Designing Aurora Impact we came to see that really good — worthy cases, are full of black, obscure patches. Like in a good story, like in any great idea, there have to be questions. With equal parts humility, honesty, play and humor one may look to answer the quintessential questions of the creative life: How do you get “discovered” for your real worth? How does your worth as a brand, organization, project or community gets “discovered”?

Worthy cases inevitably tie to crafting larger than life stories, solving impossible riddles, applying ingenuity, doing what has never been done before, hacking away at the edges of a serious question.

We looked at thousands of real life cases we have been involved in over three decades. What we found is that our models actually worked when we managed to allow the necessary variety, freedom and interaction between actors. When experts dominated the field —as owners, as rule setters, as arbiters, the results left much to be desired, especially because the follow-through and following were poor. But where the conditions were met—the interaction pace and intensity flowed at high rates, we could clearly perceive how understanding, sharing across a large and diverse group, concentrated as-if in a time-capsule, in a single mind, in a moment of flow.

We were left thinking: what-if these conditions could be built into how we think and work on real cases with crowd sourcing? If indeed crafting something of value is a long uncertain process — why assume we can see it before it becomes? why assume that we can handpick the right partners or teammates prior to having crossed to the far shore together? how can we realize the experience of it happening?

The answer that came —or took us over, was that the same type of socially curated interaction we have practiced in live events for decades, can be structured to curate worthy cases. The single essential ingredient to generate that single-mind and flow effect is quite simply… the shared sense of worthiness. David Ogilvy in Confessions of an Advertising man nails it: “Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

With these big dreams (especially the challenge of making them come true) it’s important to make some big bets. Getting at those few important changes and strategies that will alter the course—and more likely get you there, require to figure out only what matters —what is worthy.

Aurora Impact

In 2012, artist Austin Kleon gave us Steal Like an Artist, a modern manifesto for combinatorial creativity that went on to become one of the best art books that year. Like Aurora Impact—rather than encouraging you to “steal” from others (best practices, success ideas), it offers a blueprint to making your work influential enough to be theft-worthy. And this of course told us that the key to discovering worthiness is— not in claiming value or interest, but in evidencing it, in that others want to take it over for themselves.

Kleon’s own artwork — his signature “newspaper blackout” poems — is a sort of meta-case of a modern model of what works. Key to it is that our work proceeds out from the areas illuminated under the lamppost. What we know and what we are creating is always like a collection of bits—light spots on a much much larger canvas with grey and dark areas.

We saw in this a way to describe the play-ground, and build this into the structure of Aurora to be an invitation to discover the bigger model, to connect your grey circles with the grey circles of others in unpredictable ways.

We saw that if diverse people deemed a play-ground sufficiently precise, yet open to play, to hack away at the edges of the central question, then an Index of Worthiness could be implemented. The main feature of the Index is that it is not fixed by the rules of what is worthy in the past, but forged in the field through experiential-modelling. The engagement process would gauge the level of courage, commitment, and creative integrity to discover the dark spaces—the worthiness of the case as a whole, and of the contributions of the multiple actors.

Kleon says “embrace the status of amateur,” which for us is the necessary condition we observed in our cases. If an expert is someone who owns a space —a memory of some experiences, an amateur is someone who declares her or his interest in things and fields she or he doesn't know, as is knowing in the Act:

In my personal experience, I believe that if I had not been submitted to this obligation to draft questions I did not know a thing about, and to manage to pull through, I should never have done a quarter or even a tenth of the mathematics I have done. —Jean Dieudonné [scribe and curator of the Bourbaki, possibly the first open-source community, most famous for spawning several generations of advances in the Mathematics community, 1935–today.]

Frank Lloyd Wright laid out perfectly: “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows.’” The real amateur harnesses the Zen notion of “beginner’s mind” — bringing a state of openness to possibility that closes up as we get calcified in expertise. This is the spirit and feeling of Aurora Impact for enabling worthy cases to come together.