When companies seek inspiration they often resort to the same strategy, seeking out exotic life forms and strange behaviors to inspire new ways of seeing their options. The glassed in research lens distorts and exaggerates little anomalies in the same way the fish tanks do. Managers and staff stare in wonder at apple (as they used to at GE, toyota, zara etc.) and how it has produced the latest sea change, as if by magic.
Quite often though I think they spend too much time looking at the fish and not enough time learning from the water or the tank. It's easy to forget how the laws of gravity are suspended, how depth and light change opportunities to hunt and harvest when you stand in front of a well lit slice of paradise. After all, products are only the archeological evidence of a corporate culture. What are the organizational patterns that would sustain your company in an exotic environment? and what are the patterns expressed by the exotic little pisceans that could actually be useful in the earth bound trudgery of your business?
Ray Kurzweil and his crew are actually thinking about the fish tank. In the work they have done around building the Singularity University, the focus is all about what kind of species we need to be when everything we think we know, changes. I wonder if it is just intellectual arrogance or survival fear that makes us hope that we can predict a post singularity future any better than we predicted the advent of the PC. The important thing though is that they are trying to sense the patterns of thought and new ideas that will become prevalent in our tech-symbiosis.
As I was walking through the aquarium I came across a boy with his ear tightly pressed against the glass, intensely listening to the water and the sound of the fish tank. I think he gets it.
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