da Vinci’s Innovation Traits: Still Relevant, Still Compelling

Leonardo da Vinci identified seven key traits or skills that one can cultivate to enhance intelligence and unlock the potential for genius.

Even after mastering these traits, one must overcome the fear of failure, which often prevents people from taking the first step. Likewise, da Vinci’s traits strongly align with the qualities of a facilitative leader, guiding others toward creativity and growth.

Therefore, da Vinci’s traits or skills or strengths include:

  1. Curiosita—an insatiable thirst for knowledge
  2. Dimostrzione—the ability to learn from experience
  3. Sensazione—the discipline of continuing to hone one’s senses
  4. Sfumato—the ability to cope with ambiguity
  5. Arte/ Scienza—holistic thinking
  6. Corporalita—what some people call sound mind and body
  7. Connessione—the ability to see deeply into the connection between things

More can be found in the book entitled “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day” by Michael J. Gelb

Walter Isaacson

Subsequent to the original posting of this article, Walter Isaacson published a comprehensive and compelling biography, Leonardo da Vinci, that deserves a much higher ranking in a Google search. While nearly 600 pages in length, the well-researched and documented history of the polymath would provide an excellent return on your time and money. Isaacson identifies twenty Key Learnings. For more detail, you should turn to the original source. They include:

  1. Avoid silos.
  2. Be curious, relentlessly curious.
  3. Be open to mystery.
  4. Collaborate.
  5. Create for yourself, not just for patrons.
  6. Get distracted.
  7. Go down rabbit holes.
  8. Indulge fantasy.
  9. Let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
  10. Let your reach exceed your grasp.
  11. Make lists.*
  12. Observe.
  13. Procrastinate.
  14. Respect facts.
  15. Retain a childlike sense of wonder.
  16. See things unseen.
  17. Seek knowledge for its own sake.
  18. Start with the details.
  19. Take notes, on paper.
  20. Think visually.
  • “Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testament to pure curiosity the world has ever seen.” (pg. 523)

 

Finally, from a commercial perspective and in the spirit of radical innovation, here are some well-established “secrets”:

  1. Get intimate with your customers
  2. Make your own product obsolete
  3. Break the rules and be audacious
  4. Act small, think small—even nano small
  5. Celebrate failure—(see Thomas Alva Edison’s objectives)

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools and methods daily during the week. While some call this immersion, we call it the road that yields high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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