Mary Panttaja

The Idea of Net Potential

We are all trying to create things—lives, families, product, projects, businesses, communities. We are trying to create a future in which our creations are part and parcel of our lives, and perhaps the lives of many others. This seems to be our role in the evolution of the cosmos—to create what inspires us. Our ability to create is measured by how all our activities and beliefs net out—productive actions minus non-productive actions. Our results are the “net” of what we do. (Along with everything else that’s going on.) So the more aligned or coherent we are in what we do (assuming we find the right trajectory) the more “net” positive motion we can cause. So we can see that sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we do the wrong thing. And sometimes our beliefs can conflict so we don’t really know we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to get it right even for ourselves and our private goals.

But when you build an organization (family, community, business) you have to coordinate the net positive potential of everyone. Everyone has to be working toward the same goal (we call that taking aim on a trajectory.) And then the hard part, everyone needs to execute productive actions—do the right thing. And there are so many more ways now that things can go awry. The further the group expands beyond the truly inspired, the more dilute becomes the net potential. Sometimes adding a body is a net negative, not even a small net positive.

Of course, we all know this. We can see that the complexities of size in organizations is a cost. But what we sometimes don’t appreciate (and totally forgot in the year 1999) was the possibility of size producing nothing but a negative to the potential of an organization. Suddenly we spend more time on the support structures than on the creative work; more time organizing ourselves than inspiring our customers and partners. More is often less. And usually the inspired ones are distracted from their efforts by the need to support the organization.

So what does this have to do with technology and smaller companies?

In any organization you need the key inspired folks who create the product. They have the idea, understand their customer, and have the passion to make something happen. Then, it seems, you need a lot of support (management, marketing, sales, system admin, office management, etc.) Any of these roles can be fulfilled by inspired partners—but as the numbers get bigger the likelihood is that some people you hire will not come the table with the passion and engagement that the key players embody. They will be playing at another level. These folks dilute the potential of an organization. And they can be anywhere in an organization.

(There is nothing wrong with these players. I have found myself to be one when I got into an organization that had a great deal of passion for something that I didn’t share. I wasn’t a bad person and on paper I looked useful, but I had gotten in over my head with respect to my ability to really commit myself to their passion. After struggling for awhile, I figured out that I should just leave. I was a net negative to their ability to maximize their potential. I wasn’t really helping (even though I did useful things) and I wasn’t having fun either. Both good measures of whether you should be doing any particular thing.)

Modern technology enables the source, the people who are the inspired participants, to deliver their wares/message/media to their audience with a lot less support from those who might be diluting the potential. So what goes wrong? That is, how is the potential of a company diluted when it requires “bodies”, people that “have jobs” in support of the creative effort?

(Now don’t get me wrong, anyone in any role can be a source of additive potential. It’s not the role that causes net negative, it’s the level of engagement. The janitor, the marketing support team, and the system administrators can be incredible contributors to the potential of an organization. The scariest thing is to have anyone in the leadership of an organization not be an inspired, engaged participant—a net add. As an organization grows, the difficulty in managing net potential grows more quickly.)

Think about dancing. If you are dancing by yourself, and your potential is how much creative enjoyment you get, you see that you are in control of what you get out of your effort. (Any activity you love will do if dancing isn’t your thing.) But if I match you up with a partner (let’s say a friend), then the enjoyment you can extract is complicated by your need to work/understand/communication with one other. Now the possible potential, should things work out really well, is higher. But getting the necessary coordination together makes it more difficult to realize.

So imagine that I pair you with a random person. Or four random persons. How hard will it be to extract the same quality of enjoyment or quality of work, and how long will it take you to get to a level that supersedes what you could generate by yourself?

The truth is that if we very carefully choose partners who are as inspired as we are, our potential can grow exponentially. But as an organization gets larger, and we’re probably not talking about dozens of people, then the likelihood is that self-selection or hiring-selection is moving more towards being random than it is to capturing people who are truly inspired. (You can hope that they will become inspired—but they might just want the job.) And, of course, they not all uninspired, but geometrically increasing creative potential requires that the team be really focused on the same value proposition. If they are going even slightly different directions or using slightly different trajectories (in the terminology of Catching the Updraft!), then the potential does not increase, but can actually be degrading all the time. We’ve all seen this happen.

And why do I care? Well, I’m working on what happens next and I’d love to find or figure out what combination of people, technology, and business models can fuel my inspirations. I think its different than it was twenty years ago when I started my first company and I don’t want to use any old assumptions in this very different environment.

Tomorrow:
Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

A Thought Meander on New Business Model Opportunities

I have spent the last few months studying new business models, new technology, what’s happening, who’s happening. There seems to be a lot of turmoil, a lot of thrash and crash, and also a lot of steady business and technology development.

As someone who is in the midst, as always, of figuring out what wants to happen next in my life, I look on curiously to see what can apply to my situation. What can I leverage? Where can I contribute?

In my previous business endeavors, I essentially used one key skill to build a career and a company. I could learn new technologies fairly quickly and see how to leverage them in a structured fashion. My husband and I built our first consulting company by always being the earliest adopter on the block—after carefully picking the right adoptee. It was the only way a small consulting company could stay ahead of the Andersons, as it were.

So now I’m looking at what’s happening with an eye to see if there is any place for me in this dynamically changing environment, and if so, what would the opportunity look like?

One thing I see is that the new wave of extraordinary technological capabilities has enabled some incredible ideas to come to fruition. Some of them are potent, and some of them are, well, a little dorky. (There are many directions to go with these observations, many of which have been covered. Read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for one discussion of why technology has made the world a new place. Read Tim O’Reilly and his gang, who write on many of these opportunities.)

What’s new? Well,

• Tools are better and enable you to design and build anything more quickly.
  We have a world-wide delivery system. And it’s instant for digital products, like music, books, software.
• We have a world-communication system. You can have a conference call with any group of people distributed almost anywhere in the world.
• We have a world marketing platform that enables you to talk with your customers all day long from your bedroom.
• This is not to mention the very new things that you can build with the current technologies.

The major point for me is that suddenly you can do more with much, much less that was ever possible. And that turns out to be critical for maximizing the potential of a young organization.

(Remember the heady days at the end of the century when HR was hiring so many people per day that it was frightening? Turns out we were right to be very afraid.)

More (with less) tomorrow.

In 2001, for various reasons, some personal and some business, all of my ongoing plans and activities were interrupted, seemingly all at once: a business evaporated, a family member died, a baby was born. This is not to say that life all fell apart for me. It did not, for my immediate family was fine and healthy, my home still stood, my health and capacity to work remained. But the things that were driving my activities all fell away and it became clear that I was going to need to make new choices.

At a moment like this, it is very easy to reach out and grab one of our habitual responses—and sometimes that is helpful. But sometimes, if one can surrender to the stillness, manage to be unreactive and feel the flow of life’s direction, such a moment can allow us to align with a truer direction.

In this time of disruption, threads began to come to me. In the joy and exhaustion of the new life of my niece, a children’s illustrated book came into being along with drawings, paintings, and illustrations. In a slow meander and pilgramage to the arctic in our truck, the work on the creative process began to speak to me and flow daily onto pages in my notebook. And one night, laughing at the possibilities of making a living with children’s books or creative philosophy, to the cosmos I posed the question of how I was to pay the bills.

I awoke in the morning from a lucid dream, a very, very rare occurance in my life. The dream was a vision of the opening scene of a story, a movie really, rich and detailed, a profound situation, emotionally taut. I did not remember having such a vision before and spent an hour writing it all down as best I could. And this turned out to be the thread that became the novel. And this stream of potential, this gift of a story, has never abated. It is still there and as I work its weft and weave, it continues to flow.

Writing fiction was never, ever a dream of mine. It was never an idea that came into my head. But this story is an updraft for me, an original source. And part of my confidence in it is its ongoing resourcefulness, the depth to which I can plumb it. Notice, that I do not believe that I make any of it up, but that it is present and I am able to pull it in. That is the best way I can describe my relationship to it.

And so, I can find the precise moment when this updraft came into my consciousness, when everything aligned and I was still enough to see life present it to me, when I was open to new possibilities, even, I would say, searching for my path, but without any particular ideas of what it would be.

And this is not to say that this book is necessarily good, or that it will be successful (though those things are possible in the future). In the arising world there are creative endeavors to be engaged in and learned from regardless of any measure of success that we might have for them. Businesses that falter, writers who still need to grow, philosophies that never quite take wing, these are the ways that the universe evolves. Capacity and skill are continuing to grow. One of the things we know from the creative philosophy is that concern for the state of the outcome is a disabling relationship to the creative process. The creative process must be free of constraints—including the one that says it must be successful. And, as it turns out, that is the best way to improve the odds of being sucessful in the creative process. If you know the result, then you are not creating anything new.

So sometimes we meditate ourselves into an internal quiet; or come to a moment when we struggle to pay attention; or sometimes life crushes our busy-ness into stillness. However we get there, in that momentary reprieve from doingness, sometimes we catch an updraft.

(Continued)

Stillness is not something we experience very often. It is hard to come by.

In fact, the opposite is more likely. Momentum, the strong tendency to stay in motion, predominates most of our lives. (And we are not talking about jogging here, we’re talking about compelling doingness, ongoing activity, mental striving.) Momentum is defined as “the impetus and driving force gained by the development of a process or course of events.” What are our lives if not a continually evolving course of events? And each of those events tends to generate it’s own momentum.

Where does all this motion come from?

• Some of our ongoing actions are truely updrafts, us catching and participating in inspired action.
• Regularly, we start or commit to extended projects—like, say, we have children or an idea for an extended product development effort. Then the momentum of life and work becomes in many ways determined for quite some time, and while it starts as an updraft, habit can keep it moving even if the updraft changes.
• We create many “support” activities in our lives or businesses (cleaning house, keeping the lawn, financial accounting). Sometimes we let these activities take over much of our effort, and over time they can lose their meaning if they don’t relate to the support of an updraft, the support of some inspired activity. Then they just become busy work, sapping our potential.
• Often, instead of catching our updraft, we adopt a goal from someone else. “That looks nice/profitable/doable.” And while, sometimes that puts us on our own path, sometimes it has nothing to do with who we are, and so, for us, there will be no updraft in it and therefore much more effort, though the other guy/company may have really had an updraft.

And I can see that all of these things have played out in my life, some more than others. I particularly fell for trying to do what others were doing because they were having some success—and surely I could do what they were doing. But it wasn’t my updraft and it was a struggle all the way. And I find it easy to get distracted by “life” stuff—fixing the house, keeping the garden, cooking the meals—and while they are an important part of life, it’s easy to let them take over. (A form of keeping up with the Joneses.) (Now sometimes these things are someone’s updraft, and sometimes they are not. Learning to know the difference is important. And difficult.)

An Illustration of the Metaphor

In the spring in northen California, the raptors, red tail hawks particularly, have a beautiful dance they do in the skies above us. They spend hours catching updrafts in the bright sun, partners looping around each other, following, spinning. They are experts at the subtle process of staying in the middle of an updraft. If the red tail hawk set his wings a certain way, deciding in advance what he should do, how he should “act”, what his “action plan” would be, he would glide out of the center of the updraft and lose it. And from there on he would have extra work to do to move upward—he would not be gliding but fighting to create upward movement. But, with a high degree of sensitivity and subtle engagement with the air current, he maximizes his potential in the updraft and soars thousands of feet into the atmosphere.

And this subtle sensitivity is why an internal state of stillness is so valuable.

Updrafts can be roaring storms and when they are, it’s not hard to get into middle of that motion. In fact, it would be hard to resist. But updrafts are equally likely, maybe more likely, to be small shifts in the current. These are easy to miss. And if you miss them, in a short time, you can be way off base. And over time, you can find yourself adrift—without inspiration or meaning, or understanding how you (or you company) got lost.

(to be continued)

(This will be a series of posts.)

This week I am delivering the third major draft of my novel, Illumine, to my readers. This happens about once a year, hopefully not indefinitely. It’s is a moment when the work of that project glides into a slow drift in the current.

The metaphor I am using for the creative process, catching the updraft, is something that I have experienced more fully with this project as my philosophical understanding of the process has been evolving in parallel to the novel work itself. Both projects have been arising together. So one of my threads in this blog is to write about my own experience.

I have talked to many friends in the last few months mentioning my work, and my enthusiasm for it. I usually use a phrase like “my work is really demanding more of my time.” “I have so much that is compelling my attention.” And they can see that the work is a passion for me that pulls me along, or, we should say, I am caught in the updraft. I have seen a pensive look in their eye, and they explain that they would like to find that passion for something. But they are not sure what it is, and they are not sure how they find it for themselves. And, though I have caught the updraft of many projects, few have been as challenging and long-lived as this one. And I can point to the precise moment that the updraft came into my life. The nature of that moment illustrates one of the important parts of catching any updraft, of finding the source of your creative passion.

Stillness

In the story of Illumine, the character George writes this passage in his journal:

“How does one find the dead point? No, the still point of surrender where one’s path arises into the light before you? And you are quiet enough to be in that moment and see the universe present it to you.

How you come to be still is a matter for the gods or your own will. You can push and prod yourself into stillness or you might land there inadvertently or the world might crush you into it.”

In 2001, all of my plans for the future came to a blinding halt—everything ran out of momentum, all the updraft and self-induce momentum fell away. In this case, events in my life came together to create a vast stillness, a profound lack of movement. And in this stillness lies the secret to finding an updraft—to being quiet enough to sense it coming through.

I will continue the story in the next post.

I started reading “Nonzero” by Robert Wright last night. I had picked it up as interesting in my research at one point—but last evening it was finally begun.

Right off I was struck that his analysis is very meaningful to my theories of creative engagement and innovation. (Of course, this is always a potential trap!) His basic thesis is that life with all its creative evolution is a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum-game is one in which everything of value goes to one player or the other—there is a winner or loser and the stuff of value is split between them. What one gets the other does not.

But Wright contends that life in the big picture is not a zero-sum game but non-zero-sum game. That is, in its ability to create, evolve, and innovate, life creates situations where every participant can win, where each “game” can improve the life situation of all the players. Not that it always works this way—there is not a guaranteed outcome—but if it did not work this way in general, how do we find ourselves in a world with such vast creative results, high complexity and diversity, and successful innovation?

Then this morning I used a visual search engine recommended by Michael Arrington in Techcrunch (Quintura Visual Search Engine Relaunches) to seach the term “creativity” for work related to “Catching the Updraft!.” I was immediately stuck by the usefulness of the Quintura approach, using a tag cloud to present and help you navigate the data. I have a strong bent towards visual representations. It was immediately intriguing and productive.

In the tag cloud, I found an interesting site from David Weeks, a creativity expert in the UK, Creativity and Innovation in Business. He has a cartoon series called “D and his thinking heads”. It in he discusses the difference between the “logical” brain and the “creative” brain.

I immediate saw a connection that may help me evolve my explanations about what is working when “creativity” is flourishing and when it doesn’t. Perhaps the “logical” brain is always (or often) playing a zero-sum game, where the “creative” brain is based, like the evolutionary process itself, in a non-zero-sum game. Both potentially useful for their own purposes—-but exactly that—not general purpose or all-purpose brains.

In our methodology we use something we call modes—which are different styles of operation or engagement with the process—embodying different relationships to the creative process. With this new metaphor I can see that some of them are more intentionally non-zero-sum based, working to make non-zero-sum assumptions about the world.

So, as usual, things are flowing that make more things flow—definitely a non-zero-sum morning.

Catching the Updraft—what is this about?

(Note that I’m trying to catch up each of the threads of my weft as I get started.)

One of the major threads that has been compelling me in the last few years, is the desire to come to some understanding of how and why the world? How and why humans? How and why companies? Through a great deal of study, research, meditation, and collective thinking, a group of us has evolve an understanding that satisfies us.

One of our realizations is that for people who are driven to ask such questions, a general answer won’t do. Such people have to find their own answer, even if it evolves from the study of others. (Which, for most us, it must.) In any case, it becomes necessary to delve into all the dark corners until one finds an understanding that works for your sensibilities. I and a few cohorts have spent some time driving that dark terrain and have a model that we use to explain, illuminate, and practice how to participate most effectively in the world.

What’s a model? It’s a way of thinking about things which we acknowledge is not the thing itself, but allows us to work with and predict the thing. For example, we (most of us anyway) don’t know what gravity is, but we have practical and mathematical models of how it works that we can use to predict how things will go. So it is with our model, which we call “The Arising World.”

Today I will not go into the details of the model, though you can get a sense of it on my older site which is called E-4. It describes a practical model of creativity and innovation that can be leveraged in all our activities. I will be rewriting, in this or another blog, the story of this practical philosophy of action and creativity. I am calling it “Catching the Updraft”, and it will be arriving at a website and blog shortly—or perhaps at a theatre near you!

The key, as always, is the entrance. What is the first thing people want to hear? What are the most important points? As in marketing, where you need to lead with the customer’s interests and not the product designer’s proud creations, it is critical to identify the real value propositions.

I think the real value for most people is guidance on how to act, what to do. But without a deeper understanding of where the guidance comes from, what it means, it becomes hollow and simplistic. So a balance is required: this is what is true and this is what you do about it.

The first principles are:
1) Everyone is the potential for something unique and important to arise into the world. Actually, this is true for everything. The world is the sum of all its distinct parts living their unique lives. (Later we can get into the fact that they “are” the potential, they don’t “have” the potential.)
2) If we can align ourselves with our own potential, we can have the most extraordinary and meaningful life that we can imagine. We can fulfill the purpose of our potential in the world. And if we are aligned, we will find it gloriously satisfying.
3) There are ways to find and align ourselves with our potential—the practical part.

So this is true for everything: people, families, organizations, corporations, communities. We need to answer the key question of “who am I” with a statement, not of static identity, but of a dynamic potential waiting in the wings to be realized. Mozart was his music coming into the world—he was the vehicle through which it became reality. That brilliant teacher that inspired you so, was there just to be that inspiration. Everyone has a potential to be realized.

So, in the model, your potential is arising into being along with the rest of the world—the arising world model. And, as we tell the story, it creates an updraft. You can catch the updraft and go along for the ride, freely participating in the creation, or you can miss/resist/impede the updraft and get bumped along. “Catching the updraft” is the practice of getting into the middle of your potential and riding it for all it’s worth.

And this can work for an individual’s life, an artist’s work, a company’s evolution, a project’s life cycle. All the same arising into being—just more complex alignment challenges, more challenging and intricate potentials coming into being, more difficulties identifying what the potential really is. But we are evolving a documented process that we can use to embed this thinking into our everyday actions—with diagrams and everything. So it’s a practical approach.

The beginnings of the Catching the Updraft site and blog are in the works and should be available next week some time. (I mistyped it as “Catching the Updaft!”—isn’t that interesting?)

What is your biggest question about your life or work: “How do I figure out what I should be doing?” or “How to I make what I’m doing more effective?”