Improvisation is the way to wonder, and wonder is contagious. Everyone loves to uncover something amazing, something startling. And to share it with others. Human beings' natural state is looking for the wonder in life. By bringing many disciplines, facts, and people into a single conversation, today's enterprise social software is making idea-fusions possible on a scale never before seen. This is the atomic age of ideas, the age of idea-fusion.
The contained, the distinct, the separate -- our Western legacy -- are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively (fused), startling discoveries often result. Marshall McLuhan
There are some startling discoveries being made by combining a little of this with a little of that. And, the interesting thing is that many of these magic cocktails are being put together by total amateurs. But, that's not really a surprise. Experts hate to be startled. Experts have a category for each thing, and each thing is filed in its category. Experts are shorn of wonder as their initiation rite. It's sort of sad. But, worse than sad, it is bad. A bias against wonder saddles experts and everyone around them with an unbearable inertia against progress, against experimentation, against exploration….against anything that produces the startling and wonder-filled….the aha moment. Why?
These improvisations and fusions across disciplines are dangerous. They threaten established ways of seeing the world. By transcending and blending categories, they threaten categories -- including the categories in which the experts place themselves. They threaten our strategies and methods. They threaten…wait…what do they really threaten?
These improvisational fusions threaten only our bad assumptions, delusions, and pretenses. They threaten only to break us free from the inertia of tradition and habit and we-can't-remember-why. In that sense, collaboration's cross-disciplinary fusions will, indeed, produce a powerful reaction. One that will power your organization for years to come.
It is the business of the future to be dangerous. A N. Whitehead
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