Metaversal Mining

I am reminded of the other meaning of openness – that of openness to new ideas, to new challenges and to play.

I don’t think that it is coincidence that some of the core ideas behind being creative use the same term as the discourse of truth. When was the last time that you played ? I don’t mean on a Nintendo playing Super Mario (yes I’m that old). I mean, really had unstructured fun with something or someone, where you tested boundaries in a naive way, where you threw an idea into the mix that was just plain silly, where you built something with no realistic use.

The last time that I remember was while struggling with a group project. We all had different points of view, everyone was compromising in order to retain group cohesion, we were all being pragmatic, but we were failing to reach the goal of producing an innovative exploration of systemic change in technical systems. We’d tried looking at theoretical analyses, historic studies, gap analysis, all sorts of approaches, but each came to a dead-end because one or more of us didn’t buy-in or because it was just plain dull.
So we started to play instead. Random ideas, quickly pitched ( a few seconds), silly things, we were laughing and having fun with it. We took one of the ideas, thinking ‘Well, we didn’t come up with anything great, but at least it’ll be fun’. Once we started working on it seriously it became more and more obvious that, in fact, the fun idea was actually quite a good one. We developed it and researched it to the point where we eventually found that a major international company had already sunk $10′s millions into developing the same idea to prototype. OK, we didn’t get there first but our hydrogen-powered fuel cell agricultural vehicle was born of openness to play and to new ideas.