The Art Academy of Cincinnati - Education to be Radical, Relentless, & Radiant

 

I was deeply honored to give the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. These last few days, I am now continually reflecting upon the unique and powerful proposition this school makes to the world. There is no other school like it. 

The only other college to which I can compare it is the mythical Black Mountain College of the 1960s that produced revolutionary minds such as John Cage.  To plagiarize someone else’s story, the Art Academy (AAC) doesn’t merely graduate artists or designers, it graduates the critical but hard to find team member of every successful business: 

"there are three kinds of people you want to launch a business: the person with the idea, the person with the financial sense,  and the person who makes you say 'what the fuck?' The last is the person who can rip ideas apart, remix them, and flip everything upside down to generate breakthroughs that no one else can see."  

Blackmoutain College w/ Buckminster Fuller

The last kind of person is particularly hard to find. Many schools can teach people to become accountants or to be entreprenuers but no school teaches students to be intellectually rebellious and operationally radical.  Except for the Art Academy of Cincinnati. No joke. It is even in their mission statement.

Everyday books about Innovation, Design, and Economic Disruption churn through billions of dollars in annual publishing sales. Parallel to the publishing industry, countless institutions argue they offer an education that will transform students into innovators who will change our world.  But do these industries actually generate the change-makers we seek?

In the last ten years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time at the world’s best universities as a speaker, student, or instructor including Oxford University, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon University – and these are indeed great schools.  Their students are brilliant and the faculty are more than competent. The programs are well funded and the students are nearly guaranteed the security of a well-paying job upon graduation.  These schools also attract people who already have a history of success - when Elon Musk attended Stanford, he had already earned degrees in Physics and Economics. Yet I have never encountered another school that transforms unknown students into true innovators.  In fact, when I recently taught Design Thinking at an East Coast top-tier MBA program, my students complained the entire time about the lack of clear directions and the constantly shifting parameters within the course requirements.  I have since learned that this complaint is exceedingly common within MBA Design degrees. These programs are forcing square people through intellectual circles and many graduates come out very little changed. 

2017 Commencement Address

Do all art schools impact students to think so differently?  I'm not sure... there are many art schools in the world. My sister is a student at SCAD. I have friends as RISD. When I was a teenager, I lusted for the attention of the San Francisco Institute of Art (SFAI) and the School of the Chicago Institute of Art (SCIA).  Unfortunately, in 1999, I had so little money for college, I did not even have the 50 dollars to apply to any of those programs let alone all of them.  With little hope to attend any college, I drove my broken-down ‘91 Geo Prism to the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a Portfolio Review Day in mid-October, to present my high school artwork to various colleges.  San Francisco was there, as was Chicago, and at least a dozen others.  Chicago offered a partial scholarship on the spot, which was incredible… yet, as I did not have the money to apply, let alone to live in Chicago, it held more symbolic meaning than opportunity. I was nonetheless motivated at that moment to find a way to go to art school.

Weeks later I happened to cross paths with some artists, Aaron Butler and Christopher Daniel.  Aaron worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and pioneered the experimental music group, Dark Audio Project, while Chris was a metal sculptor who went on to found the extraordinary and thriving Blue Hell Studio. They both held Art Academy ties, and with their encouragement, I decided to do everything possible to earn a scholarship. I applied only minutes before the deadline, in person, submitting my application in a massive wooden box crafted from an old PA system pulled from a dumpster in Kentucky (at Aaron’s suggestion that I make the physical application somehow stand out). As a mediocre student in high school, I had only applied to one other school at the time – the globally exceptional design school of the University of Cincinnati, DAAP – and I was not accepted.  The Art Academy took a chance on me, offered a scholarship to cover more than half of tuition, and I will be forever grateful.  Notably, after later graduating from the Art Academy, I received a full scholarship to DAAP for graduate school.

Art Academy of Cincinnati

Visiting AAC this last weekend was not only nostalgic – it was inspirational.  The Art Academy is a weird place. It consistently takes chances on people like me. It is a community of outsiders. It pushes them to build expertise on the ability to make something new  – which is not typical, considering most degree programs demand students acquire knowledge on a longstanding subject or methodology. It pushes students to invent new models of production, new identities as artists, and to take life to the frontier of possibility.  Graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati do not need books on creative problem solving, they need wicked problems where all others have failed.  If the Art Academy has a flaw, it is a simple fact that they do little marketing or high-profile partnering, and consequently, the world knows little about this school amid an insatiable demand.  The Art Academy of Cincinnati is not a diamond in the rough – it is a silent A-bomb in the exosphere.

My life has changed much since I attended the Art Academy. I am writing this blog entry while on a flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow morning, I will run a series of design strategy workshops for a Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley to explore new investment models for Artificial Intelligence. Since attending the Art Academy, I have lived in multiple countries, built companies, and am fortunate that my abilities to tackle entrenched problems in new ways are continually in demand. When I think of the year I started college, 2000, my life is now very different from the future that was most likely ahead.  Though I have my fair share of life challenges, I have a wonderfully creative and satisfying life. It has been a hard journey, but I credit the faculty and students of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. While most colleges chart a path for your future, the Art Academy provided a compass to guide me through the deep woods of the unknown.

It takes an artist to paint a picture

This last year I had the fortune to meet author Anjali Sachdeva, who in 2018 debuted an extraordinary collection of short stories in her book, "All the names they used for God." As much as we all want to ask Anjali about her process, I found that reading her biography was enough to glean some insight. Anjali has lived a full and robust life. She has travelled and lived around the world. She has spent years working with other writers to hone her skills. She is an active reader. She cares not just about the craft of story making, but she has made choices and pursued goals to live a remarkable life from which she can reflect and draw upon.  Her stories come from her, and she has thus invented herself from the bits and pieces of the world so as to create those stories. 

We can do this in business too.

In the last year, I was working with a team to design, build, and deploy custom software for a government office. Like most engagements, it started off with a request for a mobile app, but through engaging in a deep research and design process with robust client engagement - much more happened. 

We never built a mobile app, because after digging into the problem, it was obvious that the problem was just as much about the organization as anything else. We couldn't just say that though - rather, I made a point to travel widely across the country, meeting the people and spending time with them to understand the problems. I made sure we documented these engagements, presenting our work to the client, taking them on the journey too.

We made some software, but better, we delivered and approach and an architecture for change, working closely with the client to lead them on a journey of self discovery and unlocking a range of interventions. The outcome was profound. 

Higher levels of leadership began to discover that they had an internal vision for how their organization could work, leveraging modern technologies and values, to create faster and more effective outputs. The business grew and the work expanded.

And here is the thing I realized:

Leaders often know what they want, but sometimes they need a guide to help them articulate it to everyone else. Especially in a government agency. Federal hiring practices tend to hire the same kinds of people, with the same kinds of background, over and over again. They need someone with sufficient outsider status, but insider language, to help break open the organization and paint the sky a new color.

On another occasion, I once crafted a service blueprint of an entire organization to identify where and how our cloud software will function to change the company. Upon presenting the image, the COO boldly spoke aloud to say, "for the first time, it's like everyone in the room can see everything in my head."

Day after day, this man had been trying to communicate this organizational design to his staff, and yet we managed to achieve it within a matter of minutes. This is not a poor reflection on the COO, but rather demonstrates the challenge to create and live a great story. 

We are not really taught in school or in many career fields how to tell a story. We are instructed on how to relay information with clarity. As children we might be asked to write a story, but rarely have teachers taught how to create one. When you learn to paint, you learn about color, form, and must look at paintings - over and over again. Painters are taught more than technique and materials, but learn about the legacy and personalities of painting. They learn the biographies of painters and trade stories about profound, world changing exhibitions. They learn to create a different world.  

We who make software, algorithms, robots and cars - the hard tackle of 21st century industrialism - could learn much from those artists and writers.

Better science by exploring metaphors

Brewing with champagne yeast. Beverage and music production by Mitchell Sipus

Brilliant campaigns and sharp insights are not tied to rational processes. Business schools overlook this. We train young minds in rigorous and highly structured analysis, and yet, the ability to identify the uncanny and seize it is more frequently tied to open dialogue, fast moving conversations, and slow periods of reflection. In the meanwhile, we do not educate our MBAs to meditate or to work through metaphors.

I once read in Ray Kurzweil's How to create a mind, that Einstein wasn't so much a strong mathematician, but had a strong ability to think through metaphors. Kurzweil described Albert Einstein as a man who would read voraciously and daydream, but unlike most of us, would carry the imagined scenario many steps forward into the realms of abstraction. Once he these dreamlike scenarios were far and distant from reality - he would begin to analyze them, reverse engineering them into plausibility. He didn't do better math - he just did better at dreaming.

Over the last five years I have worked on this technique. While working at the EPA, I built rich metaphors for the organization as a car on a race track and as a dust storm on the moon (yeah, I realize, it doesn't have dust storms). I pushed these metaphors hard, imagining scenarios where the wheels fall off or static electricity evolves into a cosmic disturbance. And then I began to work backwards and sideways, repositioning these extended metaphors and translating them into something real. Sometimes it created value. Sometimes it did not. Sometimes it just gave me a headache. But when I injected the outcome of the effort into daily work - it always had repercussions. My colleague Ben Wilman and I did some great work at the EPA, and I suspect this was part of it.

In the video above, I am creating a metaphor. I was brewing hard seltzer at home and started to film the settlement of the yeast as it interacted with diamonnium phosphate,  a yeast nutrient. Through the camera lens, I found the interaction of the champagne yeast and the nutrient somehow romantic and extraterrestrial. I wrote some music and applied it to the imagery.

What is this? I do not know? How will it shape the next steps in the scientific process of alcohol production that I otherwise am constantly measuring and locking away into a database? I do not know. But by and large, databases only enable greatness, they do not create it. Metaphors can unlock new worlds, whereas science can only study them.