Talent 1: Relentless curiosity

‘Curiosità’ is translated from Italian as an insatiably curious approach to life and unrelenting quest for continuous learning. It is the ability to constantly question yourself and others; the relentless pursuit of knowledge and truth, learning to ask better questions; the ability to solve the most challenging problems by keeping an open mind.

Leonardo believed that man is not divorced from nature, or any object from its surroundings. And that observation should be accompanied by reason and application. He saw this as a creative challenge. As Vasari put it, ‘he taught us that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands’.

Leonardo was intensely curious about everything he encountered. His incomplete notebooks are full of spontaneous, random drawings but few words, demonstrating an agile mind: observing, thinking, imagining – capturing new insights or fragments of invention, recognizing that future possibilities are unlocked by a better understanding of current phenomena, and then searching for more.

How does relentless curiosity drive creativity?

Our world is more uncertain than ever. change is relentless, technologies emerge at breakneck speed, and markets and behaviours are incredibly complex. Neuro-imaging can give us new insights into the mind and space travel is unearthing life beyond this planet. seeking to understand this world – at least partly – offers you the best clues to making a bigger difference in it.

Thinking from the future back helps you to challenge the conventions of today. Asking why is always a better starting point that asking how; understanding the context is a more useful place to understand a problem that the symptoms themselves; and developing a better product starts by understanding what people seek to do with it, rather than what it actually is.

Steve Jobs, a little like Leonardo da Vinci, has many talents. But like Leonardo’s linguistic weaknesses, Jobs readily admits that there are many who understand technology better than him. Yet he also sees this as a virtue, as it means he is not inhibited like others. Instead he takes a human perspective, challenging every aspect of design, usability and communication.

Meet any other entrepreneur – such as Richard Branson, for example – and they are intensely curious about you and your thoughts, about why things are as they are, and how they could be different. In Branson’s pocket there is always a small notebook full of scribbled notes, untidy pictures, questions and new ideas. Every situation, every person, every hour, he adds more to his thinking.

How can you be relentlessly curious?

It is easy to be so focused, that there feels like no time or space in which to think. Yet thinking is perhaps your most valuable use of time. The motivation to think does not come from others, but inside. It comes from being curious.

Take a notebook everywhere you go – small and without lines, so that it is more portable and less restrained. capture ideas and insights, and spend a few minutes every day reflecting on discussions and experiences. Then you can occasionally sit back and review what you have created. Look for patterns both obvious and not, and seek symmetry where there is currently none.

Sometimes it is easier to focus on one theme at a time, or to even force yourself to generate as many ideas as possible around that theme. This is sometimes referred to as ‘brainwriting’ – a personal brainstorm, unlocking your stream of consciousness. A few minutes of thinking time is the best possible starting point to being a creative person.

• Time and space (chapter 2) explores the places where no business has gone before.

shigeru Miyamoto (chapter 3) applies his curiosity to transform Nintendo’s games.

• World changing (chapter 4) responds to the shifting power in the world and the implications for innovation.

• Future back (chapter 6) explains how to stretch your people to be more curious.

• James Dyson (chapter 9) describes how running up sand dunes led to vacuum cleaners.

• Philippe starck (chapter 11) inspires us to stay crazy through creativity and design.

Talent 2: Seeing more

‘Sensazione’ is the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience. Of all these, da Vinci was most focused on sight, making ‘saper vedere’ – knowing how to see – the foundation of all his work.

Seeing more … understanding how objects relate to their context

Leonardo was not satisfied with his ability to depict physicality, and sought out the anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre to help him understand people and their motion even more closely. Torre was passionate about using the eyes in new ways.

Sight and perception

Da Vinci believed that the five senses were connected to a single point: the ‘senses communis’, located just behind the eye. ‘Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?’ he pondered in his notebooks, translated and reproduced as The Da Vinci Notebooks.

He considered sight to be the superior sense because it gives more context, adds perspective and enables scientific reasoning, and is therefore the foundation of creative talents.

Leonardo also believed in the idolum, the power that all things possess to give off both their physical shape and inner energy, and that only by looking more closely can you see the real intersection between an object and its surroundings.

Light and perspective

Perspective became a defining principle of Leonardo’s work, showing how objects relate to each other, and to the distance and angle at which they are observed. Geometry and mathematics became increasingly important to his art.

However, he did not believe art was a ‘desk job’. He believed in mingling with the bigger world, thinking big before small, believing that otherwise his detail could be in the wrong place. He recommended that artists walk alone in the countryside to more keenly appreciate the beauty of nature.

He became fascinated with all aspects of nature. Trees in particular mattered to him: he admired their structures and changing colours, and the way they interacted with light. The shadow of trees, he said, is as much about the light patches as the darker patches, and their vibrancy and transparency.

How does seeing more drive creativity?

We dive into problems and opportunities with little thought for either their context or indeed whether we are focused on the right areas. We are all too keen to understand people today, and maybe in the past, but less interested in things that they do not yet say they need, or for which words have not been created. We are comfortable seeking to make sense of our own world, but we lose confidence as soon as we enter a new space.

Opening up before closing down is key to innovation: exploring possible markets, existing or emerged; understanding possible future scenarios, rather than assuming one; considering non-customers as well as customers, because there must be reasons why they are not customers; and considering more ideas, options and potential solutions before making choices.

By considering different viewpoints, we can see an opportunity from different perspectives – as a customer, competitor, technologist, futurist, artist and more. By spending more time with customers, we can learn far more about their motivations and aspirations rather than just their needs and wants. By giving ourselves time to think big, we are more likely to find the best opportunities, rather than just better ones – to do the right thing rather than just do things right.

Thinking from the future back is perhaps the most useful of all perspectives, because it is without restraint, without prejudice, but with infinite possibility.

How can you see more?

Learn how to draw. Drawing unlocks your creative spirit like no other: it allows you to express ideas without the necessity of established words and meanings, to develop the ideas as you draw, to connect ideas that are usually addressed individually, to reflect this in a unique and personal manner, and to engage people more emotionally.

Above all, learn to draw with a stream of consciousness – with your ‘right brain’ rather than your ‘left brain’. Whilst the brain is more complex, in simple terms, the right side is more intuitive, spontaneous and holistic, allowing us to make connections and see the bigger picture. However, many of us are slaves to the left side (numbers, logic, structure and focus), which is important but can often limit creative thinking in the initial stages. ‘creativity’ emerges from the connection of both.

As you draw, use all your senses. Listen to sounds around you, articulate the most important ideas prominently and then connect supporting ideas around them. Think about the touch and smell, as well as sound and vision, describe them and how they make you feel. Remember sometimes that less is more, simplicity as well as detail. And above all, don’t feel embarrassed by your drawing skills!

• seeing things differently (chapter 12) encourages us to explore different worldviews.

• Deep diving (chapter 15) immerses you in the intuitive world of customer aspirations.

• Paul smith (chapter 17) reflects on quirkiness and how to embrace parallels and extremes.

• Co-creation (chapter 23) adds new ideas to business that you might never have thought of.

• John Maeda (chapter 27) uses graphic design to find simplicity in our complex world.

• Cai Guo-Qiang (chapter 45) encourages artistic experimentation to find genuine newness.

Talent 3: Thinking bigger

Da Vinci was able to think beyond his peers because he combined opposites and adjacent fields – art and science, man and machines, logic and imagination. This requires new ways of thinking – the ability to synthesize information in new ways, work in parallel at different levels and even hold two opposing views at the same time.

Leonardo was fascinated by the proportions of the human body. The Roman architect Vitruvius had previously related these to fundamental geometric principles, but Leonardo went much further, defining his symbolic drawing of the ‘Vitruvian Man’.

‘… Four fingers make one palm; four palms make one foot; six palms make one cubit; four cubits make a man’s height; and also one pace; and twenty-four palms make a man …’

He was obsessed with finding harmony, symmetry and balance: ‘the span of a man’s outstretched arms is equal to his height’ and ‘every man at three years is half the full height he will grow to at last’.

In mathematics, and in the arts too, two quantities (a and b) are in a ‘golden ratio’ if the ratio between their combined value (a + b) to the larger value (a) is the same as the ratio between the larger value (a) and the smaller value (b). The ratio is a mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887. Behind many of Leonardo’s greatest works lies this almost spiritual geometry.

His intellectual ‘border crossing’ was also evident in his mechanical breakthroughs. He explored the human body with meticulous dissections, learning from every muscle as if a masterpiece of mechanical engineering that could be applied on much larger scale in the physical world, from levers and pulley systems to visions of automation and flight.

Thinking bigger … Vitruvian Man and the Golden Ratio

How does thinking bigger drive creativity?

Reductionism, incrementalism and efficiency: the enemies of effective innovation in business today. With our heads in our spreadsheets, we focus on the minute details. We seek to improve sales, reduce costs or enhance performance by small percentages. We seek to optimize the things we currently do rather than do things differently, and we stick with the ideas we can quantify rather than those that are more difficult. Thinking bigger is about understanding people outside their boxes, our home market as the globe not our locality, and opportunities beyond the three-year plan. It is about understanding a person’s surroundings, and then the person; applications before products; attitudes before behaviours. And it is about having the imagination to stretch beyond what is known, comfortable or predictable.

Thinking from the future back is a better starting point, because everything is possible.

How can you think bigger?

The answer lies in this book. To stretch your imagination beyond reality to possibility, and then work backwards to understand how you could do more. To stretch not only in time, in terms of years ahead, but also in space, in terms of adjacent markets. Once you have stretched you can then connect it back to today – future back, now forward – to target an emerging market or leapfrog a convention.

Package your bigger thinking in more acceptable ways for people, for example by saying ‘let me propose a hypothesis’ rather than being dismissed for crazy, impractical ideas. Hypothesis-thinking is far-stretching but also credible – scientific, if you like – and gives you the opportunity to prove or disprove it, and at least explore it further.

Hold back on the spreadsheets. Use your imagination and intuition to reach new domains before seeking to analyse them in detail, rather than diving into the wrong ocean. Equally, once you have settled on a thinking space, evaluate it for the best opportunity areas – the best potential customers or products, for example – and then focus your creativity on what matters most.

• Virgin Galactic (chapter 2) tells us how a dream of space became reality in a few years.

• Tim Berners-Lee (chapter 12) thought bigger to reconnect the world through his web.

• Future scenarios (chapter 14) develops alternative futures to help make better decisions.

• context reframing (chapter 22) helps us to redefine situations in more powerful ways.

• Market shaping (chapter 36) recognizes innovations as just the starting point for change.

• Zaha Hadid (chapter 36) never stopped fighting to make her big ideas come true.

Talent 4: Making connections

Da Vinci had a deep appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things. This helped him to find new connections and combinations, and to open up whole new fields of science and philosophy.

‘Whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hand; and these are of such excellence that they present a proportioned and harmonious view of the whole, that can be seen simultaneously, at one glance …’

The Medici effect

Leonardo believed that an artist should not just copy nature; he should understand it, saying that a creative expression is only achieved by a total immersion in a task, finding harmony with the natural world in order to see its detail.

Not only did he revolutionize the use of perspective in art with the mathematical application of proportions, he also introduced a systematic approach to ‘immersing’ himself in the world of his subject. In this way he understood how life interacts with what surrounds it, and how it succeeds better when it is in harmony. Leonardo believed that an artist’s role was to hold a mirror up to nature.

‘He should act as a mirror which transmutes itself into as many colours as are those of the objects that are placed before it … Above all he should keep his mind as clear as the surface of a mirror.’

However, as a scientist, he also believed in questioning what appeared in his mirror, arguing that better understanding enables better judgement, and better art.

Leonardo only believed this was possible by staying in touch with real people – walking the streets, talking to people, observing their behaviour.

‘You should go about and often as you go for walks observe … the actions of the men themselves and of the bystanders.’

But he also said that observation was not enough, that understanding why people behave is more significant – how they are influenced by others and their surroundings:

‘… Consider the circumstances and behaviour of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh or come to blows with one another.’

Art and science

Most impressive of all was da Vinci’s convergence of art and science. His observations and drawings were ultimately the enablers of phenomenal scientific breakthroughs and innovations. But it was the purity of art rather than the limitations of academia that enabled him to achieve that. He demonstrated how to lift and draw great weights by means of levers, hoists and winches, or ways to pump water from great depths. He rejected conventional wisdom and accepted truths, preferring instead to trust his own eyes and interpretation.

How do connections drive creativity?

The best ideas are often a combination of smaller ideas, and indeed the best solutions for customers are usually a combination of various products and services. Therefore, seeking to solve the problem rather than creating a product is a far more connected approach to innovation.

Working with a wider range of partners enables you to access ideas, capabilities and customers that you would never have been able to alone – through open innovation, joint ventures or affinity brands. Rather than being restrained by specific capabilities, retain more flexibility and reduce risk in an ever-changing world. These connections extend to your customers too, collaborating – or ‘co-creating’ with them in new ways to develop ideas, produce and evaluate them, and even sell them to others.

Thinking from the future back gives us a bigger picture where we can see patterns and potential connections that are perhaps invisible day to day. consider parallel sectors that have similar challenges or different worlds altogether. Architects can learn from nature; banking can learn from retailing; public sector can learn from private sector, developed nations can learn from developing nations.

How can you make connections?

Take two different ideas and see how they can produce better ideas. If you want to think how social networks can work for you, then fuse ideas such as Facebook with something completely random, like a birthday cake. Think about the attributes of each – people, friends, profiles, photos, games, candles, icing, flavours, party, annual – and then connect some of them, such as real parties for online friends or a featured profile if it’s your birthday.

Talk to a person with similar challenges to you in a completely different market. If you are a bank trying to attract young people, talk to Apple or H&M. If you want to give your shoes more marketing buzz, see what you can learn from Disney or Bloomsbury (the publisher of Harry Potter books). If you want to understand the likely impacts of deregulation, track what happened in industries where similar events have already taken place.

If all else fails, try something completely different. Read a book about something you know nothing about. Watch a different television channel. Go for a walk in the woods, or browse in a shop you’ve never been in before. Look for ideas and connections to whatever you are working on.

• samsung (chapter 8) reinvented itself through a design language based on yin and yang.

• Extremes and parallels (chapter 17) drive radical ideas through unusual connections.

• concept fusions (chapter 26) brings the best ideas together to create better solutions.

• Going further (chapter 38) uses licensing to replicate ideas in adjacent markets.

• Lego (chapter 42) opened its research labs to the kids who can really play.

• IBM (chapter 47) uses ‘InnovationJams’ to bring people and partners together.

Embracing paradox … light and dark, shadow and sharpness

Talent 5: Embracing paradox

‘Sfumato’ in Italian suggests a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty. This gave da Vinci’s work a great sense of mystery or even uncertainty in the mind of others.

Intrigued by light, he saw it as the physical element that stimulated the eye, but also figuratively as what stimulated the mind:

‘Light is the chaser away of darkness. Look at light and consider its beauty. Blink your eye and look at it again; what you see was not there at first, and what was there is no more.’

As an artist he considered how to interpret where inner and outer light meet, which gave contrast to his paintings, but also depth to their meaning. His paintings demonstrate infinite graduations between dark and light. He understood the power of darkness as well as light, perfecting the techniques of ‘chiaroscuro’.

How colours mix and contrast, how colours split and give more meaning became his new obsession – he declared that ‘where there is most light the true character of a colour in light will be seen’.

The Laughing One

Sitting in the Louvre is perhaps his most famous creation, the Mona Lisa.

The painting – also known as ‘La Gioconda’, or ‘The Laughing One’ – is most famous for the mysterious quality of the subject, the elusive smile on the woman’s face, brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes.

Faces said everything to Leonardo. Not only anatomically, but in the way they reflected thinking, emotions, relationships and surroundings. He conveyed his beliefs in some of the greatest masterpieces. Of the portrait, Vasari said ‘The eyes had their natural lustre and moistness. The mouth joined to the flesh tints of the face by the red of the lips, appeared to be living flesh rather than paint. On looking closely at the pit of her throat one could swear that the pulses are beating.’

The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned became known as ‘sfumato’, or ‘Leonardo’s smoke’. Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux and the subdued colouring.

How does paradox drive creativity?

Paradox is the ‘big daddy’ of innovation. Finding ways in which to resolve a fundamental contradiction in people’s lives, where they want two opposite things but have to choose one, can be the catalyst for significant breakthroughs. How can you resolve their dilemmas?

Ambiguities lie all around us. Brands are often forced to compromise as they try to meet the needs of different audiences, creating average solutions or a whole range of features that many people don’t need or want. The small things, like the shading in Leonardo’s drawings, can make a big difference – particularly to the aesthetic qualities and the emotional engagement of customers.

Thinking from the future back allows us to address uncertainties by understanding how to reduce risk and concern. It helps us to see how small frustrations or imperfections can have big consequences in the longer term. It allows us to break free of the constraints that cause many paradoxes and create solutions, which we can then set about finding a way to make happen today.

How can you embrace paradox?

Seek out ambiguity in everything you explore – in the lives of customers, in product composition, in channels to market, in ways of making money and more. Look to the margins not the mainstream for ways in which people have adapted standard products and services to their own needs: the person who ties a ribbon around the suitcase because they all look the same, or deliberately makes their designer clothes look worn and dishevelled because it looks cooler than if they were new.

When listening to or researching customers, don’t ask them what’s good or what they want; focus instead on what’s not so good, or frustrating, and understand why. Probe their answers more deeply until you find some fundamental contradiction in their needs or in the solutions available to them. Understand how you could make it better.

Explore possibilities by asking questions to which there is no obvious answer (sometimes known as the ‘socratic method’). Of course, this could just seem like you are being difficult, so it is also worth adding that you understand that there is no obvious answer, but that it is still worth asking the question.

• Aravind Eye care (chapter 4) transforms sight in India with a non-profit healthcare model.

• creativity (chapter 7) uses the Jester to challenge your thinking and open your mind.

• Patterns and paradoxes (chapter 13) explores the world of paradoxes and possibilities.

• Rule breakers (chapter 18) challenges you to disrupt normality and embrace discontinuity.

• Alessi (chapter 29) reveals his secret formula for connecting function and form.

• Tesla (chapter 34) demonstrates that fast sports cars can also be environmentally friendly.

Talent 6: Courageous action

Da Vinci was not just a smart thinker; he had a bias to making things happen. Having an idea is one thing but proving it is another: scientific method is all about experimentation and continually testing to prove that the proposal is valid – or to learn through mistakes how to create a better solution.

Mathematics was central to Leonardo’s thinking. While much of his interpretation was intuitive, he saw analysis as supporting hypothesis, needing to make a leap of faith before proving it. He supported his proofs with repeated experimentation and only after such rigour did he trust his conclusions. He also found that new ideas often arose through deeper analysis and testing, and often took him closer to the origins of phenomena.

He brought all this together in his scientific four steps method:

1. Observing: Trusting your eye and other senses to understand the subject, its contextual surroundings and the influence they have.

2. Interpreting: Making sense of these observations and from them hypothesizing reason, which can be postulated as scientific laws.

3. Demonstrating: showing how factors such as mathematical proportion can be found in many different situations, and its implications.

4. Articulating: Testing the logic through repeated experimentation and visualizing the logic in pictures, diagrams, words or numbers.

Creative engineers

Leonardo designed incredibly sophisticated machines beyond anything that had been articulated before. However, his focus was not on the invention, but on the mechanical engineering that solved the problems or enabled new possibilities. He was less interested in devices, more in the processes behind them, and their applications that made people’s lives better.

His creative engineering created a new world of weights and forces, levers and pulleys, cogs and wheels. From this he created everything from a loom to spin wool to clocks that kept time. His understanding of propulsion led to the first designs for a bicycle; his insight into water displacement allowed him to imagine what a submarine could do.

Fly like a bird

His visions of flight were his most ambitious, fundamentally challenging what people at the time dreamed was possible. Examining motion through air, Leonardo studied the flight of birds to understand how their delicate structures were able to resist the force of gravity. He marvelled at the natural technology of wings and considered how he could replicate it:

‘The wing of a bird is always concave in its lower part extending from the elbow to the shoulder, and the rest is convex. In the concave part of the wing the air is whirled round, and the convex is pressed and condensed’.

He sought to understand not only the movement of objects in flight, but the movement of air as it passed by the object. By addressing the problem in reverse, he explored how air could be channelled to keep much heavier objects in flight – and ultimately to create flying machines.

How does courage drive creativity?

Thinking from the future back requires courage. A more conventional approach would be customer-centric, where the customer (or more often the customer research) says that something is wanted so therefore must be the right solution. Too much innovation is still based on the current articulated needs and paradigms of customers. But breakthrough requires stretch and challenge, perhaps collaboratively with customers, taking you beyond the safety zone of quantitative research, fusing insight, imagination and inspired implementation.

It is one thing to sit around having good ideas and another to make them happen. Test new ideas with experiments and prototypes, either physical builds or computer-generated graphics. Use this testing approach to learn and improve the designs, build commitment from stakeholders, and engage customers and partners.

Few of us are confident in our drawing capabilities, less still in our model-making skills. But we can all be tremendously inventive when we try. Draw pictures, cartoons or diagrams of your ideas, rip out pictures and slogans from magazines, and build collages to give a sense of the look and feel of a new idea. They might look ridiculous, but they help you to then describe your new possibility far better than words.

How can you act courageously?

Test and challenge all of your assumptions. Apply it to real situations and consider how it would work, if it’s a product, when and where would people buy it from, who the competition would be, and what price it could demand. Ask customers, colleagues and partners, friends and relatives: they don’t need to be an expert to have a view – it is better if they bring different perspectives.

Make things happen. Draw your pictures, stick them on the wall. If you are working as a team, consider recruiting an artist or cartoonist who can capture all the best ideas as spoken or developed, and create a visual record of the evolving ideas. Make models – even the most amateur combination of cereal boxes and toilet rolls is good. Engage people with it – ‘imagine this is a 60-centimetre LCD screen, and this is a body sensor’, or whatever.

Learn from failures (yours and others’) and find ways to make it better. Persevere, keep trying, each time getting a little closer to your dream, and to a practical solution. Enjoy the journey, not just the result. If the idea is good enough, the reality will be worth the effort.