Mapping Inspiration
Tom Haymes
Learning and Innovation Consultant at IDEASPACES, Author of Learn at Your Own Risk (ATBOSH, 2020), and Discovering Digital Humanity (ATBOSH, 2022)
Knowing how ideas gestate is essential for understanding how to generate new ones. This is one of the key points Vannevar Bush makes in “As We May Think.†Creative journeys have always fascinated me. I think this is because I’m trying to understand my own creative process.
When we face mystery, a good instinct is to map our way out of our confusion. From time to time, I have attempted to do that, but it’s difficult and time consuming. That’s why I want to create a dynamic AI-driven mapping tool.
Every writer, musician, visual artist, and creative suffers through the same anguish of precognition. We are charting new territories. However, understanding how to set sail and what direction to take often comes with days, weeks, months, or even years of anguish.
Once we create an article, book, photograph, painting, or business, we ask ourselves why we put ourselves through the agony of uncertainty. Was this agony necessary? Is it an essential part of the creative process?
This is where the rational side of my brain takes over and I want to take apart how I got to where I was at the end of the process. One of the first things I intend to do with the IdeaSpaces mapping tool is to feed my own books and articles into it to see what associations they spin up.
I do this with blogs when I feed them into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize them for me. This puts me outside of the work looking in. Shifting perspective is a powerful tool for analyzing how I got to final product.
We can map any process. If we understand mental pathways, we can build a roadmap to understanding our next steps. In short, it teaches you how to learn.
If you’re building a company, the next steps are always mysterious and unsettling. Sure, there are plenty of books out there that offer generic process maps. They have some interesting insights, but they’re not you.
You can get as much of a creative block reading something that says you need to do this, and then not understanding why you need to do it. Your reality is going to differ from the one described in the book.
Understanding where you came from and connecting that with those bits of relevant reality that informed your journey is a much more customized and useful way of growing forward. Keeping a running map of where you’ve been takes some of the mystery and pain out of making decisions that seem very difficult in foresight, but so obvious in hindsight.
This is true whether you’re growing a small company based on your own ideas and struggling through your own creative process, or whether you’re working with a team and trying to synthesize multiple creative processes. If anything, it becomes even more important when you’re trying to align everyone’s pathway to the future.
Instead of mission statements and other attempts to align a company with a singular vision, you can map synthesized visions that take the best from everyone on the team. Having a tool to map collective journeys can create futures that no one person could imagine alone.
The industrial era plugged people into factories and offices designed to realize the vision of a tiny elite. The digital era undermines that hierarchy and the opportunity to maximize the human potential in any organization.
We need the right tools to achieve this goal. Text is hierarchical because writing and communicating via text favors those who control the narrative. Much of business thinking and writing over the last 50 years has been about aligning a company around a singular narrative.
Even Wikipedia, one of the most collaborative digital tools, often devolves into fights over what is canon. This is because it is still a text-based tool, however innovative and transformative it may be.
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Organizations focusing on aligning narratives made sense when the best tools they had were linear. Singular goals gave companies a competitive advantage in a text-based world. However, those goals were often inflexible. This brought with it its own problems.
Clayton Christensen’s classic The Innovator’s Dilemma cites this very problem. Companies, however, often struggle to carry out its nimble and disruptive precepts. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty of aligning a singular narrative with the agile requirements of running a firm in a disruptive technological environment.
When you write, you freeze. Those ideas become canon, and the most efficient path is for the rest of the team to align themselves with that canon.
If you have an interactive map that shows where you come from that provides a grounding, it can substitute for canon. The future can be left fluid as the company evolves through the collective efforts of its creative teams. This is far more antifragile because it allows for the rapid pivoting of ideas and leverages the creative talent of the entire organization.
We need better tools for the digital era. These tools need to leverage the iterative nature of digital technology to create whole new ways of thinking about problems and designing for them instead of reacting to them.
If you want to skate to the puck, you’re going to need a dynamic mapping solution. The future is unknowable, but you can map your way to the unknown.
One of my least favorite terms as a manager has always been “best practices.“ Why do I hate this? If you think about it, best practices are just an excuse to follow someone else to an average.
Best practices are not an invitation to explore unfamiliar creative territory. Creative people in organizations don’t follow best practices. They create their own. Steve Jobs didn’t follow best practices when he created the iPhone.
There is a difference between being inspired and copying. Text pushes you toward copying because of its structured narrative. A linear pathway favors worn paths.
Inspiration, however, requires a far more fluid and amorphous process than following a checklist manual. The reason we don’t do this is because we lack the tools to do it dynamically.
We’ve approached this challenge through brainstorming, mind-mapping, and concept mapping. However, these are difficult to execute technically if you want to engage with them iteratively.?
Collaborative concept mapping like Miro gets you one step down the path, but even there it takes a lot of skill. Ideas are often far more difficult to herd than cats.
Automation of this part of the process is the key to changing how we approach inspiration and ideas, both as organizations and as individuals. Maps can tell us where we have been and what remains to be explored.
Understanding where we’ve been, and where this compels us to go, is a fluid process. Creative approaches to wicked problems require us to shift thinking dynamically. We can’t do that if we can’t see where we’ve been.