Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under Uncategorized
I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. I’m back in Athens after a nice winter break. It feels good to be in Ohio again and I’m anxiously waiting for the start of the quarter.
Being back in Athens means I once again get the NY Times on a daily basis and found this article in the business section to be a good read. Especially in terms of pushing yourself to go beyond the boundaries of what you know and do.
As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.
When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
Newspapers as a whole are still struggling to find what works and what doesn’t with online storytelling and while it leads to a lot of discussion in the community it isn’t leading to a whole lot of compelling storytelling. I’ve contributed my fair share of junk to the mess.
One of my goals for the new year is push myself to move beyond what I know in terms of multimedia and storytelling. We all know how to make safe pictures. Safe pictures only lead in one direction and that’s mediocrity. How can I see this in a new way? We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are.
More risks. More failure. More discovery.
A blank canvas awaits.
Further Reading:
Tags: creative, inspiration, multimedia, photojournalism
