Cultivate Collisions

Link: http://socialea.chickenbrain.de/2012/10/cultivate-collisions.html

A couple of days ago a tweet flew by which deserved closer attention:

Questions to ask about any method or approach: Who invented it? What problem one tried to solve? Do I have that problem?

In the interaction with the author it became (once again) obvious that I have a different approach to look at methods and tools than just looking at for what specific problem space it was created. Steven Johnson has put this in a great way in his speech Where Good Ideas Come From. The immediate question I ask myself is:

Can I use this for any problem I face at the moment?

I try to cultivate collisions. I try to see behind the core idea and why it was created. Even though there is a lot of value in understanding why and how a method was created I personally believe there is one flaw in understanding the thoughts of others: it constrains the creation of new ideas.

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who read too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”,

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

So learning from others is key for me to understand and learn, but also to develop new ideas. And I am not only trying to learn from other Enterprise Architects, but I try to learn from everything what I experience. And then I try to create and add that new piece of puzzle based on that experience. It is a journey, and honestly it is a tough one, but not panicking helps me here.

I will label all posts in which I try to with collision, and there is already one example on this blog: The Enterprise Architecture Matrix. Cultivate collisions and embrace the change coming through that collisions. What are you waiting for?