Thinking at the Intersection of Einstein and da Vinci
Written by Jan Turner Tuesday, February 21 2012
- You are a born “genius thinker.”
- Your genius-thinking skills have been gradually rubbed off by school, work and other societal forces.
- You can reignite the genius in you by suspending critical thinking and intentionally using thinking patterns that spark creativity and imagination.
Reed calls it “transformational innovation,” and a growing number of executives are seeing it as a lifeline that can pull their businesses out of a swamp of recession-born cutbacks and stagnation.
Einstein: “Logic will get you from A to Z, imagination will get you everywhere.”
Reed is CEO of EdgeDweller, Inc., a business strategy and transformational problem-solving company relocated from Atlanta to the shore of a mountain lake near Clarkesville, Ga. The EdgeDweller Process, which is a guided progression of assessment, problem-solving and visioning, yields concrete results.
Reed says that advancements in creating original and “new to the world” ideas can improve 140 to 450 percent among participants. Her clients have included Disney, General Electric, Avon, Trane, the American Cancer Society and a variety of nonprofits and small businesses. In each case, the task was to help create “time travelers who lead with speed” – individuals who can take their organizations into a healthy and successful future.
Why workplace creativity – and why now?
A large segment of the corporate world continues to focus on firings, plant closings and purchase embargoes on everything from employee travel to copy toner. So why invest in genius thinking?
“Because you can only squeeze a business so much,” Reed says. “You can squeeze and squeeze until there is nothing left to squeeze. And then, if you want to stay in business, you’re going to have to grow.”
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The “left-brain bully” and the death of creativity
Creativity in the workplace has taken a drubbing since the onset of the Industrial Age, when systematized work required workers who think and act in concert. This accounts for the ascendency of the left-brain (what Reed calls “the bully of society”) and critical thinking which, with its more limited and predictable results, is easier to manage than workplace creativity.
Reed explains that genius thinking is neither left brain nor right brain. “It is when left brain and when right brain,” she says. Genius thinkers use their “neurological switching stations” (brains) to switch comfortably from left to right and back again at optimal times.
The many faces of genius
The question of how to produce genius is very old. The answer, from EdgeDweller, is new: Assess a person’s dominant thinking pattern and then teach that person to re-engage in the innate thinking patterns that have “lost their tread” due to disuse.
EdgeDweller has identified six thinking pattern profiles: stabilizer, optimizer, evolver, differentiator, disruptor and ideator. Since Reed has a history of hanging upside down from airplanes and setting off down untraveled paths in India, she is – not surprisingly – a Disruptor, a game-changer who sees the future as clearly as other people see their images in a mirror.
The team intensive: creating transformation
The EdgeDweller Process is scaled and customized to fit client needs. One popular format is the two-day Team Intensive, which includes a pre-intensive Thinking Profile Assessment that reveals each participant’s dominant thinking pattern. Team members and EdgeDweller experts then come together for one-on-one consults and group sessions where alternate genius thinking-patterns are taught - as well as how/when to switch among them - and critical thinking.
Participants are then guided in creating a “new to the world” or transformational business or organizational solution important to the team. Team members leave the intensive with a new solution, action assignments, a milestone calendar for implementation and recommendations for areas needing additional work.
Innovation at EdgeDweller, Inc.
EdgeDweller, Inc., is undergoing its own transformation, adding webinars, self-help online tools and training packages (a little like DIY language learning) to its intensives and individual coaching. It has also announced a new collaboration with a nonprofit in the North Georgia Mountains, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, where EdgeDweller will offer two-day intensives for groups. For more: http://edgedweller.net, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
“The really neat thing about genius thinking is that it can be used in all spheres, professional and personal. You can use it to figure out what you want to do this weekend or to solve a problem with the kids,” Reed explains. “Genius thinking brings a new level of excitement, energy and fun to life.”
Read more stories about creative business approaches:
Bad Economy = Good Time to Innovate
Zutano - Bringing Joy and innovation to "What's a Baby to Wear?"
Welcome to a Business Renaissance
Jan Turner lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. For more than 20 years her articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor as well as on wire services in the United States and abroad. Turner has written on subjects ranging from leadership and business culture to diversity awareness and faith-based organizations, and she has a nonfiction book underway. Turner has an advanced degree in intercultural communication and has traveled solo on many continents, exploring cultures from Ladahk and Sumatra to Malawi and Turkey, seeing first-hand the contributions and resilience of women.
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