Jordan Berkowitz

It’s Time to Forget, i.e. Create a Bubble

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

I’m calling bullshit on this wildly over-referenced and often misstated quotable. Forgetting can be rational, inspirational, and desirable. More to the point, forgetting frees us from the realities of a situation so that we can reestablish our objectivity and approach. I submit that remembering only forces us to relive the realities of the past and prevents us from envisioning a future that may or may not be informed by history.

In Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble identify institutional memory as common inhibitor of innovation.

Executives usually repeat actions that they believe have produced success. If success continues, then not only individual executives but also entire organizations shift from consciously repeating these actions to unconsciously accepting them as correct. Soon, these assumptions are embedded not only in managers’ minds but also in the relationships, processes, and communication patterns that make the organization tick. Even when organizations face failure, it is a struggle for them to reassess these deeply entrenched assumptions. They become orthodoxy.

I often find myself staring down the barrel of this figurative gun. I desire freedom to think about a problem outside of the organizational construct, but find myself revisiting the “reality” or history of the problem. I’ve come to realize that straddling this gap is risky and challenging. The truth is that I may never be able to step away from this duality, as my job often demands it, but it does motivate me to create an environment for other people that has none of these trappings.

The best analogy I can think of for this kind of environment is a bubble. What follows are some rules for how to get the most out of your bubble.

• Give yourself permission to create a bubble.
• Protect that bubble and the people/thinking inside of it.
• Allow thinking to percolate out of the bubble, but don’t allow reality to seep back in.
• If you created the bubble, it’s your job to translate, apply, and distribute the bubble’s output.
• Don’t look to your bubble to solve all of your problems, but expect that you’ll find something. It may be inspiration, a lateral solution, a literal solution, dissonance, or seeming randomness. In the right hands, any or all of this can be useful.
• When the bubble pops, which they always do, don’t look at it is as destruction but rather the opportunity to create a new bubble that is slightly different than the last one.

Take what you will from this. It may be that you are the sole inhabitant of your bubble … that’s totally fine. Your bubble is the place where you are uninhibited by history and reality. This is the place where visionary solutions are discovered. It’s the place where things that never seemed relevant are. Your bubble is the place where forgetting isn’t optional, it’s required.

That’s Just Like Your Reality, Man.

A few days ago I posted an excerpt from a recent article by Stephen Hawking in Scientific American that really resonated with me.

In our view, there is no picture– or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more real than the other.

Being the commensurate geek, I couldn’t help but feel that this was a particularly pointed scientific argument that had been previously articulated by none other than the Dude.

Sketching With Technology

My name is Jordan and I’m a creative technologist.

For a long time I struggled to put a name to what I do. I love technology and I love a great idea. It pains me to see either executed poorly and all to often a lackluster execution of one means the other inevitably suffers. It’s only recently that, with the help a few others, I’ve gained some clarity into what I thought was going to be a nameless future where I would always describe what I do as “a bunch of stuff.”

At the moment people have varied opinions on what a creative technologist is. I’ve heard that we are strategists, planners, technologists, producers, and a few other odd variants that elude me. The short answers is yes and no. There are aspects of each of these roles that contribute to what a creative technologist does, but the total is not simply the sum of these parts.

Mark Avnet is a professor at VCU Brandcenter and has written what I think is the the best description of a creative technologist to date.

CTs understand the business of advertising, marketing, and branding, take a creative, strategic and people-centric view of how to connect people and brands, and understand the kinds of mediating technologies that can best be used to make those engaging experiences where the connection happens.

They sketch with technology, just like a visual creative can sketch with a pencil. They’re steeped in strategy, so the things they come up with make sense, it’s not about technology just for the sake of technology. The experiences they design address real needs of people and brands.

Creative technologists share a creative and inquisitive view of the world. They’re on top of technology trends, aren’t afraid of coding (just as a modern visual designer isn’t afraid of Photoshop or Illustrator), and take both strategic and tactical approaches to creativity. They also understand that we’re in a business, and we’re solving business goals by addressing people’s needs as a priority.

The rest of the post deserve a serious read as he goes on to talk about another quality of creative technologists which I completely agree with, the “Learn, Do, Teach mindset.”

So what does all of this mean for me?

• First off, I have a new mission which is to advance the understanding and acceptance of the creative technologist as a critical member of the agency of today. This isn’t a role meant for some future state; it’s a complete necessity today and the primary challenge is that there aren’t more creative technologists to be hired and utilized to make better work. 
• Secondly, and this is somewhat selfish, I now have a way to describe what I do. Not everyone may agree with it, but I don’t care. It makes perfect sense to me and I’m confident that in due course many more people will come to understand and respect the role. 
• Finally, I want to meet more creative technologists. If you are one, think you’re one, know one, or suspect one of your friends is one but doesn’t yet know it, please get in touch with me.

I’m going to spend a lot more time talking about creative technologists, what we do/think, and how we fit into the agency environment so please stay tuned.