Thriving In Tomorrow’s Economy Today.
Data overload & the case for creativity.
Jordan Delapoer
Partner & Director, Brand Strategy
NORTH
I know what you’re thinking.
Another article threatening you with how Big Data is driving the future of business and marketing. More hyperbole about the tech revolution and your brand’s irrelevance for not Snapchatting about the Pins that Tumbl’d across YouFace this morning.
Well, this post isn’t about that. Not exactly. This is about our shifting U.S. and Global economies and whether we’re ready to thrive within it.
It’s not news that as industry, technology, and consumer demand evolve, so does the basis of our economy. In the Depression-era 1930s we saw a transition from a principally agricultural economy to a manufacturing or industrial economy. In the first decade of the new Millennium we may not have fully shifted economies, but we certainly saw our manufacturing economy make room for the new information economy, or Information Age — one made possible by the internet and advances in personal technology. An era where we began to worship at the church of Big Data and it’s supposed ability to predict the future.
Thing is, everybody can access the data. And frankly, there’s more of it than any of us know what to do with. In an era of unfettered access to a seemingly infinite supply of data, the very information of the Information Age can be paralyzing. Instead of guiding decisions, the volume of data often encumbers and confuses. It’s taught us not to trust our instincts and our own experiences. And it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nicholas Carr explains this in a simple metaphor in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. He likens short-term memory or working memory to a thimble and long-term memory to a bathtub. Information, water in this case, fills our little thimble at a drip and is poured into the bathtub for long-term storage, or soaking as it were. Thing is, with the onslaught of information of the past decade and a half, the faucet has been turned up, but our thimbles haven’t gotten any bigger. Our poor little thimbles overflow, haphazardly spilling into the bathtub. Sometimes they miss the tub altogether. As a result, we’re unable to retain information or to draw connections between new information and what’s already stored in long-term memory. We’re left less empowered to trust our own minds and are forced to further rely on the cascading waterfall of information. In many ways, the Information Age has forced us to begin outsourceing memory and complex thought.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying data isn’t useful. Quite the contrary — it’s still the foundation for just about everything we do and every decision we make; it’s critical to success in today’s business world. But that success doesn’t lie in the volume of data; it lies in how it’s used. In an era where in just two clicks anybody can learn both the history of the assembly line and manufacture 3D models in their own living rooms, the future will be written not by those who lord over their infinite data supply. Our future is in thoughtfully and selectively editing the information we draw upon. It’s in creating complex and counterintuitive connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information to shine a light on new ideas and possibilities. In other words, Creativity.
Edward deBono, the inventor of “Lateral Thinking” puts it this way, “The excellent and much acclaimed Information Age is over. We are now moving into the ‘idea age’ or ‘concept age.’ Concepts are the ‘genes’ of ideas. There was a time when information was the bottleneck. No more. We can get all the information we need. The new bottleneck is ‘thinking’ and creative thinking in particular. The analysis of information does not yield new ideas because the brain can only see what it is prepared to see… so you have to be able to create the idea first as a possibility.”
According to Japan’s Nomura Institute, “Creativity will be the next economic activity, replacing the current focus on information… Thus, just as the industrial revolution replaced agriculture as the dominant economic activity, creativity will replace the ‘information age’ as the next dominant global economic focus.”
So why am I writing this? Mostly as a reminder to myself that — though the business and marketing worlds continue to evolve at a sometimes dizzying pace — smart, informed, and inventive creative thinking is still the best beacon to guide us through the storm. A creative mind, armed with thoughtfully selected data and information, can not only solve the most counfounding problems but can invent new and previously unimagined solutions.
Post Script: Shortly after writing this piece, I heard a brief and compelling story on NPR about the value of bringing artists into the tech community to invent new ways of using our advanced technical tools to conceive new and innovative ideas.
There’s a great quote at the end from John Seely Brown, the former Chief Scientist of Xerox Parc, that I think sums up the point elegantly.
“…Where the ability to imagine is the key challenge, because we have infinitely powerful tools to build whatever we imagine. As a result we’re limited by our imagination. Working with artists really opens our imagination.”
