Chances are, as an upwardly mobile professional, there have been meetings or other situations where you look around and wonder, “Am I the smartest in the room?” This could be driven by the disconnect between participants, slower motion staffers or by the left-field comment from someone else sitting around that table.
Are we really becoming less smart? Is this the result of decreasing access to higher education? Do we really need to have everyone working on the same problems?
Nope. Let’s play the blame game for a moment.
We spend more hours at work, and less time outside enjoying things. The visual stimulation has gone from mother nature to big brother. More time with technology, less time with colors, motion and human interaction.
By decreasing the time we spend “in freedom” to consider wicked problems (which may range from personal frustration with the location of the washer/dryer set in your home to the mistiming of traffic lights for efficient and safer ush hour traffic progression), we spend less time with other people. The time we do spend, true human nature emerges… back to our elementary schools selves, looking for acceptance by our mates and showing the teacher we have all the answers.
Think about your typical day. What gets your attention more often: an electronic device or other people? When do you leave your cube or office? Where do you go most often during the week? Who is able to capture your attention?
The question not asked above is why? Why have we decided it’s more prudent to type a text than call someone? Why do we literally look at black and white font all day? Why have we put down our colors?
Yes, our colors… as in pens and markers, chalk and colored pencils. Visual interactions with shapes and diagrams contribute more to learning and problem-solving than anything else. But we are “grown out of that” by the time we reach high school. We are being trained to think like the electronic machine — the very one that scares employees who think AI will take over all of the jobs and leave nothing for humans to do or earn.
Getting back to the heart of the topic, everything about the niceties of society comes from good manners. We get annoyed when people don’t put their grocery carts back in the corral or at the front of the store once their car was unloaded. That’s bad manners.
We are pleased when we see others at a restaurant appropriately placing their napkins on their laps as soon as they are seated. That’s good manners.
But wait. Remember when you used to draw on anything that would hold the crayon’s color? When you were a toddler, it could be (cringe) the wall or sidewalk. When you were in grade school, it was coloring books. As a teenager, it could have been the back of a paper placemat while out to dinner… and in college, it could have been the paper napkins.
There’s a book, The Back of the Napkin, that brings creativity back into your work life. It talks about the visual thinking process, one that has been lost or systemically removed for many people in the work force. Pen colors are presented that categorize different types of thinkers. Shapes and imagery help spark creative problem solving.
We need to get back to looking, seeing, imagining and showing. We need to use all the colors to design solutions. We need to follow some processes for change, but not by eliminating some of the “fun” and uniqueness of our interactions. This does not mean everything needs a slide deck pitch; rather, variations on the text-only world that now surrounds us. (Why do you think emojis are so popular? Duh - the desperate attempt to re-integrate color in our new small-screen monochromatic world.)
And yes, while we may really be the smartest in the room, while the others nearby are playing catch-up, we can draw on the back of a napkin (or doodle on the agenda for the meeting or consider the plating scheme for what we make for dinner) and get away from all this black and white font stuff.
Stop wasting time coloring within the lines — then you won’t be rolling your eyes as often if some of your energy is helping define the game rather than playing theirs. (PS - this ties exactly to Generate Staying Power, which is Day 6 from The Best Ways To Focus Business Days.)
Heather M. Hilliard is Principal and Chief Strategist for R. Roan Enterprises, LLC, a professional services consulting firm supporting businesses in pointed areas of expertise as well as with individuals for targeted projects or career development. For more articles like these, visit her posts on LinkedIn or on G+.
