Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Marketing (part 2: Art and Technology)

This is part of my weekly series on how philosophy (personal beliefs) affect people’s perspective, and how you can this knowledge in life.

The engineer and the artist have the same mission.

Both are working to build something, whether it’s physical or a blueprint. What’s the difference? How each goes about their work.

Approaching the task from a pure technology standpoint, the engineer believes in doing things a specific way, which is the best way he knows. His strength is in understanding the best way of doing things. His opinion seems to be a fact at this point. At the same time, his weakness is being unable to look away from the path he believes is the best one. He does not want to try a different way of doing things.

Approaching the task from a pure art standpoint, the artist believes in feeling out the best way to do things. She sees the starting point and the endpoint, and her mind shows her all the paths she can begin to take in hopes she will get from where she is to where she aims to be. Her strength is her willingness to explore all the options. Her weakness is in determining the best route to take. She has a hard time asking, “Which decisions will produce the best work in the fastest time?”

Most of us stand somewhere between these extremes. Where do you feel you sit on the scale between technology and art?

What’s ideal is to approach tasks with as much knowledge (technology) as possible, and with an open mind as to how to accomplish the task.

It’s also good to realize the people you want to communicate with are going to make decisions that way.

Let’s go with what may seem to be a difficult idea to apply this to, just to show how it’s possible in any situation. Say your boss wants to increase productivity in the workplace. Start by figuring out what areas you might be slowing people down or being anti-productive. Are people bogged down with paperwork or less important tasks? Is it part of the culture? Are the employees simply not productive? What incentives do people have? As you determine what might be changed, you can then implement all the changes at once for everyone, or try them in different departments as tests.

While the options are limitless, using your judgment to test and change things. Learn from what you’ve done to improve your process.