Back to Basics - 2040's Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 82
Issue 82, Nov 17, 2022
How often have we been reminded to get back to basics? We live in an overprogrammed, overcommunicated, overstimulated world. Recently several cultural threads caught our attention, and when combined, remind us of how the basics in art and culture can have a positive effect on ourselves, our workplace, the organizational community, and society writ large in counterpoint to high-tech. Although we have been seduced to worship technology over the past few decades, there is much to be said for balancing science with the humanities.
Take Five Senses
We often write, including in our book The Truth About Transformation, about the power stimuli have on our subconscious mind, which in turn influences how our conscious mind feels, how we act, communicate, and respond. External sensory stimuli that we touch, see, smell, taste or hear can immediately take us back to the past and evoke the emotions of those moments in time. They can warm our hearts, make us hungry, clear our minds to thinking about a problem or challenge, initiate our creativity and cause us to feel the necessity to reciprocate.
We often forget, overlook or are too busy to take a momentary pause to consider how we are being sensorially influenced and why.
Sight: Does a stark white room make us feel comfortable … or does our active imagination immediately cause us to look around to see if we are in a straitjacket?
Communication: When write a note to ourselves do we notice our day-to-day vocabulary has suffered when a word or phrase we are seeking is only remembered by the acronym or emoji we use in text?
Sound: Do we recognize how we are suddenly in a good mood or become melancholy when we hear a certain song or type of music?
Overload: Do we feel a necessity or compulsion to engage with the hundreds of impersonal (acting as personalized) emails we get in a day?
So here goes with a few provocative ideas that can improve the outlooks and aspirations of your workforce. And these ideas are quite simply going back to the future with small moments of beauty.