“Hybrid Thinking” Leaders Will Prosper: Part 2 — Humans Were Born to Create at Every Age
Time magazine recently published a special edition focused on the elements of creativity that make us mere humans more powerful than we give ourselves credit for. To sum it up, each and every one of us are born creators with the innate ability to evolve over a lifetime, we are the only creatures on the planet that can imagine endless novel possibilities and ultimately bring them into existence. This article will be a “cliff notes” of sorts, connecting the dots back to the assertion that humans really are uniquely positioned for the hybrid thinking that will be necessary as we learn how to successfully co-exist with automation and artificial intelligence.
Every single person is a creator in some way. Full stop.
In Richard Jerome’s article, he captures the essence of this by quoting Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Origins of Creativity, in the following passage:
“…creativity is also the most fundamentally human of qualities. It is, in fact, ‘the unique and defining trait of our species’…as Wilson frames it, creativity is ‘an innate quest for originality’, driven by the enduring human passion for novelty, ‘the discovery of new entities and processes, the solving of old challenges and disclosure of new ones, the aesthetic surprise of unanticipated facts and theories, the pleasure of new faces, the thrill of new worlds.’”
Along with the declaration and wide acceptance of this fact that we all possess the innate desire to create and solve problems, Jerome brings the paradigm home by combining this thought with University of Notre Dame anthropologist Agustin Fuentes’ assertion that creativity does not solely belong to our renowned geniuses throughout history, but to every single individual human being that’s ever existed. He captures this in the following passage:
“Still, even if we acknowledge that creativity and innovation are uniquely human, people tend to think creators — or creatives, as they’re now known in the professional world — are, if not divine, then members of a special rarefied class…’People pigeonhole creativity as belonging to a single individual or a group of geniuses’ Fuentes says. ‘They don’t realize that each and every human has this incredible capacity to imagine and to change things.’”
And Jerome concludes with the declaration that “all creators, even the most celebrated ones, draw on the work of others, influenced consciously or not by what’s come before — and what’s happening around them”.
“Creativity is the art of combining a little idea with another little idea, you may have another little idea, and so on…at the end maybe a great idea will come up.”
This connects nicely to another article written by Walter Isaacson, the world-renowned biographer of some of humanities most prolific creative icons such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and finally, Leonardo da Vinci to name only a few. He recounts the ways of Leonardo’s genius that act as lessons for us “mere mortals”. While I won’t detail out each one, the essence of his creative genius is that he coupled a childlike sense of wonder with relentless curiosity about the everyday workings of life and lots and lots of handwritten notes to connect the dots for unseen leap opportunities. In a nutshell, he built upon ideas all around us, both from the past and in the present to reimagine what could be.
That doesn’t seem unattainable, does it??
Lessons from Leonardo in the eyes/research of Walter Isaacson: Be relentlessly curious, seek knowledge for its own sake, retain a childlike sense of wonder, observe, start with the details, see things unseen, go down rabbit holes, get distracted, respect facts, procrastinate, let the perfect be the enemy of the good, think visually, avoid silos, let your reach exceed your grasp, indulge fantasy, create for yourself not just for patrons, collaborate, make lists, take notes on paper and be open to mystery.
Other articles in the book provided evidence of our potential to create the unimaginable and highlighted additional elements that ignite and foster creativity. Things like, how important sleep is to creativity, how important collaborative spaces are and pushing our preconceived boundaries to name just a few. I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic to get a copy of this special edition.
The final chapter concluded with the fact that creativity is abundant and thriving at any age. What intrigued me most was the fallacy that as we age we become less creative. Nothing could be further from the truth. The shift as you age is that you become more confident in taking actions on ideas, you’re able to connect dots from a more robust amalgamation of experiences. This all boils down to enhanced wisdom which enables aging humans to make more informed creative decisions.
To pull all this together…if humans are born with an “enduring passion for novelty”, that each and every one of us “has this incredible capacity to imagine and to change things”, coupled with our ability to connect the dots from an amalgamation of a lifetime of experiences, then why would it be unfathomable that the creators of automation and artificial intelligence wouldn’t be able to adapt to the world of change upon us and evolve and partner with our own creations that are being described as humanity’s demise?
A couple reasons are that throughout our lifetime we generally become more risk averse and our institutions encourage us into siloed functional expertise from early education to advanced academia and ultimately throughout our careers. We are discouraged to think outside of our domain and/or explicit duties. We are discouraged from our innate playfulness to imagine the futures we dream of and desire to create for ourselves and the people around us. Essentially, we slowly deprioritize the creative abilities we are born with.
In part 1 of these thought leadership articles, I proposed that we mere humans are uniquely positioned for the hybrid thinking that will be necessary to stave job disruption from the proliferation of automation and artificial intelligence. Well, we are!
We are literally born with half the equation: creativity (born with soft skills) + deep functional expertise (continuously learned/adapted hard skills) = hybrid thinking (job requirements of the present/future).
Now this isn’t an exact science (haha) and there are a lot of other variables at play here for continued success in careers, but connecting the dots through these articles was enlightening for me. I hope you enjoyed the read and at minimum challenged you to think about the impact that automation and artificial intelligence will have on your job and maybe a couple things you could do about it.
