Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Do we think better when we set aside time for it?

Ellis Booker, a friend and former colleague, blogged in the affirmative, saying Take the time to let big ideas grow.

In his post, he described an unexpected five-hour layover at LaGuardia Airport, which he spent disconnected. “…[U]ninterrupted blocks of time… are the gardens where big ideas, imaginative, even playful what-ifs grow and then flower into innovative new products, services, organizations and business models.”

He used his time to make a list of ideas, though unfortunately the one he shared was to book a scuba diving trip.

His post sent me off to my pile of business books. I pulled out Think Better,, a book published earlier this year by the consultant Tim Hurson.

Alas, Hurson does not explicitly address how much time one should set aside for just thinking (it’s probably unknowable but unlikely that five hours at LaGuardia works as well as Bill Gates’ fabled Think Weeks), but he does walk through his system for thinking more effectively, which does demand some time. In my friend’s favor is list-making. In the book, Hurson calls list-making an important tool in coming up with ideas, and in particular if you use a “Wind Tunnel” process, a period of time dedicated to just making lists of ideas (Hurson suggests coming up with 50 ideas or spend five minutes). The first third will be conventional, he says, but by the last third, there may well be gems that go in a new direction.

I like this quote from the book, too:

“It probably seems as though you’re thinking all the time, but like the rest of your body, your brain uses a variety of strategies and tricks to minimize the energy it requires. And its most effective strategy for conversing brain energy is actually not to think at all. In fact, most of the time your brain is involved in just one of three activities: distraction, reaction or following well-worn patterns.” [italics mine]

Hurson has devised a model to actually help you think. It takes him 250 pages to explain it and show how it can be applied, so I’m not going to condense it here, other than to say that I liked his structuring of ideas into reproductive (similar to current things) and productive (going in new directions), and shows examples of both types of thinking and how they apply to businesses. If your business needs new ideas, and is struggling to come up with them, his Productive Thinking model rates a look.

Maybe on the Internet we don’t die. We just become static. I say this because Classmates.com has as one of my featured members an old high school friend who passed away earlier this year.

I can see that his interests were walking and golf, and he had two children. Classmates is encouraging me to ask my old friend to be one of my online friends. I want to say to Classmates, ‘he’s dead.’ It wants me to ask him to post a photo. I want to say to Classmates, ‘he’s dead.’ It reminds me that as a Gold member, I have everything I need to reconnect with my friend. There would be a nice trick. A little online seance action. It points me to my friend’s story, only there isn’t one there, and he won’t be adding one. Maybe I’d better hurry and add mine.

Classmates isn’t the only site on the Web that has immortalized him in some small way. Several sites list his name and work address — he was a recruiter. Oddly, I can’t find his obituary.

The Web really can make us immortal.

I went to the Wayback Machine today to dredge up some things I’d published but were no longer available online. The Wayback machine went one for two, and I was happy for the one. But it was a reminder of the digital world’s impermanence — these were published less than four years ago. I read Nick Carr’s excellent book “The Big Switch,” and in it he posits that cloud computing will lead to a giant World Wide Computer, and it will be so fast and so “smart” — so good at searching — that we will link our brains to it and become part of it and probably subsumed by it, an oddly eusocial vision of the future of humans. [see my assessment of what it means for business here: Are You Ready for the Big Switch?]

Even if he’s right, there will still be a problem: people die, and so do sites, and someone has to pay to keep them registered. Thus even in a world with free storage, there will be bureaucratic hangups — the tyranny of forms needed to show that a human has not gone offline. So my little episode with the Wayback Machine stands as a precursor to Internet Alzheimers, otherwise known as the 404 File Not Found syndrome.

And if I’m wrong, I harbor no illusions that this post will still be around 40 years from now for people to ridicule.