Warren R. True
Chief Technology
Editor—Pipelines/Gas Processing
National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones is making the rounds these days talking to companies about creativity. A couple of weeks ago, he took his show before a conference hosted by Invensys, an automation, controls, and process solutions company that serves several industries, including oil and gas.
Jones calls "creativity" the latest "business buzzword." And it's not surprising, he says, given how our "world is altering at an ever-quickening pace." Today's challenges, another industry buzzword, don't always respond to last month's solutions.
Creativity, however, requires "the ability to see the ordinary as extraordinary," says Jones. In other words, vision is at the heart of the creative process.
But businesses are not in the creative business, are they? Their business is to make money, right? Jones's message suggests that's just the kind of myopia that cripples creativity and, by implication, companies.
Invensys' Pres. Mike Caliel told me that his company's vision employs money as a tool, a means, not an end. How refreshing, if true.
Perspective
Jones is quick to acknowledge the traditional dichotomy between art and life. "Art is creative; business is practical. Art is frivolous; business is serious."
His point is that the same process behind his award-winning photographs can and should be employed to find solutions to many business problems, uh, sorry, challenges.
That process requires clarity of vision; that clarity requires not technique but attitude—"curiosity, openness, and celebration." It's an attitude that leaves one open to possibilities not otherwise obvious, open to seeing.
In his presentations, Jones exemplifies this approach by showing a series of photographs of the same subject, always moving from the merely adequate, routine, factual image (which most of us would be proud to have shot) to the unique, fresh, and insightful.
Jones believes, and his work evinces, that the extraordinary and finally the true lie beneath the ordinary, the surface. Sometimes it takes considerable effort; always it takes the attitude of openness he characterizes as the essence of creativity.
To a company like Invensys, this is a critical message because it is a company built on and driven by finding solutions to customers' problems. For these solutions to work and for them to last and be built upon, the company's people must literally see past—envision—the immediate and concrete.
The two articles that make up this issue's special Pipeline Report (beginning on p. 50) describe the results of efforts based on someone's vision. Developers had to remain open (attitude) to unusual or unconventional or untried directions. The goal in each case was to improve knowledge, increase information.
Centrality of vision
There's nothing terribly new or earth-shaking about Jones's ideas. Aesthetic theory and painters, sculptors, and writers have recognized the centrality of vision for centuries.
Jones's approach is really just a variation on the standard opening lecture in many college sophomore literature classes across the US: What is art (literature), and what do its best examples try to do for us? (Not teach us; show us. Good art is never didactic.)
Vision, again; and communicating that vision.
And what Jones wants his photographs to show is the truth of a given situation. Not The Truth; but a truth. Just like art. There are several truths; Jones calls them "answers." We just have to maintain an attitude of openness and alertness to see them.
What's unusual for Jones is the setting: the business world, that part of the modern world that (at least in the West for the last 200 years) has been so antagonistic to the artistic perspective.
In fact, business sections of bookstores and textbooks for MBA classes are full of accounts of companies and individuals who had the kind of attitude Jones describes.
