drawing courtesy of Craig Spence

Symphony, fortunately, is not about musical ability.  According to Dan Pink its the ability to put together the pieces.  Capabilities such as: find patterns, cross boundaries to bring knowledge from one specialization to another, create metaphors, see the big picture.

My favorite exercises from this list:

• Hit the Newsstand: buy mags you’ve never noticed before and look for ways to use the content in work or life.  I haven’t tried this, but I definitely want to.  May indeed be confusing for rest of family though…
• Draw: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the classic by Betty Edwards (I was lucky enough to get this from my mom in my teenage years).  Line drawing is such a meditative in-the-moment exercise – once you start concentrating time flies and you feel quite peaceful once you’re done.  And there’s that pleasure of rediscovering how to draw – you can still do art!  (BTW, the picture above is just one of the exercises, recreating a childhood drawing.  You can see others in Craig Spence’s photostream. You will actually learn to draw well from this book 🙂 ) Thoroughly recommended.
• Follow the Links:  An argument for random surfing via U Roulette or Random Web Search (as if we don’t do enough of this already – the last thing I need is a right-brain exercise as justification!)
• Look for Solutions in Search of Problems: could you take a solution and use it somewhere else, or flip the default to make it work?
• Books: I’ve been wanting to pick up George Nelson’s classic How to See but that puppy is $75 used!  Thanks DWR.
• Brainstorming: Pink summarizes the IDEO brainstorming technique from Ten Faces of Innovation.  I first tried this out back in 2007 when I was interviewing with IDEO and was working on a new car seat design.  Its amazing: had about 10 friends over and 30 minutes later, 100 novel ideas which you cull later.  The basics: go for quantity over quality,  encourage wild and crazy ideas, defer judgment, and use pictures and change the focus when the ideas slow down.

Tomorrow, time for some Empathy.  Have a good one.