The document discusses leveraging neurobiological principles of genius to design workplaces of extraordinary creativity. It advocates for designing organizations based on principles of emergent complexity seen in the human brain and nature. This includes encouraging interconnectedness, curiosity, independent thinking and whole brain approaches. The document also promotes practices like mobbing, cross-boundary collaboration and increasing diversity to allow for emergent innovation and problem solving to arise from the bottom-up in a self-organizing manner. The goal is to cultivate psychological safety, imagination, performance and anti-fragility in organizational systems.

1. Superhumans and
Innovation Workshops:
Leveraging the Neurobiological
Principles of Genius to Design
Workplaces of Extraordinary Creativity
Dan Feldman
@danielrfeldman
http://www.agileandbeyond.co/

3. How would you design a
workplace of extraordinary
creativity and adaptability?

4. What ideas
might you use?

5. What do geniuses know
about designing
innovation workshops?

7. • INTERCONNECTEDNESS
• CURIOSITY
• INDEPENDENT
THINKING
• REFINE YOUR SENSES
• EMBRACE
UNCERTAINTY
• ART & SCIENCE,
WHOLE BRAIN
THINKING
• MIND-BODY CARE

8. Imagine a situation
where everything is
backwards

9. • Customers control
companies
• Jobs allow for self-
expression
• Barriers to
competition
disappear
• Strangers design
new products
• Advertising scares
customers
• Demographics are
irrelevant

10. • Meaning talks;
money walks
• Stability is a fantasy
• Talent trumps
obedience
• Imagination beats
knowledge
• Empathy trounces
logic
• Markets move fast
• Innovation
leapfrogs

11. How can you change
fast enough to benefit
from disruption?

12. We must CREATE
wealth to succeed

13. But how?

14. What behaviors
would you choose?

15. Exceptional imagination

16. High performance

17. • Brand strategy
• Design thinking
• Culture of nonstop
innovation

18. How do you keep growing when
adding more stuff unfocused
the meaning of your brand?

19. Game-changing
innovation

20. To overcome relentless
speed and extreme
clutter, you must innovate

21. If you want to innovate,
you have got to design

22. • Knowing
• MAKING
• Doing
Design Thinking

23. “A designer is anyone who
devises ways to change
existing situations to
preferred ones”
-Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate, pioneer
of AI

24. Dragon Gap
• The difference between vision and
reality
• The space between what is and
what coulee be.
• You must spend time there.

25. Good design
•To KNOW truth
•To MAKE beauty
•To DO good.

26. • The financial
meltdown was the
result of bad design
• A management model
that includes a moral
dimension is needed.

27. Design thinking
applications
• Thought leadership /
vision
• Business model
• Organizational structure
• Strategic decisions
• Internal
communications
• Operational processes
• Brand ecosystem
• Customer relationships
• Products and services
• External conversations

28. Culture of innovation
• WSJ: How do you expect
to keep this up?
• Jobs: “We intend to keep
innovating”

29. If you want to innovate,
you’ve got to design

30. What abilities would
you develop?

31. • new ways of thinking
• interconnectedness in
everything
• new states of consciousness

32. What ideas might
you use?

33. Biomimcry
An approach to innovation that seeks sustainable
solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s
time-tested patterns and strategies

34. Complex adaptive
systems
• cities
• firms
• markets
• governments
• industries
• ecosystems
• social
networks
• power grids
• animal swarms
• traffic flows
• insect colonies
• the brain
• immune
system
• cell
• embryo

35. What are their
characteristics?
• Emergence
• Sudden transitions /
tipping-points / non-
linear dynamics
• Limited predictability
• Large events
• Evolutionary dynamics
• Self-organization
• Fundamental
uncertainty

36. The most complex and
adaptable system?

37. Which brains provide
the greatest insights?

39. How did these
visionaries create world
changing innovations?

40. Do human brains relate
to organizational
structure and behavior?

41. Emergent complexity

42. Sapolsky’s definition

43. • Simple rules produce complex
behavior
• No single ant or neuron knows what to
do
• Not wisdom of the crowd… it is an
emergent feature
• One generation generates random info
which creates an ideal solution

44. • complex and
creative behavior
• increased
imagination and
performance

45. Bottom-up, emergent,
randomness-inducing
practices

46. • Mobbing
• Cross-
boundary
collaboration
• Cooperation
• Brainstorming
• Travel
• Language
learning
• Making art
• Psychedelic
experiences

47. Themes in systems of
emergent complexity

48. Power law distribution
• Enhanced creativity is linked to this
pattern of nature
• Earthquake example
• Highly pervasive in systems of
emergent complexity

49. Brain development
• Most connections occur
with neighboring neurons
• Longer connections occur
less often

50. Corpus callosum
• Connects the hemispheres
• Enables generalized skills
and insights

51. Gender differences
• Women
• Men
• Autism Spectrum

52. Communication flow and
behavioral differences
• boundless and smooth flow
• abundant and steady flow
• an insufficient and uneven flow
• limited and sporadic flow

53. Which brains are the
most adaptive and anti-
fragile?

54. Which themes would
you want to model in
organizations?

55. Highly siloed/
compartmentalized
organizations

56. Traditional, hierarchical
top-down organization

57. Diverse organization with
sufficient and steady flow of
communication throughout

58. Widely dispersed
organization with boundless
flow of communication

59. The most Agile, safe,
adaptive, and anti-fragile?

60. Can’t those on the Autism
Spectrum be creative
contributors?

61. The least innovative, the most
psychologically dangerous,
inflexible, and fragile?

62. What do we want?
• Imagination
• Performance
• Safety
• Agility
• Anti-fragility
• Societal health
• Inclusivity
• Contribution of
everyone

63. Enhance imagination
and performance, and
innovation and quality

64. • Wire up the enterprise
based on simple rules of
attraction and repulsion.
• Emergent systems yield
enhanced innovation and
quality.
• Use swarm intelligence

65. • Develop healthier
communication
patterns
• Encourage
charismatic
connectors

66. Self-management
• Morning Star - Colleague Letter of
Understanding - Doug Kirkpatrick
• Nearsoft - DIYcracy - Matt Perez
• Cocoon Projects - LiquidO - Stelio
Verzera

67. Build psychological
safety
(key to high-
performing teams)

68. Cultivate networks and
collaborative partnerships
• Riane Eisler of California Institute of Integrative
Studies
• Teddie Potter of University of Minnesota
• Breaking down hierarchies in nursing
• Improved creativity and innovation
• Improved quality and safety

69. De-concentrate and devolve
power (at least structurally)
“If those with power and authority
can’t justify that authority, power and
control, which is the usual case, then
the authority ought to be dismantled
and replaced by something free and
just.”
-Noam Chomsky

70. Democratize the workplace
• Transform the workplace into
a worker self-directed
enterprise
• Give voice, power, and safety
structurally to all members

71. Remove rules which
magnify fear and anxiety
• At-will employment
• Institutional bureaucracy
• Mindless bureaucracy
seeks only to keep control

72. Dissolve boundaries

73. Overcome infantilization
• Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics
into adulthood
• Culture is a plot to keep you childish, dependent
• Avoid sloppy thinking, and intellectual shortcuts
• Embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradox

74. Become a servant-leader
• Make and meet
commitments
• Do no harm
• Encourage and support
others to become leaders

75. Team across boundaries
• Hierarchical, functional, or extra-
organizational
• Sexism, racism, and classism
• Disciplinary, geographic,
departmental, cultural, linguistic
• Mobbing - mob across boundaries

76. Increase the diversity of
perspective
• Learn simple ideas and behaviors
from others
• Resolve social dis-ease
• Recover from cultural myopia

77. Make art
• Make your own images, stories,
systems, music
• Minimize consumption of
commercial/cultural messages
• Reclaim your humanity!

78. Chaos, complexity… what
does it mean?
• Quality increases with quantity (counterintutitive)
• The simpler the constituent the better
• Random noise is a good thing (better quality)
• Nearest neighbor interactions - attraction/
repulsion
• Specialists rarely yield emergence. Generalists
are essential (i.e. da Vinci)

79. The implications?
• Working together is natural
• Bottom-up emergent thinking needed now
• Transition to an organic, emergent live-and-let-live way of
thinking is well underway
• We must do this with other people (DIY-togetherness)
• New type of leadership. Differs from command and control
• Biological need for safety will come from a different place

80. Old type of leadership
• Top-down, trickle down economics
• Someone creates blueprints
• The blueprints may no longer be relevant
• Prioritization of large enterprises
• Prosperity highly concentrated

81. Problems with old style
leadership (Jack Ma)
• Old sets of blueprints yields economic woes
• Top-down, trickle down ideology rewards very few
• Large MNCs, fossil fuel, and warfare complex
• Money not spent on citizens
• $14 trillion wasted on warfare in past 3 decades
• Benefits of globalization distributed unevenly
• Complexity, creativity, and vitality did not emerge
• Specialized subcomponents fail to produce emergent complexity

82. “Globalization should be inclusive
globalization. In the past 30 years
globalization was controlled by 60,000
big companies. 100 years ago
globalization was controlled by several
kings and emperors. What if over the
next 30 years we can support 6 million
businesses.”
-Jack Ma

83. New type of leadership
• Based on bottom-up emergent complexity
• Organic philosophy. Embraces diversity of nature.
• Better able to address range of problems
• About inclusivity, working together, sharing prosperity
• No top down blueprints. No blueprint makers.
• Complexity, creativity and vitality emerge from the bottom
• Based on simplicity. Based on generalizable units.

84. “My last advice that every government
should pay attention to in the next 30 years..
critical for the world. Every technological
revolution takes about 50 years.. Make the
technology inclusive. 30 years old (Internet
generation). Pay attention to the company
with less than 30 employees.”
-Jack Ma
30-30-30 Strategy

85. When emergence thinking
spreads…
• Alters mindset of next generation
• When consciousness shifts, culture shifts
• Happier and healthier society
• Small businesses will prosper and proliferate
• Diversity, creativity, and vitality

86. Architecture of an
innovation workshop
A highly networked
enterprise with
geographically dispersed
arrangements of localized
generalists

87. Who will lead the next
phase in our evolution?

88. • The generalists. The age
of hyperspecialization is
ending.
• The charismatic
connectors.

89. Which practices will solve
our biggest problems?
• Higher and smoother bandwidth
communication across boundaries
of all kinds
• Mobbing and working together with
teams of individuals with diverse
perspectives

90. Positive Change,
an example
The Finnish government is
reinventing itself through the
application of design
thinking

91. Connect with me
Dan Feldman
@danielrfeldman
http://www.agileandbeyond.co/