Collaborative Innovation: What Turns It Off And What Turns It On

In addition to the preparatory mindfulness benefits of recovering calmness, self-awareness and non-judgementalism, we need to reinvigorate collaborative innovation with an orientation that will turn on positive emotional drives and shift the focus of attention toward creative engagement, exploration, positive anticipation, clarity of thought, and endogenous rewards. I propose the most effective orientation to achieve all those qualities is curiosity. No other orienting state, including mindfulness, stimulates all the qualities required.

Prior research has generally limited curiosity to desire to satisfy a deficit in knowledge, a desire for information or the questioning of how things work (Litman & Jimerson, 2004). This is clearly insufficient. If all we needed was more information, then we should be the happiest and most collaborative society in the history of humanity. According to Forbes magazine (Marr, 2018), 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. 90% of the data in the world was generated over the last 2 years. Instead of inspiring our wonder and fascination, we are accosted by a relentless torrent of new information, commentary, social criticism, and self-serving agendas that are trying to win our attention, our loyalty and, more often than not, our money.

This is the current equivalent of what Alain de Botton was warning us in his book, Status Anxiety (2005) more than a decade ago, which is a parallel concept to the “winner/loser world” (Hill, 2006). Nowadays we have a morbid fear of not knowing. So much so that people will even make things up in what psychologists call an “argument from ignorance” (Robinson, 1971) just to appear to be knowledgeable. Curiosity for information, surprisingly can be seen as a negative because it implies that the person doesn’t know everything and is somehow a “loser”.

Attachments

Download Article