I first heard the term neoteny from Mike Vance, in his cassette series called Creative Thinking (yeh, cassette series – circa 1987). Mr Vance worked with Walt Disney and was much influenced by Buckminster Fuller. As I recall the story, it was Mr Fuller who spoke of neoteny as a creative practice – observing intentional wonder and voluntary naivete so as to see familiar things as if for the first time.

I was unaware for years that neoteny is a zoological term (which may explain some puzzled looks I got when employing the word to talk about design). No matter. Neoteny is a useful way to think about what it takes to see the world fresh every day and engage what’s there with purpose and passion.

More recently, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas invoked neoteny as a keystone of effective leaders in their book Geeks and Geezers:

We discovered that every one of our geezers who continues to play a leadership role has one quality of overriding importance: neoteny. The dictionary defines neoteny, a zoological term, as “the retention of youthful qualities by adults.” Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, and eager to see what the new day brings. Time and loss steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on the marvelous undiscovered things to come. Frank Gehry designs buildings that make architects half his age gasp with envy. Neoteny is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance inside his head.

— Geeks and Geezers, Warren G. Bennis, Robert J. Thomas, Harvard Business School Press, 2002, p 20

Mike Vance recalls his first meeting with Buckminster Fuller in Think Out of the Box (a meeting that was offbeat from its inception: “I’ll be happy to meet with you. I’ll see you in one year at the Santa Monica Motel,” Fuller told Vance on the phone. When Mr Vance asked if they could meet sooner, Mr Fuller replied, “One year is right away! What kind of calendar do you use anyway? Don’t you believe in timelessness?”).

At their first meeting, Buckminster Fuller told Mike Vance:

You never change anything by fighting it; you change things by making them obsolete through superior technology. Telstar replaced 500 tons of transoceanic cable. It used to take us three years to circumnavigate the globe in a wooden-hulled ship. It took three months in a steel ship, 90 minutes in a space capsule and now instantaneously with telecommunications.

You ask me about creativity? We live in a creative universe. We live in a universe of operating general principles with universal functions. We live in a universe where we are cocreators at the best, but I think that’s even stretching the truth.

Superior methodology is everywhere in the grand design of things. Our task is to be creative detectives by doing some first-class spying on the Creator. Creatively, people play the part of Sherlock Holmes for real.

I didn’t invent the geodesic dome, I discovered in through observing geodesic structures in spores under a microscope. This is why every child needs a microscope to make their own discoveries. You know children no longer need to ask questions of people who don’t know the answers. We should establish discovery zones throughout our homes rather than rooms with doors, walls and rules.
– Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Think Out of the Box, Career Press, 1997, pp 138, 139

Vance found the same sort of wonder in his relationship with Walt Disney. One rainy morning as the two walked from Mr Disney’s parking space to the studio, Disney stopped to study an oleander bloom:

“Look at the tiny water bubble sitting on this leaf. I wonder how that bubble appears to the leaf? It probably looks like a giant dome. You know, we should have a bubble restaurant floating around on a huge leaf on Bay Lake in Florida. We could call it the Floating Bubble Restaurant. Did you ever think about how many bubbles there are in an entire ocean? Think of the amount of life and creativity there is in an entire ocean.”
– Mike Vance and Diane Deacon, Think Out of the Box, Career Press, 1997, p 191

Mike Vance wasn’t the only one who noticed Walt Disney’s neoteny. Mr Disney said:

“People who have worked with me say I am ‘innocence in action.’ They say I have the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder and with all living things I have a terrific sympathy. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to imagine that mice and squirrels might have feelings just like mine.”
— Dave Smith and Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney, Hyperion, 2001, p 252].”

Walt Disney, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs + Pixar partner John Lasseter, Google’s Brin + Page . . . The designer Michael Graves belongs on this list along with Bruce Mau and IDEO’s David Kelly . . . I read it in the books and blogs of Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Hugh McLeod, Chris Anderson, Dan Pink, Doc Searls, Kevin Kelly, Cory Doctorow, Garrison Keillor, Annie Dillard, Eugene Peterson, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Ann Lamott, Shel Silverstein, Peter Drucker . . . in the novels of Tom Wolfe, William Gibson and Douglas Coupland and the films of Charlie Kaufman and Peter Jackson . . . don’t get me started on filmmakers and playwrights and musicians . . . These people are not (or were not while they lived) done with wondering and learning and creating cool stuff.

I heard the writer and pastor Earl Palmer in a little rant on the evils of retirement. Mr Palmer had nothing against eventually quitting one’s job but claimed the idea of abandoning work struck him as a little crazy. Part of this he took from his reading of the Bible, the rest from the example of his father who clearly decided to live until he died. Which is why the younger Palmer made a phone call to his father’s saxophone teacher one day to say, “I’m sorry, my dad can’t come to his lesson; he died this morning.”

The biblical narrative is obsessed with newness. A “new heaven and new earth” . . . “a new song” . . . “a new name” . . . “new birth” . . . “a new covenant” . . . “a new and living way” . . . “the new order” . . . “the new self” . . . “a new creation” . . . “the old has gone, the new has come!” . . . “we serve in the new way of the spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” . . . “a new life” . . . “a new command” . . . “new treasures as well as old” . . . “new wine into new wineskins” . . . “every new day he does not fail” . . . “I am sending you grain, new wine and oil, enough to satisfy you fully” . . . “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you” . . . “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning” . . . “The LORD will create a new thing on earth” . . . “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you” . . . “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” . . . “May God give you of heaven’s dew and of earth’s richness — an abundance of grain and new wine.”

Warren Bennis and Bob Thomas write:

“The capacity for ‘uncontaminated wonder,’ ultimately, is what distinguishes the successful from the ordinary, the happily engaged players of whatever era from the chronically disappointed and malcontent. Therein lies a lesson for geeks, geezers, and the sea of people who fall in between.
— Geeks and Geezers, Warren G. Bennis, Robert J. Thomas, Harvard Business School Press, 2002, p 21

This of course insinuates the question, “How can one develop the capacity for ‘uncontaminated wonder’ – how can we pursue neoteny?” And this, once again, is a worldview question.

The answer, I think, has to do with intentionally changing points of view – literally and figuratively – to see things from new angles, from inside, outside, above and below.

I think it has to do with asking childlike questions:

• How does that work?
• Why do they do it that way?
• What if we tried this?
• Who thinks that is a good idea?
• Where does this road lead?
• When will it stop working?

I think the answer has to do with five sensing our business output:

What does this idea, product, experience . . .

• smell like
• taste like
• sound like
• feel like
• look like

I think it has to do with empathy fueled by thoughtful, active, respectful conversations with people who are different:

• younger and older people
• people of the other gender
• people with different spiritual sensibilities and no apparent spiritual sensibility
• richer and poorer people
• wiser and less wise people
• people shaped by other social, cultural, racial, ethnic and national crucibles
• people whose politics are puzzling or off-putting
• people who can’t or don’t see or hear or comprehend the same way
• shy people

I think the answer is musical and visual and tactile, in the arts and sciences, in the literature of our trades and the liturature of all our cultures.

_____

If you hired a security consultant to show you how to protect yourself from kidnapping in a high risk environment, he would tell you to start by getting rid of your routines; to come and go at unpredictable times and by unexpected routes and conveyances. That seems to me like sound advice to keep from being kidnapped by the same-old-same-old.

Make a list of people you know whose lives are characterized by neoteny. Come up with excuses to spend time with those people. Watch closely. Listen. Copy. Repeat.

Psalm 92 goes like this:

It is good to praise the LORD and make music to your name, O Most High, to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night, to the music of the ten-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp. For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands. How great are your works, O LORD, how profound your thoughts! The senseless man does not know, fools do not understand, that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be forever destroyed. But you, O LORD, are exalted forever. For surely your enemies, O LORD, surely your enemies will perish; all evildoers will be scattered. You have exalted my horn like that of a wild ox; fine oils have been poured upon me. My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries; my ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes. The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon; planted in the house of the LORD, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, “The LORD is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him.”
— Psalm 92

Try this: Every day for a week, search Psalm 92 twice in quick succession for something you haven’t seen before. When you find something new, tell someone; then go do something about it.