Chaos… Variance… Volume

John’s Maeda’s Liu Lecture at Stanford was, as expected, excellent.

Three themes from his words and thoughts are buzzing around my head:

  1. Chaos:  when we think about organizations, we want to create order, right?  Maybe.  When is chaos a desirable state of being?  Good question.  Perhaps it’s when chaos begets…
  2. Variance: weird ideas are the stuff of breakthrough innovations.  If you’re not creating weird stuff, you’re not producing those sixth-sigma disasters/opportunities which light the way to new paradigms.  To create variance, you need to do stuff in high…
  3. Volume: the way to create a few great things is to crank out a lot of bad crap.  As Bob Sutton says, "…the most creative people don’t have higher hit rates, they just do and make more
    stuff."

Buzz buzz.

3 thoughts on “Chaos… Variance… Volume

  1. I should suggest including “speed” in mr. Maeda’s list. Although is partially related to chaos, i believe that doing lots of things and doing-them-now prevents yourself from ghost’s always present when creating anything. As in Goya’s engraving “El sueño de la razón genera monstruos” (The dream of reason creates monsters). Think less, do more, do it now, then sit back and see what’s good for.
    Sorry my english, congratulations on your blog.

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