Originally I thought I would keep this offline because it is far too long a comment, but what the heck, having written it, what’s the point of storing it in my own cerebral backyard, and since I want to become a more considerate and silent individual from here on in, why not finish with a really, really long rhetorical dump, the final mother load of my introspective online waxing and waning......Doug, I hold a natural respect for people like you. You did not come here with a textbook definition of innovation but demonstrated the confidence to play with the putty of your own thoughts; and in so doing if you happen to be right in what you say that is merely kudos, but if you are wrong, then you have given yourself a wonderful gift of self-organized learning. B.Herbig taught me this in her response a long time ago when she said “It is but here in this empty space where we welcome the friend that offers not advice but a peer into the element of tomorrow, as we should have seen, through the faith of our own eyes!”. “97% of people who think about innovation may never demonstrate it, because 97% of people also understand that the world is primarily, if not principally, driven by imitation. The 97% figure here is purely calculated on the basis that only 3% of people have been observed to set and apply personal goals. Imitation isn’t something we should devalue because it is so fundamental to the DNA of a tribal society (but IMHO it is not fundamental to the formation of a 21st Century one). Where I would differ in my present thinking than you is that innovation is best delivered as a process, and with any process it is important to separate the person from the process. Human beings for some unfathomable reason think they can have a relationship with a product. IMHO we cannot, for we can only have relationship with people and the closer we get to relationship, the greater the opportunity to renew genuine conceptual human relationship values such as family, neighborhood and village. One cannot have a relationship with a brand or distance learning, something that is an image we have conceived in our given minds, for so long as we view each other as brands, we carry out an intellectual trade with our respective images, but we do not have and cannot have a relationship with a brand, a relationship occurs when there is (in my view) no image or brand standing in between two people of good heart and sound mind. We can however turn image and ideas into innovations when we channel them through any given process. We can become process orientated people who begin to understand that a “natural” byproduct of process are results, and that is by and large when process serves to begin to produce “innovation”. Yet look at Wall Street, look at our incessant harping and focus on short-term measures and our need to count page views, as if a short-term result is of beneficial importance to the greater whole. They are not. What I want to make absolutely clear here is that the kind of people I admire are those, who like you, have the confidence to explore and have the maturity to understand that this exploration is conducted from the palette of their own life, where the art one produces is one’s own life responsibility. I refer to people like you Doug, as “New Voice”. People who however, usually mope online about signal-to-noise are what I refer to as the “Expert Voice”. When the “Expert Voice” lauds themselves online it makes me mostly nauseous, for I view that voices online differ fundamentally from voices offline, in one innovative regard. The “Expert Voice” may have taken 10 years to develop their voice, but the online world is made up of thousands of 10 minute voices, and just like the Long Tail, the compounding effect of those 10 minute voices across the web can serve to create a new personal dynamic, but that dynamic of learning is individual, a sum total one’s own horizontal exposure and personal learning. The risk of going horizontal is of course losing touch with ones own given goals or priorities and spreading oneself so thin that it is simply becomes a recipe to become plain crazy or at least bohemian or consumed and even being intellectually consumed alive by the tribe. The best place for the “Expert Voice” is IMHO in a public library or a safely harbored in a University Campus, or in specific blogs that channel an association of visible expertise.
What makes the online world attractive to the “Expert Voice” is the presence of its associated and “marketable” followership, lets call that the “Export Voice”. I obviously much prefer listening to the “Expert Voice” than the “Export Voice”, for the “Export Voice” are those who (unlike you) really have, as far I have so far seen, no real thoughts of their own, and they simply feel good about their life serving as conduits or door mats and passing rehearsed communication from one person to another. We actually celebrate this nonsense and even try to measure it in terms of recommendations, when we have never sat back and worked out from a learning perspective how imitative recommendations become, rather than the innovative DNA that we can turn recommendations into, as points of travel in our own learning pathway. The reality of the “Export Voice” as I have known it, is that it serves to slow me down – after all, what is stopping me from accessing and going too the root rather than take something on the basis of second hand information or even hearsay? Even with the “Expert Voice”, a quick skim in the bibliography or expert blogroll may (hopefully) take one back to an original source and if one has a remote inkling or innovative heartbeat within them; one can begin to or even learn to see the original magic that is wrapped up in the original or source voice. We accept this kind of social culture that propagates a dominant “master” voice because we have culturally and not naturally accepted the role of imitation. Humans therefore IMHO process information largely through imitation but those at the forefront of the Innovation Curve are more likely to become the early adopters, but that does not mean that we are personally innovative, but that innovation is and can become a managed process. The gap after that is a Cartesian Chasm (created by technology itself) rather than a Cartesian Split (created by a philosophers “expert voice”). So this is how I conceive Innovation and Imitation as “process orientated”. A “people version” of that is what I would refer to as Life and Mythology. The “Expert Voice” is no different to the “Export Voice” in that regard, both (again IMHO) are consumers of mythologies and it is when our mythologies become so hard-wired and “obvious”, that innovation comes to market that makes us see things differently. An “Expert Voice”, as I see it, calls the act of overcoming a mythology a “Scientific Breakthrough” or disproving a hypothesis (for a hypothesis I guess cannot be proven). For that is what innovation means personally to me, the moment when a theoretical idea has become a practical and useable idea that expresses itself in the marketplace as an act of entrepreneurial (and not necessarily scientific) breakthrough. While I have expressed online that my way forward in the future is to sit outside this online system and observe it offline (as a lurker), for me to benefit from this process, is observing people like you Doug, for that does perk my interest. I have little time for the Expert Voice online because I can equally stand on the shoulders of the great offline in my own private study chamber, and I have even less time for the Export Voice, because I don’t want to increase the fuel of image, illusion, mythology or personal brand. There are “Expert Voices” such as Krishnamurti, Cziksentimihaly, Deming, Drucker and even Brian Tracy that I admire, but too much of a good thing becomes exactly that, a rich edification into the endless and “Edwardian” obesity of intellect. That is why I personally find religion worthy of studying and dissecting, even if it means treading on “sacred cows”, because it gives me a clue as to why Science and Faith are still at odds with each other – and the reasoning is fairly simple, for in my view Doug, the gap occurs when people insist on propagating or centering their focus on an inherent mythology contained in both thought systems. Both faith and religion contain the power of “life” improvement. So just as “mythology” is different to “life”, so is “imitation” different from “innovation”. Innovation is a process, groups are people. I have two minor rules in this regard that serve to help me, the first as said above is to separate process from people but the second is far more riskier but contains the kernel of innovation itself, “trust the process”. Now I hope I can lurk in absolute and unadulterated peace, for my inspiration did not come form the hordes and rat packs and the idea ambulance chasers of the Export Voice, nor from the egotistical and warrior like arguments, positions and stance of the Expert Voice, it comes from an openness to observe “New Voice” and there are millions of “New Voices” out there. It is “WE THE LURKERS” (and even if there are 365 “New Voices” in the lurker community, and so all we actually need to hear in any given year on that score is simply ONE PER DAY of those “new voices”) and at that point, I can only talk from my own perspective or regard, is that it helps me to position my own minds for learning, because I am open to hearing from a different “New Voice” everyday. Thanks to you Doug I now feel cool or at least much better about drifting back into the great Lurking Ocean. I look forward to continue reading the thoughts of people like you in the future (So long as you are not another “Export Voice”) or view me any different to the invisible “US” or the greater “WE”, or begin to shower some benign “Expert” deference that I have no time for (lets call that “Idolatry” for lack of a better word). The term “FREEDOM” to me means to be able observe a community of New Voice and to meditate, ponder and think for myself. This is what principally serves the pathway of my own learning, when I am not swallowing imitation whole and I am not serving to create more CONTENT, where “content” remains as the fat cat that it always was and always will be. Content in that regard is fully loaded stomach, but mind and heart are about personal nutrition and to lurk (for my own purposes) is to give freedom to the mind, rather than simply to increase the accumulating fat of knowledge and thought. At least that is a snapshot of how things are whirling in my mind right now – which is great because tomorrow, if I have learned anything from this due processing of my thought, tomorrow becomes different (and do we not learn best from our differences rather than our commonalities or similarities?).
Neither is tomorrow a perpetual cause to keep on searching and wandering in an explorative capacity, but can also serve as a time to see what it is I have learned and how that can now be channeled to support neighborhoods of innovation, where I have the freedom or right to choose my own associations (with care, due diligence and relationship regard) and where I can then channel all these “explored” energies, through a process called “Work”. I am not writing these thoughts to write a book, these thoughts are not meant to be an earning potentiality to substitute my “actual work”, they are simply a product of my own process, a personal playground or cerebral gymnasium – for I do not do not wish to do my core work on a treadmill and if this process contains common sense, virtue and intelligence, then surely I am in better position to be a partner in the creation of innovation – on in other words I have learned in my own inimitable way, how I can personally forge a pathway for a productive & purposeful existence (without turning into an expert cookie cutter, or morose four step methodology which actually works best when learn when we have mastered having “no-mind”). So I ask myself, why make a people distinction between individual and group, when innovation should be best regarded as a process. My freedom ends when I come up against the “Expert Voice” or the “Export Voice” who is trained both like Samurai’s and Ninja’s to consume my attention. When I have lost my ability to attend or attentive capacity or capability, at that point, I then become a painter who has just lost his painting. What then should have been the art of personal exploration can simply gets “industrialized” and monotonized (monet.. if your prefer, but I prefer to call the act of Read Only culture an act of gross monotony – it is good to be in Read-Write culture but what I am trying to do here is create a Write Only culture!- thankfully Lawrence Lessig is around to figure that gray matter stuff out), for in the very act of simply reading or responding to what I have written here simply serves to reduce myself again to the stature of an artifact, or as Noam Chomsky might say, become a new form of “manufactured consent” but in this case simply one more branded product an industrial mindset factory churning out a product line called “People Power”, rather than simply be what I see myself as, a lurker who happens merely to exhibit a 21st Century mindset or at least how many external agencies do I need to know before I come to know what my own freedom is - or is freedom something other people talk about or serve to deny you because you see the world now far differently then they do (and so in a unusual and uncommon way, this is not a “reply” to your posting Doug :-)and I've done, it I have reached the end, now my new personal challenge is to learn to say all of this in ONE SINGLE NEAT & TIDY PARAGRAPH......M.