Institutionalization

Daydreams are among those things that should be allowed virtually all of the time. Schools are the first institutions that come to mind that squelch this sort of behavior. Another is companies whose brilliant, irascible and visionary founders are gone.

I was watching the movie "The Right Stuff" for perhaps the third time this year. It occurred to me that the sound barrier was broken by people who were driven by the desire to accomplish a goal that required a large number of people working together mostly without the kind of rules that are now imposed upon those kind of endeavors. The Manhattan Project might be another example.

The Walt Disney Company, for whom I worked, is one of those places that thrived under a man who has been called both genius and fascist. However, there was no question about the direction of the many projects he initiated. There was no committee that could spend lots of money in meetings that would decide nothing and produce only more meetings. Mr. Disney (who was long gone before I got there) would come to see what was going on and decide then and there if a direction was what he wanted and tell such to the designers. Incidentally, those designers were the ones who built models and then went to the field to build attractions in the parks. Far fewer people were responsible for far larger things.

After Walt Disney died, there was a slow progression toward making up for Walt's vision by adding many more people in the decision process. Supposedly it created checks and balances but instead it diluted responsibility and squelched creativity. Responsibility and creativity go hand in hand. As an institution, no one could pick up his responsibilities because no one had the vision and the trust of his employees in that vision. I fear that this sort of thing could happen to Apple when Steve Jobs is gone. We saw a bit of this when he was ousted from his own company. Pixar has been lucky indeed in that someone like Mr. Jobs has shepherded them into the big time.

Ideas are the things that drive innovation such as these examples. Daydreaming drives those ideas. But, often when such ideas are working well and those involved want to keep the success going, institutions are constructed in an effort to codify the process that led to success in the first place. once some creative or innovative process is codified, that which led to the really cool idea is smashed. The whole damn point is that the rules were broken! If you play this by the rules all you get are rules.

Places like the Lockheed Skunk Works thrived because they were making up the "rules" as they went along. Then broke them as they needed to. That is how the SR-71 come about. There was a big idea and , with slide rules, mind you, they built an airplane that is still extraordinary.

I guess that what I am trying to do is convince both you and myself that rules and the institutions that enforce them must acquire a deep wisdom about when the institution must back off. Creativity is inherently messy. It must remain messy. All of the things that drive creativity are emotional: the desire for great success, the need to help others, the need for love and attention and perhaps just to show off. There is no logic to it. That is why it works better outside of a management matrix.

Bubble

There is a mesa standing among other mesas in New Mexico. On this particular one I have a structure that is a sort of a bubble rising from the flat surface of the mesa.  This structure is a large, perhaps the size of a football field, Sculpture Studio constructed of stainless steel arches that span in  gentle curves and support movable transparent and opaque panels that can shade or allow the sun to penetrate. The apex of the bubble is about 40 feet above the ground. There is a crane that runs along  a beam in order to move heavy sculpture. The foot print of the studio would describe an oval so that there are no vertical walls.

The Studio would be a place that aspiring and established artists could come to for months at a time at no expense in order to talk and produce work without the interruptions that daily practical concerns impose on one. A metaphorical bubble. Those who would participate could interact as they wish and would have use of a pilot and airplane (located on the private airstrip on the mesa) to come and go as they please.  All of the necessary tools would be available to make the art conceived there.

This is a Daydream that I had about 30 years ago and has not yet dissolved. The power of this Daydream should have been enough to propel me to find some way to accomplish a small part of it. This is the pain of some Daydreams. The ones that are so close to the heart that they do not go away. That by their very nature fall into that "impossible" category. But they are the ones that we so dearly want to bear fruit. And yet, bigger thinkers than  I, like Ted Turner and Walt Disney, accomplished their ideas. 

How do these Dreams come about through some but not most people? The effort to accomplish big ideas seems to rely on ones ability to leverage many other people who for one reason or another want to participate in your big idea. I don't want to tell other people what to do. Perhaps this automatically counts me and many others out of seeing their big ideas become real.

Daydreams are not about compromise. Reality is largely compromise. It looks like for some of us, reality is impossible not Daydreams.