Innovative Concepts

Gaudi and Güell

If you have had the fortune of visiting Barcelona, Spain you have witnessed the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.  His design adorns a collection of residences, churches, and urban infrastructure in many neighborhoods within the city.  His most significant benefactor was Eusebi Güell.  Güell was the visionary who saw Gaudi’s talent and was willing to invest in his unique approach. Güell commissioned him to design Palau Güell, the family’s personal residence and then move Gaudi onto even larger scale ambitions including Park Güell, a planned community complete with market, gathering places, and a design impregnated with nature’s influence.

My wife remarked to me that she did not know if Gaudi needed Güell more for his career or if Güell an already prominent business man received more from Gaudi.  I think they needed each other.  Where Güell saw the vision and reward of investing in grand and revolutionary projects, Gaudi focused on the details of inspiring the physical form and design necessary to transform each project into a remarkable structure.  

The Gaudi and Güell partnership was prolific for what it accomplished in design and intellect.  Even when the vision proved too unconventional for the time, today they have become wildly popular destinations.  Güell’s wife moved the family out of Palau Güell within months of its completion and Park Güell never received enough interest to become the anticipated community of homes leaving it touched only by Gaudi’s initial contributions and nature.

Partnerships are essential for success.  Going it alone rarely yields the impact of a dedicated team.  Having a person who asks “why” is equally important as the individual who thinks about “how”.  Who looks towards the horizon and who keeps their focus inwards within your enterprise?  Knowing the value of the why/how partnership can ensure powerful results.

Rescue

Are we more likely to stretch for a significant accomplishment if a contingency plan exists?  Boarding a flight destine to foreign locale, lacing up hiking boots at an empty trailhead, launching a new initiative generates fear.  If reaching the other side is the only option then understanding the options for rescue influence the decision-making.  If we are willing to make forward progress and evaluate as you go along, establishing safety guidelines may be the course of action.  A thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail does not commence the journey without planning stops for re-rations and contingency plans.  They set-off with clarity about the final destination but focused daily on the section of trail in front of them.  It does them no good to dedicate emergency plans to Maine when they start in Georgia.  Knowing where and how to provide contingency plans leverages fear and the unknown.  Fear and safety are co-conspirators.  Understanding how they work allows us to take on remarkable opportunities without being completely cut-off from a contingency plan.


Image Credits:
Appalachian Trail Map

New Plan, Same Destination

“A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll…it’ll point you True North from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing True North?”            

Abraham Lincoln Movie

After an high cadence evening exploring canals and bridges in Venice, I returned to the Venezia Santa Lucia train station for the homeward portion of my ticket to Castelfranco, the town from which I had launched a late afternoon expedition.  I walked to the track assigned on the destination board.  No train appeared.  I rechecked the departure listings and cross-referenced a paper schedule.  No worries, another train was slated to depart an hour later if I missed this one.  I began to feel uneasy.  The only trains in the station were clearly equipped for overnight transit and local departures seemed absent from the side tracks.  I triple confirmed the train scheduled but upon this examination I decoded my error, I had been reading the arrivals information.  The last train of the night destine for the Veneto left an hour ago.  I regrouped.  Seeing buses queued up at the transportation center I inquired about bus transit to Castelfranco.  No buses departed for the town.  My next available option was to inquiry at a local hotel but without my passport I was uneasy that a hotel would provide a room without appropriate documents (a prerequisite in Italy).  The last reasonable option (outside of swimming) was to inquire about a taxi.  None were immediately found at the taxi line however one eventually appeared.  The driver and I spoke and the initial estimate was far higher than I desired but without traffic there would be no delay and possible efficiencies to gain.  I determined this choice was most certain to deliver me to my hotel.  So we crossed the causeway back onto the mainland and arrived at the hotel around midnight.  More euros invested than anticipated but the afternoon had the hallmarks of adventure.  I reached my intended destination but taken a deviation from the anticipated route.  

Affixing our sights on a destination sets the compass.  Allowing flexibility to select a route is the art of navigating when the path is not certain and the destination is known but no longer visible.

Remarkable

Somedays the weather does not cooperate and the itinerary appears lost.  You may choose to move forward as planned in anticipation of adventure.  The moment expectations and preconceived ideas are abandoned we encounter the serendipity of inspirational moments.  Life unfolds around every corner and each meter forward is an achievement, building an always expanding definition of success.  When we obsess the summit we miss the endless transformations that take place on the way towards the top.  Remarkable is not what we achieve but instead how we journey forward.

Monte Grappa, Italia

No Instructions = Innovation


What assumptions curtail innovation?  What folklore and fear have we adopted as dogma?  One Laptop Per Child tried a new approach.

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

What if you assembled your ultimate fans and request they craft an initiative for your enterprise?   Unhindered by the narrative of past projects and debate, what would they design?  How would a fresh perspective allow innovation?

Simplifying Complexity
A remarkable detail about the construction of the Sydney Opera House is that once the architectural design of Jorn Utzon was selected (a worthy story in itself), no engineering plans existed to erect the famous structure.  The project ran over-budget, behind schedule, and without certainty that the design could be achieved. It took a paradigm shift in thinking to realize a solution that allowed for the iconic design to take its intended form.  Constructing the geometric shapes in isolation had proved overwhelming but when placed into a larger context, the structure could be realized.  Using a ball as a model, the individual sections could be carved out and placed.  

Too often we ignore our fundamental purpose.  We tackle the immediate without relying our wisdom to see the whole.  The solution to complex problems is not always to create more complexity.