The question is why so few questions?

“If everything goes well, we get hired to provide answers based on our expertise — not questions based on our curiosity.”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD

To quote Hugh Garry at Storythings: “Children ask between 70 and 150 questions a day. Adults ask between 20 and 30. Children fail fast and propel themselves forward by constantly asking questions. Then things change.”

Asking questions is central to ArkAngel consultancy, not least in the ‘Kicking the Tyres’ sessions we run which are all about asking the right questions at the right time.

Curiosity is the lifeblood of creativity and innovation. Certainty does not come with the territory. Informed risk and the excitement of the not yet known are the essence of this realm.

The Frame

“Art consists of limitation. The
most beautiful part of every
picture is the frame.”
G. K. Chesterton

Having a set of rules or specifications is much easier than a blank sheet. It helps bring focus. The basis of classical theatre post-Aristotle was the imposition of the three unities: of time, of place and of action: 24 hours, one city or smaller, one main plot. Even with – or arguably because of – those limitations, those Greeks banged out some crackers.

To be honest Aristotle mainly insisted on unity of action. Various French and Italian neoclassicists extrapolated his ideas to that trio of rules.

The rule book (he didn’t write plays himself)

Nailed it

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Abraham Maslow in ‘The Psychology of Science’ (1966)

Often quoted as “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It captures perfectly how our thinking can be narrowed by assumptions and habit, and how these limit creativity/innovation.

That’s why it’s vital to check what assumptions are built into your goal (be it solving a problem or seizing an opportunity) before you start generating ideas.

A good example of quote distortion

Curves

Curves are so emotional.
– Piet Mondrian

Composition No. 6

I’m back in Sussex. In this most wonderful of counties, the hills are sexy with chalk curves. Considering Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian is best known for his hard-edged rectilinear pictures, it’s good to know he appreciated the resonance of a curve.

Round and curved architecture is compelling. I keep noticing this building in Morden, South London for that reason…

Merton civic centre

And this kind of thing is resonant…

Diego Velázquez – The Rokeby Venus (1647-51)

So enjoy curves today as they are the shape of Nature and organic emotion.

That Condition

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

What a wonderful aspect of humanity. Given that being human comes with a certain aloneness, at birth and death especially, the bonding of romantic love (as well as parental love) enables us to dissolve much of that aloneness in intensely human connection.

Radiators and Drains

People are either radiators or they’re drains. And you need to spend time around the radiators, the people who radiate goodness and light and positivity. Not the drains, the people who drag you down.

Reese Witherspoon (quoting her granny)

This is arguably a good way of classifying people – those who project energy and those who suck it away. I’m feeling very Radiator this year, perhaps because the world is so fucked up and things are changing so fast in our sector (as well as many others) that you are forced to navigate dynamically and be entrepreneurial. I’m really enjoying that energy.

Ted Talk

Higgins wisdom

There’s all kinds of insights to be picked up from ‘Ted Lasso’ which are useful in everyday life. This supposition by the warm-hearted Higgins picks up on the recent ‘Youness’ post featuring Dr Seuss and Oscar Wilde. It’s ultimately much less stress being yourself than being anyone else – wearing masks and acting a lie is way more energy-sapping.

Words

“Words are for those with promises to keep”

WH Auden

I don’t know the context, I just liked the sentence. Promises are a challenging aspect of life that really tests your moral strength. I give you my word. Word of honour. A man’s word is his bond. He broke his word. All have a certain poetry about them.

Youness

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

Another angle on Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” There’s quite some wonder in the realisation that each of us is unique. The challenge is to make that unique human as benign and constructive as possible. Which chimes in with George Bernard Shaw’s notion that

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

which suggests we have more agency than we might think over our ability to shape ourselves over time.

GBS says: Happy self shaping, amigos

Back to Basics

A mosaic of Irish revolutionary nationalist politician Constance Markievicz in the People’s History Museum in Manchester. As well as taking an active part in the Easter Rising of 1916, she was a suffragist and socialist, becoming the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, serving as MP for Dublin St Patrick’s from 1918 to 1922.

She was actually born in London into an upper class Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family, making her embracing of Irish independence and social reform even more impressive.

The quotation is striking in its contrasting of practical clothes with fancy jewellery, and of fripperies with a firearm. The language is very powerful, almost poetic, whatever you think of the justification of violence (which she no doubt considered self-defence under the colonial circumstances). It’s also incomplete and without full context – which tells you a lot about quotations and what you can do them to, to some degree, transform their meaning. (You’d think from the Manchester mosaic she said it on the eve of the Easter Rising.)

The better ideal for women who, whether they like it or not, are living in a work-a-day world, would be — If you want to walk round Ireland, or any other country, dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank, and buy a revolver. Don’t trust to your “feminine charm” and your capacity for getting on the soft side of men, but take up your responsibilities and be prepared to go your own way depending for safety on your own courage, your own truth and your own common sense, and not on the problematic chivalry of the men you may meet on the way. [Women, Ideals and the Nation speech, 28th March 1909 — Students’ National Literary Society, Dublin]

 “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.”