Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Common sense

I had the good fortune to be helping Productivity Alberta with a session they were running on innovation at the Dicky Days Innovation Conference at the Telus Spark.  First thing the Telus spark look awesome and a lot of fun.  The amount of good noise coming from the kids (small and big) touring said only one thing, they were having a lot of fun.  The second thing, I learnt something I had never considered before.  Common sense has its own perspective.  What is common sense now, may not have been common sense before.
The example I was given was that it was common sense a few hundred years ago that the world was flat.  Of course it was you only had to look out at the horizon and you could see it was flat.
This got me thinking how much "common sense" do we hang on to?/it  There is the adage that is slowly being worked away that mass production and scales of economy are cheaper than only making what you need.  How many other ideas of common sense am I carrying around?  The question that follows on is how do you challenge the current common sense; how do you create an environment where the current common sense can be challenged and a new common sense built?
Those are big questions, and ones for me to think some more on.

In reflection

Jim