Imagination, Intuition & Intersections - why nothing succeeds like failure

Guy Kawasaki interviews Scott Berkun about The Myths Of Innovation. The interview & site discuss improv, the imagination, experimentation & the importance of failure.

A colleague lent me a copy of The Medici Effect by Frans Johanssen. Despite the name, it is not really about Renaissance Florence. Rather Johanssen writes about The Intersection - that notional place where disciplines intersect. He claims that a richer source of innovation can be found in using two or more disciplines (e.g. using ant behaviour to improve call routing in a telephone network) than sticking to one. He also discusses the role of experimentation (& therefore failure) in these highly unpredictable intersectional innovations. Don't expect to get it right first time if you venture into this area.

Lauchlan MacKinnon writes about intuition. His first recommendation to improve your intuition is "Get involved in further activity and gain more experience". And I would suggest that some of this experience needs to be failure. Building intuition is a form of learning*. And we learn most when we get things wrong, rather than we succeed.

In fact, innovation can be seen as a (highly applied) form of organisational learning - collective learning in action.

*We are also doing it constantly whether we like it or not. The question is: how well we do it.