Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Can You Explore the “Blue Ocean” in Your Mind?

The profound mind is like the deep ocean.

Our mind is a complex system of complex systems and many of them are very difficult to understand and grasp. Like the blue ocean, often hard to predict, but full of treasures and mysteries. The thoughts piled with thoughts also like the waves cascaded with waves to push forward on the sea.

On a bigger scale, there is the thought that we are creating our experience moment to moment, bringing our reality into existence as we go, just like those thinking rivers and thought streams merging into the sea. It evolves all sort of thought processes and creates strong brainstorms. The point is that, as the digital professional today, can you explore the blue ocean in your mind?

Creativity flourishes in solitude: Just like the ocean, our mind can be calm and beautiful, but it is never still, creativity flourishes in such a solitude. With quietness, you can hear your thoughts, you can reach deep within yourself, you can stay focus. Human creativity has a quintessential facet with the integration of multiple thought processes. Thinking things differently and making imagination roll into reality is creativity. Creativity is not just about being knowledgeable because creativity is at the intersection of knowledge and imagination, and it is able to expand the boundaries of knowledge. Creativity happens in both unconscious and conscious level as well. Creativity is sparked by an implicit rather than explicit underbelly of knowledge. Creativity is all about change. Creativity is a higher level of communicating or perceiving the beauty and balance of natural creation, or what being called the law and source of the natural phenomena. Creativity can start on an unconscious level (just like many miracles happens under the sea), and then when ideas start shaping, it is brought into our conscious awareness. Therefore, it is important to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest, and innovative ideas can be incubated. It is surely not about “boiling the ocean,” but creating a healthy ecosystem for nurturing creativity and making innovation blossom.


Systems thinking, and thinking, in general, is more about discovery: Digital professionals today need to learn how to explore the variety of thinking in their mind, just like taking the adventurous journey to explore the blue ocean. You can dive into the underneath ocean for discovering unique creatures or precious treasures. Systems Thinking or thinking, in general, is about discovery, to understand things with widely different perspectives and what the holistic system looks like. It is the thinking process to understand the interconnectivity of parts and the whole and see the connections around us. It allows us to embrace uncertainty, identify interconnections and interdependencies, understand flows or the lack of them, and identify emergent business opportunities. It encourages looking at the wider aspects around any problem space and then understanding the effect of imposing boundaries within that space, in order to frame the right problem and solve it in a systematic way. Just like the journey to discover the deep ocean, System thinking provides better and more accurate understanding of the overall situation and problems, and hence better defining the problems and subsequently how you should go about solving them and in what sequence!


From linear to nonlinear thinking could be evolutionary: The concept of "non-linear" thinking as a concept is representative of what you term emergent properties. The digital world today with “VUCA” new normal is just like the blue ocean, not always calm, but full of turbulence and unpredictability. The reason linear thinking is in many cases, not so effective for solving the complex problem because there is always a temptation to use simple linear models to understand highly complex, nonlinear scenarios. So many people do not know how to connect the dots within complex systems, nor think dynamically, inclusively, and holistically. The route from linear to nonlinear thinking could be evolutionary. At the beginning, you often make a one-dimensional, linear, arithmetic concept of accumulation, but at the end, when you have gone through the mufti-dimensional analysis or process, nonlinear thinking helps you understand things systematically, to embrace the emergent changes or properties, comprehend dynamics, inductions or deductions, understand variables, interfaces, and interaction. One characteristic of nonlinear systems is that small changes can have large impacts. There is flexibility, abstract, and pliability in the concept of a system and system of systems.


The profound mind is like the deep ocean. Digital thinking is like the running river, or live steam, keep flowing, keep open, keep cleansing; keep touching, to prepare for merging into the sea. It allows the mind to seek new possibility or emergent trends. It requires that we move from mind SET to mind FLOW, from fixed mind to growth mind. What is needed right now is continuous change and flexibility of our mind, completely away from being set in a fixed way, to put another way, we have to learn how to explore the blue ocean of the mind, adapt to the changes and take the journey of digital transformation as a discovery journey.






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