Built to Learn
Love, art, learning, play — there’s joy in these that doesn’t need to be explained or accounted for; they’re just worth doing for their own sake. And yet these activities often turn out to be the most fruitful.
Art prepares us for what we wouldn’t have thought to prepare for.
We play with stories and artifacts and eventually some of them will give us the insight or inspiration to make it through a crisis or recognize a new opportunity.
Open Conceptual represents the principle that an enterprise can be artistic too: capable not just of producing moments and objects of insight and beauty but embodying those moments and being the object itself.
People either shrugged at or scorned the idea — just as people have always treated revolutionary ideas. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Although formally a “business” idea, I pursued it not for projected profits but for the challenge and the education it provided.
What I learned almost immediately was that even if I was wrong — even if the thing turned out to be a failure — I was on the way to failing in a way that generated more benefits than if I’d just done something conventional. I had to read and think broadly and deeply about organizations, creativity, decision-making and motivation; it led me to ask questions and acquire knowledge and skills I otherwise wouldn’t have even thought to develop — because,
Art prepares us for what we wouldn’t have thought to prepare for.
So when conversations about emerging challenges and trends — e.g. social media, open innovation — lead to higher-level questions about purposes and values, we’ve already navigated that space and learned how to work with any problems and opportunities presented.
In fact, that “higher level” domain of questions and discoveries is where Open Conceptual is specially designed to thrive.
Always looking for what’s newest — or what’s about to be the next newest opportunity before anyone else sees it. Always asking new questions, better questions, more fruitful questions. Always looking for smarter and more sustainable ways to answer.
Those are habits and skills that not everyone can afford to practice. Doing a job over time takes a lot of things for granted. Open Conceptual is the one place where nothing is taken for granted, except this dual principle:
There are exceptions to every rule, and rules for every exception.
It’s about aspiring to a higher level of accountability, deeper meaning and broader vision. It’s a way to constantly rethink how we think, making sure we don’t fall into any comfortable habits or assumptions.
It’s a role that hasn’t even been conceivable before now.
Just like finance, marketing, HR, IT, logistics, or any other support role, conceptual work involves its own unique set of practices. Knowledge here is less important than the ability to find, understand and organize it.
Concept development isn’t treated distinctly from other disciplines yet, but what better way of mastering this über-creative discipline — bridging art, science, commerce and social entrepreneurship — could there be than creating not just the discipline itself but an enterprise that embodies it?
That’s Open Conceptual: a proposition, a hypothesis, an enterprise that’s built to learn and bringing us with it.
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