lots of $75 workshops where we drilled all-day through complicated choreography. But, despite all my notes and practice, I really only ever remembered one particular move or combination out of the entire day, which I began to refer to as my “$75 move”.

I want to give you all a $75 dollar move.

In 1900, a group of European artists, scientists and scholars were asked to design postcards of what the world Innovations would be in the year 2000.
(By the way, you know I AR’ed your Alsion logo on the program — you can find 8 of the postcards there, and our twitterfeed : Hashtag #alsion2014)
So, the artists and scientists came up with interesting and often pretty accurate ideas; but you can see in their visions that the artists were held back by powerful foundational paradigms of their time.

One postcard shows a classroom full of students with electric caps on their heads getting matrix-style learning shocked into their heads: but they are still sitting in chairs at desks overseen by an instructor (who is grinding up books into some sort of data dust, I guess.) Another has a flying postman handing mail to a woman in an upper story apartment, assuming we would still get couriered paper mail and need to be home to receive it. I personally like the automatic “egg-hatcher” which needs a goose-girl to load the hand-collected eggs into the machine. The machine can pop out a chick in a few seconds but then the chick still has to eat food and grow up outdoors on a farm. People would have personal flying machines, but there would be flying traffic policemen with clubs, white gloves and whistles to handle the air-commute problems. There would be electronic music but played by machines holding instruments sitting in an orchestra pit directed by a human conductor.
There are complex multi-tool machines for shaving but they use shaving brushes, cream, hot towels, strop razors and actual barbers. Shaving apparently only got more complicated. And they kind of got it wrong with the postcard of the radium-fueled fireplace.

These visionaries could not see outside of their daily life as it really was and imagined only devices that would tweak their current life.
Today we continue the evolutionary path paradigm: keyboards are the natural follow-through from the typewriter, glasses become smart glasses, gloves become smart gloves, watches become smart watches…bracelets become Fitbits…

At any rate, people are going to ask you to be innovative. They are going to want you to innovate their stuff -by which I mean they are going to ask you to somehow make what they currently do relevant and exciting without actually changing it. It’s more like, “TheirStuff 2.1”.

It’s really hard to imagine what’s outside of or not a natural extension of our daily “real” life. True innovation (risky, but seriously fun) takes what everyone accepts as a given-as what is necessary-“the Duh” and chucks it aside. Then, you focus on and develop what everyone else considers merely the bonus wish list.

And if you let it, innovation will drive you to deconstruct questions. Teachers, facilitators, supervisors, managers, cohorts -people are going to ask you a lot of questions. But the great majority of questions contain a paradigmatic framework that constrains and directs your thoughts, and consequently, your answers. So, I ask you, “What are the three kinds of trees…?”

…Well, there are only two kinds. But my question made you think in terms of three. At the Radical Innovation Summit, I was asked to consider the future of Arts & Humanities in relation to STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) classes. I thought for a moment and replied, “The question is flawed. It presupposes the continuing separation of data and skills into two traditional classifications. Let’s ask, “When will we remove obsolete classifications and redefine knowledge?”

Sometimes the answer is a completely new and different question.

So here is your $75 move:
Question everything. Especially the questions. Don’t get caught in other people’s paradigms.
Question everything, and life will stay the very exciting adventure that it is.