The Innovation Show

Framing is a cognitive muscle we can strengthen to improve our lives, work and future. Today’s book shows us how.” We heartily welcome back the author of "Framers: Make Better Decisions In The Age of Big Data", Kenneth Cukier Find Kenneth here: http://www.cukier.com @kncukier https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/05/11/imaginative-framing-is-the-key-to-problem-solving

Framing is a cognitive muscle we can strengthen to improve our lives, work and future. Today’s book shows us how.” We welcome the author of Framers: Make Better Decisions In The Age of Big Data Kenneth Cukier Find Kenneth here: http://www.cukier.com @kncukier https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/05/11/imaginative-framing-is-the-key-to-problem-solving  

52 years ago, our guest foresaw and implemented the foundations for the world’s first trillion-dollar organization. Back then, Visa was little more than a set of unorthodox convictions about organization slowly growing in the mind of a young corporate rebel. Today, according to the Visa 2019 annual report, payments and cash volume for the year was a staggering $11.6 trillion dollars, transactions processed on Visa’s networks totalled $138.3 trillion dollars and the year saw some 3.4 billion Visa cards in operation. Our guest is the man who imagined this reality, who had a once-deemed-impossible vision 52 years ago, a vision which has become a concrete reality today.  He is a man who has a different view on what the next 50 years can deliver, but that vision will require a radical shift in mindset for every single one of us. His book, "One from Many" is much more than the story of the scarcely believable events that brought Visa into being and led to its extraordinary success.  It is also the story of an introverted, small-town child, passionate to read, dream, and wander the woods, the youngest of six, born to parents with but an eighth-grade education.  It is a story of crushing confinement and interminable boredom in school and church, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how institutions profess to function  and how they actually do; what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them. It is about three compelling questions arising from that awareness that came to dominate his life: Why are institutions, everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs? Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the institutions of which they are part? Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray? This is the story of a lifelong search for the answer to those questions, which had everything to do with the formation of Visa. It is a story of harbouring four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper; ego, envy, avarice, and ambition; and of a great bargain, trading ego for humility, envy for equanimity, avarice for time, and ambition for liberty. It is a story of events impossible to foresee, that sent (a man of 92) him at 55 on (a journey) an odyssey more improbable than Visa, and infinitely more important. At 91, he is still in the midst of that odyssey Beyond all else, it is a story of the future; of something trying to happen; of a four-hundred-year-old age rattling in its deathbed as another struggles to be born.  It is not just the story of today’s guest, although he is central to it. It is not just your story, or my story, (although you} although we are both in it. It is a story of everyone  A story of us all. It is such an immense honour to welcome the founder and CEO Emeritus of Visa and author of the pioneering work "The Birth of the Chaordic Age" and its updated version "One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization", Dee Hock

There are reasons we are the way we are; we are optimized for other purposes, not the least of which is thinking in stories not logic. So we did something else instead: we taught rocks how to think. Intrigued? So was I and I’m delighted to host the man who’ll answer this strange question in Act III of “Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It” Byron Reese, welcome back to the show Find Byron here: www.byronreese.com

We're often told that humans make bad decisions and that more data is better. But this is backwards: people are good at decisions precisely because we use mental models and can envision new realities outside of data. Great outcomes don't depend so much on the final moment of choosing but on generating better alternatives to choose between. That's framing. It's a cognitive muscle we can strengthen to improve our lives, work and future. Today’s book shows us how. We welcome the author of Framers: Make Better Decisions In The Age of Big Data Kenneth Cukier. Find Kenneth here: http://www.cukier.com @kncukier https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/05/11/imaginative-framing-is-the-key-to-problem-solving

Today’s book is about the impossible, but it starts with the invisible.  Over the four decades, an unlikely collection of men and women  have pushed human performance farther and faster than at any other  point in the 150,000-year history of our species.  In this evolutionary eyeblink, they have completely redefined the limits  of the possible.  But here’s the stranger part: this unprecedented flowering of human  potential has taken place in plain sight, occasionally with millions  of people watching–yet almost no one has noticed. Today’s guest will explain why, he is a friend of the show and author of multiple titles and the focus of today’s episode is “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance”, Steven Kotler, welcome. More about Steven: https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/flow-blocker-quiz

It is a pleasure to welcome back the author of “The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”, Iain McGilchrist In this episode, we explore intuition, imagination and more. Find Iain here: http://channelmcgilchrist.com

Today we focus on ACT II of Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future and Shape It with Byron Reese Act II is set In 17th century France, the mathematical framework known as 'probability theory' is born—a science for seeing into the future that we used to build the modern world. We welcome back the author of “Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It” friend of the show, Byron Reese. Find Byron here: www.byronreese.com

In Part I of “The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World” Iain McGilchrist addresses the means to truth, in the sense of the faculties with which we are endowed for this task. He takes these to be: attention, perception, judgment, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and creativity. In each case, he looks at what either hemisphere contributes to the process. We don’t stand a hope of diving into each but I felt we should share some of your writing on attention and Perception before we focus today on some of the more philosophical chapters such as intuition. We touched on it on the last day, but for those who know your work! We will know how we attend to the work is of utmost importance to what and how we experience the world? “Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being. This raises a core question then, What is attention?

Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron Age iguanas? In today’s episode, our guest argues that we humans owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in.    Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, our guest shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, and predict—and eventually master—the future. He unravels our history as an intelligent species in three acts:   Act I: Ancient humans undergo “the awakening,” developing the cognitive ability to mentally time-travel using language Act II: In 17th century France, the mathematical framework known as 'probability theory' is born—a science for seeing into the future that we used to build the modern world Act III: Beginning with the invention of the computer chip, humanity creates machines to gaze into the future with even more precision, overcoming the limits of our brains We welcome back the author of “Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It” friend of the show, Byron Reese. Find Byron here: www.byronreese.com