Journey to Nuance - Fire Starter

From The Atlantic Blog -

The Key to Design Insights: See the World Differently by Luke Williams (click to view)

"There's a wonderful New Yorker article titled "The Eureka Hunt" (PDF). It's the story of a firefighter named Wagner Dodge who survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch in Montana in 1949. Thirteen other smoke jumpers died in the fire, but Dodge was saved by a brilliant insight. Fleeing for his life, he suddenly stopped running and ignited the ground around him. He then lay down on the smoldering embers and inhaled the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground. The fire passed over him and, after several terrifying minutes, Dodge emerged from the ashes, virtually unscathed."

I recommend reading the entire piece, it is very well done. My purpose in sharing the story is that I find the insight and quick thinking of Wagner Dodge to be inspiring. He was able to control his nerves, slow down and draw on his past experience/knowledge to save himself.
How often do we flail about in life or business looking for direction and safe passage. I find it an interesting pattern that if, like Dodge, we slow down, survey the situation, and draw on past experiences we are able to see the nuances in the crisis that then bring clarity. As someone who subscribes to the belief in an extremely personal transcendent God, I find that in these moments of quite/slowness the nuance can be directed or revealed. Maybe we need to slow down and survey our environment so as to not miss the nuance.

Journey to Nuance - Cupcakes

Cupcakes - From Graceful by Seth Godin

"The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor.

The third time, you might improvise and screw up.

Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can.

At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen.

Others merely plod along. They're cooks, not chefs.

A cook follows a recipe. A chef invents one.

We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs."

How do we become chefs? How do we move into the place where we can understand or create nuance? According to Mr. Godin it is time and repetition, "rinse and repeat". Until we have so embedded ourselves in the minutia that we see things that are hidden and so "self-actualize."

Youtube -> Matrix - He finally see it for what it is....

The Journey to Nuance - The Cloud

Observations on IT:
The IT segment has begun its slow march into the slough of commoditization. With the advancement and acceptance of cloud-computing and virtualization the CIO can now eagerly pass the IT grunt work to the Googles and Amazons of the world. The post-recession organization, big or small, is less apt to spend capital (financial or intellectual) making tactical IT decisions. They are seeking new direction, new inspiration, and new streams of income. Why focus on areas that are not core, are they in the IT business? No more will they be beholden to the disgruntled IT department - the systems that keep their business afloat are safely in the clouds, now the focus can be on using technology to enhance and complement their offerings.They can now seek the nuances that will make them, them.

The idea around the Journey into Nuance stems from a series of (what I like to think are providential) conversations that awoke me to a melody line in life, maybe all life. As we begin to master something we are able to improve/enhance/enlighten it by adding our own nuances. Our addition may not be original, but sort of an illumination of what was already there, just out of our site.