The future lies with those individuals who can see connections
[ by Charles Cameron — gaming the future, rethinking thinking, NPS essay contest, mixing drinks ]
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I’d like to introduce what may be a new format for my DoubleQuotes and SPECS. It features two ideas — in this case, the telephone and the game console — which merge into one via some overlap between them — here, the iPhone.
You want the neurosciwence behind all this? Try Fauconnier and Turner‘s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities.
It was a piece by Benjamin Kohlmann in today’s Small Wars Journal titled The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers that triggered this post.
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Listen up:
The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits. The mind that can see that a phone and entertainment device can be intertwined into something like, say, an iPhone. Or, an intellect that recognizes how secondary and tertiary networks are often more valuable than first-order relationships, thus creating something like LinkedIn. Or the strategist who understands that crowdsourced, horizontally structured non-state actors pose a greater threat to our security than Nation states.
That’s from today’s Small Wars Journal piece — and when I read that paragraph, I was way too excited to read the rest, because:
1. That’s what my series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] on Arthur Koestler‘s notion of intersecting concepts has been all about, and…
2. I’ve been working on a family of games that will train people — pleasurably — in precisely this kind of “overlap” thinking for at least fifteen years now. Don Oldenberg of the Washington Post described one of my games as an “on-line match of ricocheting intellects” back in 1996.
But you’ll be hearing more on #2 in the not too distant, once our team has all its ducks in a row — and black swans permitting.
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Hey, this kind of thinking can get you noticed — it’s what last year’s Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security essay contest [link opens .pdf] boiled down to:
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If you’ll permit me a quick detour:
Not only that, it’s also the basis for cocktail hour!
It appears that the Bartender’s Guide was first published in 1862, so bartenders have been doing this — mixing ideas, mixing drinks — for at least a century and a half. Maybe the fact that they work with liquor has something to do with it.
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In any case, isn’t it time for the rest of us to catch up?
The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits.
