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Embracing Openness

Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.

The Rotman issue is thus timely, and it is wise to (re-)frame the topic as “culture (and economy) of sharing,” as the foreword does:

“The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work between organizations and stakeholders are being rewritten: computation, storage and communication capacity – the basic means necessary to produce information, knowledge and culture – are now in the hands of every connected person worldwide (30 per cent of the world’s population of seven billion people.) The result: a culture of sharing powered by ubiquitous access to information that empowers stakeholders and demands radical transparency.

Unfortunately, many business leaders remain flummoxed in the face of stakeholders empowered by new tools that once seemed unimaginable: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Make no mistake, as your stakeholders become more adept at using these tools, they will demand that you become more open about your activities, and that you engage them in conversations that matter. With one billion new middle-class consumers set to enter the global economy in the next decade, the more you understand the new culture of sharing, the better off you and your organization will be.“

Amongst other contributions, the Openness issue features articles from management guru and Rotman dean Roger Martin and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, as well as interviews with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership, and Linus Torvalds, the godfather of Linux. (Full disclosure, it also includes an article I originally wrote for design mind, “Openness or How to Design for the Loss of Control”).

Only if you’re open, you can share and be shared with. And if you share, you shall receive the greatest benefit, the greatest gift of all – someone else sharing something with you: their knowledge, their networks, their passion, their ideas. It is worth noting that the TEDGlobal conference 2012 – committed to sharing “Ideas Worth Spreading” – in Edinburgh will be held under the theme Radical Openness: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open – manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity, and collaboration.”

My company, frog, is embracing Openness, too. We share our thinking with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter; more than 60% of our employees engage on Yammer in conversations that range from water-cooler topics to crowdsourced insights research firms would kill for; and design mind, the outlet you’re reading, is an open forum for all of our employees to publish their thoughts. We also recently launched SpeedMe, our own ‘speed-dating’ activity, to faciliate the bonding between new hires and ‘old frogs.’ In the words of our NY-based Associate Creative Director Dino Sanchez: “frog has grown quite a bit over the past year and with all our busy schedules it’s been difficult to keep up with new hires. Creativity is something that hinges on critique and in some cases brutal honesty, so knowing your colleagues and being comfortable with them is essential to a productive process.” Openness needs to be designed for.

At a the recent i7 Innovation Summit near Paris, frog ran a session at the beginning of the conference where we asked the conference attendees to break out into pairs and interview each other based on a questionnaire that we had prepared. Questions spanned the professional (e.g. “When was the last time you fired someone?” or “What was your biggest failure with the greatest learning?”) and the more personal (“What is your favorite movie?” – “What was your biggest lie”? etc.). The pairs had to fill in the answers in poster-size sheets which were subsequently mounted to a huge wall in the lobby, as a sort of “physical Facebook.”

David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, ran a similar exercise at WPP Stream in Athens, and in both instances the exercises were true ice-breakers for the attendees, forcing them to experience the implications of Openness first-hand: How open do I want to be? At what point does Openness become uncomfortable? What do I consider private in public? How much do I have to give in order to receive? Rowan argued that this kind of interactive, public data-mining would benefit any gathering as social interactions are typically more valuable when they’re facilitated by even a basic level of familiarity and trust among strangers. (On a related note, I’ve begun lately to ask job candidates to fill out the Proust questionnaire. Sure, professional qualifications matter the most, but at the end of the day you want to know who the person is you hire because chances are you’ll spend more time with them than with your own family.)

Yet pretending that Openness is just like any other business initiative that you can plan and execute would be disingenuous. It is a massive cultural change and requires a whole new mindset. The real challenges await the advocates of Openness after the first glitch, when things, very openly, go awry, and the conservative minds quickly come out of the closet to stigmatize one-time errors as systematic flaws. With every failure of Openness, the power of those who prefer Control rises exponentially. There is no doubt about it – openness, true, radical openness, hurts. It makes you uncomfortable, vulnerable, weak, and deprives you of the subtleties that came with control – but the benefits are huge. Pick the moments of Openness carefully: they will be your worst enemies and your best friends.

The Remembering Self Reflects on Happiness and Morality at TED

TED conferences, you might think, are happy affairs. You get up early, meet the most fascinating people, listen to jaw-dropping talks (each followed by a standing ovation), have deep conversations, and party until dawn – and all of that for four days in a row, safely remote from your usual daily routine. The reality, however, is more complicated. The event is a physical and mental stress test, an emotional rollercoaster ride that challenges you with constant over-stimulation, extreme cross-pollination, and tidal waves of acceptance and rejection as you navigate the social networks in the conference’s “social spaces.” To slightly paraphrase Heidi Klum: “With one group you’re in, with the next group you’re out.” And yet you will never hear anyone who was lucky enough to attend TED come back and not rave about their experience. Why is that? Daniel Kahneman, the mastermind of Behavioral Economics, provided the answer – at TED2010: TEDsters are happy because they expect to be happy. Let me explain, or rather, let Daniel Kahneman explain.

The future as anticipated memories

In his talk, the first of the conference and for me the most memorable, Kahneman sharply distinguished between “being happy in one’s life" and “being happy about one’s life,” and fervently debunked the “myth of the one self.” Instead, he introduced two different modes of “self” – the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self. Their notions of happiness can be very different, he stressed, so that happiness cannot just be viewed as a substitute for well-being. The lack of money buys you misery, as Gallup surveys regularly indicate, but an abundance of wealth, as often reported, does not necessarily make you happier. To illustrate his point, Kahneman explained why people relocating to California are reported to be extraordinarily happy – before they even move, their Remembering Self imbues their experience as a happy one, which indeed might make them behave happier and thus infect others with more happiness (Connected co-author Nicholas A. Christakis showed in another TED2010 Talk that happiness, like other emotions, is highly contagious and spreads like wildfire through social networks). While the Experiencing Self is in the moment (and might feel good about it), it is the Remembering Self, the reflective self, that qualifies experiences as memorable experiences. There are 600 million moments in one’s life, Kahneman stated – “the Remembering Self tells us which of these are relevant, meaningful, and worth remembering.” “We choose between memories of experiences,” he concluded; in fact, “we think of the future as anticipated memories.”

It is intriguing to think about the implications of Kahneman’s model for policy-making, business, and also design, especially with regards to product and service experiences. If designers followed Kahneman’s theory, they would design user experiences not only for the Experiencing Self but also for the Remembering Self, which puts experiences into perspective by inferring and deferring. You could also say: the Experiencing Self values usability; the Remembering Self attaches itself to a brand. Users are usually happy when the Remembering Self finds out that its anticipated memories (brand promise) match the Experience Self (user experience). Great brands connect the Remembering Self with the Experiencing Self to make consumers happy, inspire behavior change, and make the world a better place – not a simple feat.

Counting what counts

Speaking of simple, there are other gestalts of happiness: George Whitesides proposed the beauty of simplicity as one. In his definition, “simple components are reliable, repeatable, and predictable” – thus they can be “stacked” to create remarkable systems. “Academics like complexity and emergence. The real world wants simplicity,” he contended, and borrowed some of Thomas Jefferson’s wisdom: “When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it.”

Simple – in a good way – was also the happiness formula that Chip Conley, founder and CEO of hospitality chain Joie de Vivre, presented: “Wanting what you have divided by having what you want.” Gratitude plus gratification. Conley evoked the principles of Positive Psychology and re-imagined Maslow’s pyramid of needs as a new hierarchy of “survival, success, and transformation,” suggesting that we start “counting what really counts” – intangible values, spiritual fulfillment, and meaning. 90% of business leaders believe in the value of intangibles, Conley remarked, but the way we run our organizations does not yet reflect that – for we rely on myopic models and metrics: Pareto optimality, shareholder value, ROI, and GDP (of which, according to Conley, only 36%, is made up of tangible values). A metric for meaning, anyone? On the macro-economic level, the government of Bhutan has come close by introducing Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a new national currency that attempts to measure “quality of life” and “social progress.” France and other countries have begun adopting it. When will the first company implement its micro-equivalent?

Spiritually present during Conley’s talk was Enrique Peñalosa, who in his three years (1998-2001) as mayor of Colombia’s capital Bogota made “promoting happiness” the main directive of his governance, boosting the common good in a city characterized by vast disparities of wealth. During his tenure, he improved slums, built schools and nurseries, new libraries, and hundreds of parks and other pedestrian spaces. “We live in the post-communism period, in which many have assumed equality as a social goal is obsolete,” he once said. “Although income equality as a concept does not jibe with market economy, we can seek to achieve quality-of-life equality.”

Science and compassion

Quality of life may be a moral obligation not only for elected officials but for all of us. In this vein, Sam Harris, the zealous atheist, in his TED talk proposed a concept of “objective morality” that would make life better for everyone. In his eyes, the separation between science and human values is an illusion; for him there is only a rather artificial division between values and facts. “Belief is the default state,” as fellow TED speaker and professional skeptic Michael Specter, author of the book Denialism, observed. It was ironic though how Harris fell prey to his own convictions; his belief in the universal validity of “facts” is just that – a belief. ”Do the Taliban have any point on physics worth considering?” Harris asked. No. So why do we consider their views on morality? “Certain opinions need to be excluded from the discourse for morality to flourish,” he requested.

This is, frankly, a scary thought. If those scientists who present themselves as naïve believers in absolute, measurable truths were to determine the tenets of a universal morality, this would constitute a tyranny of science, with some very subjective outcomes imposed on the rest of us. Values need to regulate science, not the other way around. The essence of morality is “compassion,” as Schopenhauer put it: respect for the “other” – the other being and his/her values. Morality, per se, is an open concept with myriad interpretations. It needs to remain an ambiguous space that tolerates divergent values and opinions – if it doesn’t, the concept of the “other” will become obsolete. “Difference,” in other words “quality” (and “quality of life”), will fade, and “moral scientists” will fill the void with a regime of a default absolute morality.

But morality is relative, by definition. No one said it better than Oscar Wilde: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

Sometimes it just takes one true word to make you perfectly happy.

[Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson]

TED and Others to Unveil Charter for Compassion

TED India just ended, and the TED team is already off to the next exhilarating project. On November 12, 2009, TED and others will be unveiling the Charter for Compassion, a document about the core shared values and moral code of every world religion, the “Golden Rule.” The Charter is the result of 2008 TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong’s “wish” (if you haven’t read Armstrong’s latest book, The Case for God, I highly recommend it – even, or especially, if you consider yourself an atheist and usually side with Richard Dawkins et al).

More than 75 events are currently planned around the globe to launch the Charter for Compassion on November 12. Everyone can become a part of it by attending one of these events or hosting their own; by emailing, blogging, writing, broadcasting, or offering media space for Charter banners, widgets, and videos. TED says it hopes that in the week following the launch, “thousands of sermons on the nature of compassion will be preached all over the world ... thousands of discussions will be held around dinner tables ... thousands of ideas will be shared.” Because, at the end of the day, “compassion is the best idea humanity ever had.”

California Artist Rebuilds World Economy With Antimatter

The overlap with the title of the blog I write for CNET, Matter/Antimatter, is completely coincidental, but since most meaningful events are coincidental, it makes perfect sense that it prompted San Francisco-based conceptual artist Jonathon Keats to send me a note pointing to his upcoming exhibition "The First Bank of Antimatter."

Keats' previous artistic enterprises include applying string theory to real estate development, and in the wake of global economic collapse, Keats is now introducing a hedge against future catastrophe by creating a mirror economy designed to skyrocket as world markets plummet: the first holistic response to the great recession.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," explains Keats. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

Backed by private Swiss funding, his scheme will be implemented beginning on November 12, 2009, when the First Bank of Antimatter opens in San Francisco's Monadnock Building, the location of Modernism Gallery. The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception."

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

"We want our customers to be confident that the antimatter is available on demand, but we're advising clients to conduct transactions strictly in paper currency," says Keats, who has used his artistry to design the money in multiple colors including red, blue and green. "The paper is cotton rag, archival enough to survive economic Armageddon" he promises. "It's an essential asset in any balanced portfolio. Antimatter is a natural haven for wealth when everything becomes worthless."

Like advertising guru Rory Sutherland said at TEDGlobal: "Most of our problems are problems of perception." And: "We need more intangible value." I always knew we could rely on artists (and advertisers!) to (re)-build an anti-economy of meaning, and I am thrilled to see this vision finally materialize.

Of Elephants and Planes

TED  just launched its first-ever short film (30 sec to 3 mins) contest  - with winners to be shown at TEDIndia this November. The TED Blog is taking the opportunity to feature some of the short films that played live at the conference in recent years.

Here are two of my favorites: "Flight Patterns," by Aaron Koblin, which uses FAA flight data to create shimmering animations of flight traffic patterns and density. And a PSA  produced by the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

New design mind issue Launches with TED Salon in London

TED Curator Chris Anderson – who had 844,821…wait 844,833 followers the last time we looked – tweeted about it yesterday, and we’re thrilled that the word is now out about the new special TEDGlobal edition of our design mind magazine, “The Substance of Things Not Seen."

We officially unveiled the new issue on Monday with an intimate TED Salon ("More Substance of Things Not Seen") with 120 TEDsters and friends at the Unicorn Theater in London. Hosted by Bruno Giussani, TED’s European director, and Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, the evening featured three TED Talks.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design, explored the possibilities of using data produced by the human body to educate the human mind: "How to design (for) awareness and self-reflection? How to design platforms that people can use to encourage and challenge each other to follow what they believe are virtuous behaviors?"

His main proposition goes like this: We live in a world of data. From keeping track of our household expenses to sharing our running data with the community at Nike+: What happens if we go on with this idea and gain the ability to keep track of even more areas?

Sergio's vision can be neatly summarized as: track, share, and change. He sees four intersecting opportunities: Access to our own data streams and services to accrue and store our bit crumbs forever; individual and collective aggregations to reveal hidden patterns; well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate, and shape raw data into meaningful information; and social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency.

In his prediction, it is essential that we track more data of our lives, our behavior, and the things we use. To make this data more accessible, visualization is key. Secondly, the data that we collect should be made usable for our social lives. Thirdly, data analysis and sharing it with our environment to trigger social pressure could trigger change. An example: Imagine you could keep track of your Toyota Prius CO2 emission and share that data with other drivers on the road in front of you. A display in your car would show you that the Prius next to you has ejected fewer emissions than you. Wouldn’t this be the perfect challenge? Now imagine you could see your friends’, your family’s, your neighbor’s emissions. Instead of just saving the environment as a single player, it would transfer it into a collective challenge – a playful way to save our planet and a great way to show off in front of your friends at the next dinner party! "It's all about love and passion again," Sergio said, and "empathy."

Fields Wicker-Miurin, co-founder of Leaders' Quest, presented her vision of new leadership based on field-based insights from around the world. Wicker-Miurin trains business leaders by connecting them to other leaders. This sounds rather common - however, her leaders live in the Amazon forest or are advocates of HIV education in India or collect and display artifacts related to uneasy periods in Chinese history: they are leaders that face the real challenges of our time.

Wicker-Miurin spoke forcefully about Benki, a young tribesman from deep in the Amazon, facing the threat of deforestation, which not only has an impact on climate change, but also, much more immediately, on the existence of his people. Becoming a leader very early in life, he recognized that the environment, the animals, the rivers, the air he breathes and his tribe's existence were in danger. That's when he took a step out of the Amazon and traveled 3000 km to the Earth Summit in Rio -- to tell the world outside about the world inside the forest, and connect the two worlds. He spoke, but he also learned a lot, and brought those learnings home. Almost 20 years have past and the Ashaninkas (Benki's tribe) have reforested 25% of their territory, created schools, brought satellite Internet to the village, and more. After describing other profiles from around the world, Wicker-Miurin summarized the seven characteristics of the "new leaders": they go away from what they know; build bridges and walk across them; have a sense of the great arc of time; know that they depend on others; remember that “it's not about them, but it starts with them”; and have humility.

 

Misha Glenny, underworld investigator and author of the book McMafia-Seriously Organized Crime, is interested in different kinds of leaders: key figures in the "shadow economy" of organzied crime. In conversation with TED's Bruno Giussani, Glenny discussed very openly, and with genuine humour, his research methods, the encounters with his sources, and some behind-the-scenes episodes. Among many other things, we learned that the FARC had no interest in kidnapping him, that fake names are often references to characters in gangster movies, and that human traffickers and drug dealers were especially hit hard by the financial crisis. Glenny was also interviewed for the new design mind issue ("Hiding in Plain Sight").

Andreas Raptopoulos, founder of FutureAcoustic, gave an exclusive technology demo of reactive soundscapes. And singer/songwriter Lou Rhodes concluded the program with a stunning "unplugged" live performance.

The advance copies of design mind were in high demand.

The moderators, Bruno Giussani and Sam Martin, awaiting the "Substance of Things Not Seen"...

On the other side of the pond, simultaneously, the launch was more grassroots-style. Promoted via twitter, an ad-hoc group of 50 strangers (a Twitter Flashmob, if you will) convened at the café in our back alley at noon sharp, uttered the password “Oxford,” and picked up their free copy.

There’s already a lot of buzz about the magazine on Twitter (search for “designmind” and “frogdesign”) and on blogs. BusinessWeek just re-published Beth Comstock’s (CMO and SVP of GE) article from the new issue, in full content, online. Core77 has a nice write-up featuring frog designer’s Laura Richardson’s article, and so does Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org. TED.com has highlighted the issue on its blog.

All photos by Robert Leslie (except for the one at the bottom, which is by Jacob Zukerman). You can find more on Flickr.

London Design Festival Celebrates the Art and Business of Design

Several of my colleagues are in London this week to unveil the special TEDGlobal issue of our design mind magazine in a very special TED Salon on Monday, with the title "More Substance of Things Not Seen." The event will be co-hosted by frog design and TED, and moderated by Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, and Bruno Giussani, European director of TED. More about that soon.

It comes in handy for the frog delegation that this is also the first week of the magnanimous London Design Festival, an eclectic assembly of design-related programs, exhibitions, and parties all over town.

You can watch an introduction by Festival Director Ben Evans here.

Yesterday Jaime Hayón unveiled The Tournament, his chess board installation that will be used to play chess today for the first time by the lucky applicants who signed up to pit their wits against English Chess Federation guests and world champion players.

Possibly the world’s tallest paper tower, Paper Monument, by Shigeru Ban has been completed alongside Marc Newson’s Supercell structure.

Much of the Festival program starts this weekend, including the opening of exhibitions at the festival hub, the V&A. There is a flurry of activity around the Oxo Tower Wharf, which opens its doors to coincide with the Festival, London Fashion Week, and London Open House. Brunswick House on Wandsworth Road in Vauxhall is the setting for Super-Squat - a design invasion. RE-made (in Britain) at A-Z studios on Hardwidge Street in London Bridge is also open.

A 6 minute train ride from London Bridge is South London's creative hotspot, Deptford, which witnesses the re-launch of Committee's Gallop Complex, accommodating Committee’s design studio, a coffee bar and a one-seat cinema. Across the river at Somerset House, The Sorrell Foundation's exhibition What’s Next for Schools? is open. Just round the corner the London Transport Museum hosts The Outer Limits – Beyond Zone One poster exhibition depicting the glories of suburbia.

In the West End, Ligne Roset opens a show called Urban Nature and Armani / Cassa launch their new collection of furniture, accessories, limited editions and exclusive textiles by Rubelli in New Bond Street. Not far from there La Maison de la Région Languedoc–Roussillon host their first exhibition of contemporary regional French design entitled Sud de France Design 2009 in Cavendish Square.

In the West, Young Creative Poland showcases emerging Polish talent in the Brompton Design District whilst SCP West in Westbourne Grove launches a new range of decorative bone china by Donna Wilson. On the Kings Road Designers Guild store hosts an exhibition called The Chair.

In the East, there is even more than usual to see, including, for fans of graphic design, Made in YCN on Rivington Street in Shoreditch. Emerge open their first graduate showcase at Rich Mix, and Magma in Clerkenwell open their exhibition called Russian Doll. If you're in the area you can go on a stroll with Studio PH on a guided walk of the area entitled MetaboliCity.

Back to frog design: On Monday morning, frog president Doreen Lorenzo will be one of the panelists in the Financial Times’ "Business of Design" Talks at the V&A’s Sackler Center. The "Responses to the Recession" panel will explore how design-led companies are coping with the current economic crisis. Are tight-spending consumers now in charge or can big brands still drive buying behavior? Will the market polarize into a world of ultra-luxury products for the “haves” and super-inexpensive ones for the “have-nots”? What strategies – back to basics, diffusion lines, etc. – work best in a downturn? Doreen will be joined by Miguel Fluxà Ortí, the Vice President of Camper; Rolf Sachs, Designer; and Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, Chief Executive Officer of Liberty.

Seen | Unseen

“Everything has symmetry when you just leave it where it is,” mathematician Marcus du Sautoy said in his talk at TEDGlobal in Oxford. Attending a TED conference is as asymmetrical an experience as you can imagine: Nothing is left where it is. The combination of riveting ideas and remarkable people you encounter is purportedly designed to disrupt your balance, routines of thinking, self-esteem, beliefs, values — even your sleep. After TED, you’re no longer congruent with your former self: You have seen things you have not seen before, you feel different, and you have been moved. Things have changed, and you know that only true passions cause real change.

After five days of delving into other people’s passions in Oxford, I felt that it was time to celebrate my own: football, a spectacle that combines archaic competition with sublime pleasure. In his scholarly essay “On the Alleged Dehumanization of the Sports Spectator,” Allan Guttmann describes football matches as cathartic events, “saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited.” So, on the first evening after TEDGlobal, I took the Jubilee line to London’s Wembley Stadium to see a rather meaningless preseason game between Tottenham Hotspur and a B-team of Europe’s current champions, FC Barcelona.

I’ve always thought — to paraphrase Pascal — that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not stay in a football stadium. A football arena is my refuge, my cave, my playing field, my “manspace.” After all the elevation, elusion, and enthrallment at TEDGlobal, I was craving a simple point of reference and a naive familiarity that only a football field can offer. Like a good pop song, it provides something archetypal that is immediately and permanently relevant, a way to look at life, a worldview. Football, like all sports, offers clear rules, and thus, comfort in a world of growing ambiguity. It satisfies the unfulfilled stories of our lives waiting to be resolved, catalyzed, and made sense of — by one single elegant sequence of interactions and passes that lead to the eruptive, collective, and yet so private celebration of a goal.

Football is like theater. It condenses all human emotions, all possible developments of a story onto one big stage that lies at the center of our attention for 90 minutes or more. Football gives its players the power to be the “authors of their own ambition,” as Alain de Botton suggested in Oxford, when he spoke about 21st-century career patterns. De Botton heralded tragedy as a more humane way to embrace failure and posited, “Hamlet lost, but he was not a loser.” Football possesses this appreciation for tragedy, too. Hearts will ache. Promises will be broken. Somebody will lose. But losers they will not be.

The football stadium is a space where the boundaries between player and spectator are still defined, but the distance from idea to implementation, the gap between unseen and seen, is negligible. A football game is a train of thought, a breathless stream of consciousness, but it is also the very act of acting itself. What you see is what you get. Football is “the head and hand united,” in the words of Richard Sennett, or better, the head and foot united. It is an accelerated microcosm of innovation, where the idea is the prototype is the product.

Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho once described it as follows: “What I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he’s good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he’s stronger on his right or his left foot. That’s my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game.”

Players like Ronaldinho or the uniquely gifted Argentine Lionel Messi are artists, and like artists “they set up expectations of symmetry and break them,” as Marcus du Sautoy put it, “[because] in everything, uniformity is undesirable.” Innovation, which is needed to advance on the pitch, is asymmetrical by its very nature. The whole game of football is one big attempt to break symmetry through imagination and beauty.

At Wembley, my gaze traced the distinct white of the chalk marking the sidelines and penalty areas on the field, the calm before the storm, disturbingly quiet. I studied the goals, as they stood there, monolithic and self-absorbed, fully aware of their power to attract and fulfill that one simple desire. I admired their majestic symmetry that is only destroyed when man, goalie, enters the scene.

Below the main stands, I spotted Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s coach, who had won all possible trophies with his club last season. And I recalled what TEDGlobal speaker Itay Talgam had said in Oxford about great conductors: They create the “conditions for the process to take place.” This is true for great football coaches, too. They simply enjoy watching and letting go — gaining influence as they embrace the loss of control over time and space, as some of the great players have in rare moments.

Spanish author Javier Marías’ story, “In Uncertain Time,” portrays Hungarian football player Szentkuthy, who, in the final minutes of a critical game rallies forward on his own, shakes off two defenders, and overcomes the goalkeeper. All that is then left to do is to slot the ball into the empty net, but even as the whole stadium rises to respond to the goal, he refuses to shoot. Instead, he advances, and stops the ball right on the goal line. Then, as the goalkeeper and the two defenders come running towards him, “Szentkuthy rolled the ball an inch or so forward and then stopped it again once it was over the goal line.” “He had thwarted imminence,” writes Marías, “and it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain, as if he were saying, ‘I am the instigator and it will happen when I say it will happen, not when you want it. If it does happen, it is because I have decided that it should.’” Szentkuthy’s action “pointed out the gulf between what is unavoidable and what has not been avoided, between what is still future and what is already past, between ‘might be’ and ‘was,’ a palpable transition which we only rarely witness.”

I was looking at the lush green of the football pitch that still allowed all possible mathematical configurations, all possible combinations of play. Seeing the unseen, I thought, means the ability to create multiple stories. Like dancers, football players interpret space, each in his own way. Everything is possible because anything is possible. Just as life, unfolding, is inevitable, so it goes with the referee’s first whistle: “It ain’t why, why, why, it just is” (Van Morrison). It simply happens — and afterwards, legions of commentators and analysts will attempt to reconstruct it, explain it, and demystify it, in vain.

As the teams entered the arena, 60,000 fans began chanting. The players occupied their positions — both teams lined up in a 4-4-2 formation, in perfect symmetry, anxious for the action to come. How I wished I could have held this moment of uncertainty a little longer, as Szentkuthy did when he stopped the ball on the goal line. I was thinking of my soon-to-be-born daughter and how her life and mine will be immediately and forever asymmetrical from the very minute she enters the world. I was thinking of the endless array of possibilities ahead of her.

Then the game began. I’d seen the substance of things not seen. Nothing would ever be the same again.

From the upcoming special TEDGlobal design mind issue "The Substance of Things Not Seen," available next week

TEDIndia: The Future Beckons

I'll miss it (because of my soon-to-be-born baby girl), but I wish I could go to this one: From November 4-7, 2009, TEDIndia will offer a vision of the future that's rich with invention, entrepreneurship, cross-disciplinary problem-solving, unexpected solutions and sensory delight. Hosted in a country that’s reinventing itself -- and reshaping the world.

Watch this preview: