The Words - An Autobiography

Telepathic Collaboration

In addition to the many services we offered our customers, we now had the best collaboration tool in the history of mankind. There was a reason I'd given the company the name I had in the beginning. I'd had a vision, and Telepathic Collaboration had become a reality.

I will apologize, at this point, for the onslaught of mixed metaphors you are about to endure, but mixing metaphors was an inevitable component of telepathic collaboration involving the interaction of the individual perceptions and imaginations of those participating in the sessions, each of those being heavily metaphoric.

We'd taken brainstorming, not to unimaginable levels, but precisely the opposite, to the heart of imagination. To say that innovation continued its acceleration wouldn't do it justice. Prior to our contributions, innovation had already achieved a rate that became nearly impossible to follow because so much of the world's innovation never reached the eyes of the public. Brilliant ideas were regularly superseded, not only before they reached the market but before they had the opportunity to be presented ahead of competing ideas originating from within the R&D departments of the same companies, believing that internal competition would provide fuel for the creative process. At the same time, many small, innovative companies went bankrupt, putting all their effort into stillborn concepts. On the opposite end, the more fortunate were acquired by larger companies without the outside world aware they existed.

I had determined early on never to accept that nothing could be better or faster, but paradoxically also that nothing was infinite, even the infinite. The universe was supposedly infinite. Yet astrophysicists were calculating its dimensions, thereby defining it as the exact opposite of infinite, even as it expanded - supposedly infinitely. Its mass purportedly could neither be gained nor lost. Yet things somehow leaked in and out. From where, to where?

Given the statement above, there is likely hypocrisy in expressing that Telepathic Collaboration had driven the speed of thought to where it approached the innovative equivalent of light speed. And since we were still dependent on technology, still limited by the speed of light, until some brilliant innovation breached that barrier, we were nearly there. You can bet we were working hard on that.

As it was, brilliant innovations, one after another, were surpassed before anyone not participating in that specific telepathic brainstorming session had any way to know they'd been so much as a synaptic blip. And likely, they went unnoticed even within the session. Embryotic epiphanies, uncounted, were aborted before they ever fully formed, silenced before allowed to announce themselves, rolled over, and crushed beneath the mass of collaborative imagination. Other thoughts screamed in triumph as they threw themselves into the violent maelstrom of our sessions. Or whispered so timidly they might easily be overlooked forever if not captured in the web woven from the threads of multiple individual consciousnesses and some lagging perceptiveness hollered the equivalent of, "Wait! Back up! What was that you just said?" And from there, it began again.

Contribution to these sessions required participants to be brilliant and creative while focused and clear in their thinking. Those who couldn't interject quickly, clearly, and often loudly enough were just there to watch the show. But the show was impressive, and nearly every participant took away a great deal from each, contributor or not. One of our researchers referred to Telepathic Collaboration sessions he'd attend only to observe and be edified as a Ph.Ds. in an instant.

Then there were those whose ideas were not aborted, superseded, but never considered, never part of the mix, left behind, still resonating in the minds of their creators. Ideas they knew were brilliant, important, still eminently contributable, and they chastised themselves for not being more assertive - next time, scream, "Stop! Wait! Shut up! Listen!"

Also required of all our brilliant participants, especially those who were aware they'd been contributors, was the most difficult challenge ever requested of them; they needed to put their egos aside. Because not one of them could ever take sole credit for a single emergent innovation. There would never be award dinners for appreciation of their contributions and accomplishments to be acknowledged. There were no ideas any could claim as theirs and theirs alone. Because what emerged came from what was effectively a single collaborative mind.