This weekend I’m attending a “Creativity Session” whose topic is distributed energy generation.  Kind of a niche topic, I freely admit, but I have a friend who is deep in the alternative-energy world and he invited me to attend to help infuse the proceedings with my own personal background and professional experience in software.  I suppose he also considers me creative, or else he wouldn’t have offered.  In this respect, he and I agree, but now I’ll be put to the test – how to be creative about a topic that I’m not intimately familiar with?

Here’s the answer: outsider status has its advantages.  I don’t have the same set of assumptions, blinders, or habitual ways of thinking about the topic, and can therefore see some obvious solutions that may be overlooked by someone who has spent years in the field.  Also, some problems are cross-domain in many ways: if you think about problems one level higher than you’re used to, you can often find similar patterns, and what may have worked for me in the software industry may be partially or wholly applicable to this distributed energy distribution problem.

Regardless of how much I can or can not contribute, I’m looking forward to spending a few hours with a smart, motivated, passionate group of people; making some new contacts, possibly some new friends, and learning a lot.  These kinds of things give back to you in proportion to how much you put into it – so I’m going in with a positive, can-do attitude, meet everyone quickly, engage, be engaged, and be alert to every possibility for growth.