Inventing Elephants

I want to help myself and others see beyond boundaries of disciplines, make unexpected connections, and create better solutions in this complex and dynamic world. I'm not an expert and have considerable learning to do on my own, but in 2009 I want the purpose of my development to be directed outward first, athough supported by the inward, of necessity.

Immediate Changes

The differences may start out small, but I expect the shift in viewpoint to show up in my writing. Unfortunately, posting will probably continue to be sporadic until I complete my MBA in June.

Topics will continue to follow the broad outlines laid out by my cateogry selection, although I hope to devote considerably more time to studying systems thinking.

I will still be incorporating personal stories, but I've also started an unabashedly unthemed and personal blog at http://bethrobinson.me just so I have a place to stash anything I want to write that doesn't fit into my themes.

A Larger Vision for the Future

The heart of Inventing Elephants is the idea of creating something new based on the combination, synergies, and understanding of possible interdependecies and interactions between diverse and divergent points of view. This idea draws heavily on systems thinking and innovation theories.

One voice and one medium are not enough. A fully developed site should contain multiple perspectives conveyed across multiple media - words, images, sound, video.

There's a lot out there on innovation and creativity, but not so much on systems thinking. Much of what I have found is academic and presented in a way that means you have to know what you're looking for to find it. It would be a good thing to change that and make another portal to that viewpoint with stories and solutions.

These ideas are far enough away for me that I struggled to even express them as a vision and left them as the rather sideways description above. Even once I capture the wording, achieving it will be a DUMB goal for me (Stepcase Lifehack calls them dangerously unattainable monstrously big, but I've seen other explanations of the acronym as well.) I'm not even sure I'll stay on this path long enough to partially achieve the unvoiced goal, but it is a site I would like to see and want to have a hand in building, so I'll give it a try.