You Need a Healthy Dose of Sfumato...

I continue to be intrigued by DaVinci's principle of Sfumato as it keeps coming into my life. Rereading Langer, I was amused by imagining my high school Chemistry teacher taking us through the Elements Table using phrases like "In most cases Oxygen is the 9th element of the... (I made that up - I also got D's in Chemistry). I'm sure I would have been much more engaged and learned more had we been able to play more in class and not memorize equations and other things that I truly believe ARE facts and not fodder for "mindful learning". I know I would have loved history much earlier had we been able to explore it and not memorize dates - or try to. But I see Mrs. Cates just seething if we answered her pedantic questions with "might have been" or "maybe"! Talk about a woman who did not embrace ambiguity! For several years I've been thinking what fun it would be to go back and do 6th grade all over again, this time learning and not memorizing. Between new teaching methods and the wisdom a creative adult could bring, it would be a blast! And it would open up so many new worlds.

I have a wonderful client who is letting us do a month long in-depth online ethnographic research project about 25-27 year old guys. The results are profound yet, as a typical client, he's chomping at the bit for results. "So what can we make of all this? What am I going to put in my ads? I don't think we're getting anything usable!" That was last week's concern. He's happy now - downright delighted - but you have to trust the process of research. You don't just open the can and insights spill out. Like facilitating ideation for new product work, you have to wallow in uncertainty and look for paradigms to break before the answers neatly fall out of your brain onto flipchart pads and computer keyboards.

I think this year instead of holiday greeting cards, I'll send my friends and colleagues a simple message... My holiday wish for you is....SFUMATO!

Chris

Sfumato & Endings

My cousin died this week. Not unexpected but still not expected. Anyone who has ever lost someone to a terminal illness lives with ambiguity and uncertainty about when, not if. When my dad was close to death last year I hesitated to make business travel plans and instead booked Florida trips to visit him on "gut feel," hoping my instinct nailed a weekend when he felt good.

This recent family event made me think of the anxiety around an impending death. Most of us are not prepared for what we need to do. It's not comfortable to ask what the dying wants for a funeral. And how often do we shop for caskets? A very recent memory of my cousin was when he and I were meeting the pastor to plan my aunt's (his mother's) memorial service and neither of us knew her favorite hymns -- or any hymns other than Easter and Christmas songs.

Authors have written about the mysteries of death. This wasn't a mystery. More a waiting game - a life lesson in Sfumato.