It's genius time once again here at Alfidi Capital. I shine the spotlight on innovation whenever I can and some really bright folks are doing stellar work on how innovators can maximize their cognitive abilities.
The Expanded Consciousness Institute is mathematician Tom McCabe's project for showing entrepreneurs how they shift effortlessly between six different perspectives. The basic principle is that a human's thought process reflects a dihedral group governed by mathematical relationships. Each perspective contains a portion of the information needed to solve a problem, but the best innovators can integrate them all.
Tom McCabe developed the cyclomatic complexity metric for measuring the complexity of software code. I think the logical subsequent application of his Expanded Consciousness work is to develop a control flow graph for entrepreneurial decision-making. What would be the analogies between the graph's elements and real-life startup operations?
Reachability: Any task not directly related to a milestone in fundraising, technology development, or marketing can be aborted.
Infinite loop: The "paralysis of analysis" that leads to endless meetings with no problem resolution.
Dominator: A decision point requiring a yes/no decision from the CEO.
You know something, I'm starting to think that computer scientists and mathematicians would make excellent business process consultants and project managers. They already have an intellectual structure that lends itself to business processes. Hand them a PERT/CPM chart and they'll probably grasp it intuitively.
