N. Monroe Marshall

Transcription

If you've ever felt like you want to change the world or if you've ever felt like you just want to design something really cool or if you've ever just felt like you want to improve your situation just a little bit or the situation of people around you -- Then, you are in good company. That's because wanting to reach out and connect and touch the world around you and make a difference and make it better is at the core of what it means to be human. And that's why I am excited to be here, because that's sort of what TED is about. And I feel very at home with the concepts and the ideas of this place. It's wonderful. The problem is that we don't have a really good sort of unified concept of how to do these things, big changes, radical changes, new realities. And, when I was a kid that frustrated me a lot. I grew up in New Mexico. I used to go out to at the Air Force Base and I watched F18 accelerate straight up into the sky. And I'd fiddle around programming second-hand supercomputers, because Sandia Labs would cast one aside and get the new one. And I would watch Star Wars or Bambi. And I would listen to "Earth, Wind, and Fire." Not like earth, wind, and fire, but the band. "Earth, Wind, and Fire" (Laughter) When you are in New Mexico, you've got to clarify it. And I used to ask myself an unusual question I found. I didn't ask myself, "Wow, how did they do that?" I got in this bad habit of saying, "How could I do that?" or something like it. And when I started asking that question and poking around a little bit I got really scattered and sort of unsatisfactory answers. And so, that was about 30 years ago and I had just basically decided I was going to go out into the wolrd and try to make cool stuff. And all the while I kept building a sort of knowledgebase of what works, what doesn't. What would I learn from somebody who's brilliant in one way? What things combine to end up as something that is a new real thing, that is magic and great? And doesn't break. And people love it, because they get it. And that's what I've been thinking about. So, I've built this thing into a system. And it's called quantum leap mechanics. And it's kind of a play on words, because quantum leap is the idea of a new world, right? Quantum mechanics is the study of sort going from an energy state that is lower to an energy state that's higher, I kind of like that as an analogue. And this system works. And it's really fun and we're starting to teach it to people and see great results. So, I thought I would share with you. Do you want to see how it works? (Audience): Yeah. All right. Here it is. These are seven concurrent dimensions of creative excellence. And these are seven sort of worlds and core qualities that you can look for, and use and apply when you are trying to make something new that is great. And the cool thing is that we are in New Mexico. I am here for a reason and I suspect that a lot of you might be here for the same reason. We have 2 of these 7 things sort of in abundance. You walk down the street and you get a sense for the art side and the science side. I am going to this in detail in a second. And let's go through those so you can see what the polarities are and the sort of bookends of the system. Art represents these words: Primal, Organic, Humanistic, Poetic. Very deep, mythological, sort of supernatural dimensions of whatever is that you are doing. And, some people resonate very strongly with this stuff to some people it's sort of a world you don't go to, but kids of course get all this. They get fairy godmothers and they get demons and dragons and shadowy scary things. And it turns out that as we become adults, we don't forget those things. We just sort of sometimes pretend they aren't there. The next category is probably recognizable to a lot of people here because New Mexico has a lot of scientists in it, that are here because of the work in the National Labs. And this category is broad. This means science, technology, physics, natural laws equations and new technology that we can go use. The question is -- okay, we can establish that there are these sort of two poles of this system. And we know that we have that kind of stuff here. But it seems like, and it seems to me like, when I was sort of at Disney and as a designer there and getting a sort of crash course in real world innovation that there was something more. So, that's what the center of this diagram is all about. And if you see it. Let's see if we -- There's five more categories, I'm going to go through them really quick just to give you a quick overview of what this thing looks like. And I want to say before I go into them, this is not sort of mathematical ivory tower thinking. This is the result of 25 years of design. Designing 100 million dollars theme parks. Economic development plans. We're now doing a lot of work in mobile apps and building apps that sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise a day, and we do some work with National Security. We are proud of that. We believe there's a big application for this at that level as well. The first category of the 5 that are missing is business. And this might seem like -- well -- duh, that's kind of obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people set off to change the world without thinking about the fact that whatever they do needs to be sustainable. They can't run out of resources to do it. And that means you have to have a capital structure, you have to think about accounting, tax, law. To some people in this room that's no fun at all. But it turns out that different skills in this 7-bar system are kind of affinities for different people. And this is a really important one. The next one, I'm calling design and it's different from art. Design is the business of making something understandable to people. And fitting their body in an ergonomic way and it's also about ideation. It's also about just being a kid again and starting to ask some questions - that's what TEDx is so great for. It's why we do a lot of work with students because they kind of come to situations with a willingness to try something new and to be open to a larger question. This also involves aesthetics and style. And these are important things that -- you know, frankly in the New Mexico context context we have a lot of growth to do in this area. Because product design and the sort of reduction to a thing that people can use, is kind of a -- not something that we do as much. The next area is kind of funky. This is COTS. So, if you work in the sort of government world, you probably know what that means. It means Commercial Off-The-Shelf. And what that means is -- What can you go out in the world and just get, that someone already knows how to do and already makes, and make your thing work better. And that means products, but it also means who could you go talk to? Who could you just find, who happens to have been doing this for 30 years and ask them some questions. And what I found at Disney was so amazing -- there were people who just were very, very good at this. And it had never occurred to me to know how many different kinds of cryogenic valves there are in the world, but it turns out there were people there who knew that. And it's a lot easier to do this with the internet, because I started to think about this problem before there was an internet. And it was really hard because you had to go to trade shows and you had to really sort of network to find out what's the next Sony HD camera going to do. But this is important -- I just want to emphasize it, because it's not taught in our schools. You get out of school and you've learned and you've absorbed and you've retained sort of things that you were tested on, but knowing what's out in the world is going to become a critical piece of the value proposition of creating new worlds. The next one is called prototyping and this is the business of taking your neuron sparks and your napkin sketch and turning it into molecules of a working test of something. You saw it in the marshmallow competition or whatever it was, that was the key, right? It's that the kids kind of don't mind making a huge mess abd breaking all those noodles and finding out what works, you know, to make a stronger structure. This is a skill that is very much in need in our culture and we're losing it because in schools -- shop class, art class -- things where you actually touch physical stuff -- are becoming less and less in fashion. And we think, well that's not a white-collar kind of thing to do so we kind of don't spend a lot of time on it. This is a profoundly important area. And one of the things I like to point out is that in Japan they don't have garages. In the US, we can have an abundance of land, so people have a house that has a garage. Well, the garage is a great place to make a huge mess. And drill holes in the wall and wire stuff up and have it explode and then leave it for a week because you can't figure it out, and come back to it, but if you have a tiny house that creates a problem. And I just want everybody to think about, in your life, where is your workbench, where is your garage, that lets you scratch around and try stuff? And we need to be very careful about this because we have, you know -- there's a whole sort of thing about, "Oh, let's go live in a loft." Be careful! Because you need a messy place. So, if you don't have one, find one. The last category is in the center and it's green for a reason. And it has to do with values, ethics, trust, and cooperation. This is the area that means not just, "Are we honest with each other when we're trying to create our new world?" It means -- What new world are we going to create? Stacy had that great talk this morning. Remember that when he's just said, "When you got so many days left. What's the top priority and then how do you fill in underneath that? Well, this is about that. What will you do, and what won't you do with -- how good you are at your particular skill? And the reason this is important, is -- I firmly believe that values and ethics aren't limiting. Sometimes it feels like, "Oh, that means I can't do certain things." See, Walt Disney looked at values and he said, "Well that's liberating." Let's do something for kids that we feel good about and we can leave to the world that is also worthy of hanging in the Louvre, because the artwork is so outrageously gorgeous. So, that's an important thing. I also will just throw out that in education this is going away. We don't talk about this, it's become a taboo subject certainly in the spiritual realm and I include spirituality in this realm. Because, it turns out if you are not grounded with a larger concept of what the divine is, then, you're less likely to take risk. Because it's really scary to step out off of this little ledge, if it might not work. And there needs to be something more. So that's the center category. So that's the seven categories and this thing, it starts off as sort of a little introduction to some modalities. They correspond to ways of thinking you'll find, and you'll probably experience that that as I talk to them. It turned on different parts of your brain. The cool thing is that it becomes really useful really fast. You can look at things and you would say, "Oh, well, this works as a diagnostic for myself or a person." And you would say, "Look there's a New Mexico engineer. I can kind of see that person walking down the street and this gets kind of scary because once you get deeper into this you kind of can do this and you can say, "Oh, look there's a New Mexico culturalist." There's somebody who's in the art scene up in Santa Fe. You know, those Santa Fe grounds. (Laughter) And there's a resonance there with certain life patterns and just sort of inherited skills and sensitivities. The bottom part of that, that gets interesting is, you can look at corporations and organizations. This is a fun one, that is Microsoft. Here is Apple. Is it any wonder? The largest corporation in the world at this point. So, we're applying this stuff in ways that we want to use for education. We're using it for interns. We really believe that youth are one of the first places to introduce these ideas because they're so adaptive and flexible. And, we're also looking at homeschooling and charter schooling they're very adaptive institutions and so that's been great. We're also working on a program with Harvard that has a special concentration in innovation. And so, in closing I just want to say, "Try this." These are 7 pretty understandable categories and even at the lowest level, think about them as they apply to the ideas you've heard today. Because, you could take these categories, walk up to somebody who you liked to hear what they said today and I guarantee you, by thinking about them you can move their ball down the field, and help them, and that's what's fun because you start to become a quantum leap magician. Thank you very much. (Applause)