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The Lost Art of Being Frugal

Worcester, Massachusetts got slammed by a blizzard this week, bringing out the hearty nature in all of us New Englanders. What’s a little (34″) snow to dampen our spirits? I made a big pot of chili, watched a couple of movies, read a little, and hung out with my pets while the snow flew. Then yesterday, I joined everyone else in the neighborhood in the first great dig out of the winter. It’s what you do when you live here. No complaining needed. Born out of the spirit of the Puritans that settled here, New Englanders have a reputation for hard work and frugality. Granted, it’s been some time since the days of the Pilgrims, and regional distinctions fade as we’ve become a much more migratory society over the centuries, but we still think of Southern hospitality, Midwestern friendliness, Western pioneers, and hearty New Englanders. And yesterday, we hearty folks were shoveling.

Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

While we praise hard work and frugality, these traits also run counter to much that Americans dream to achieve today. Retiring early, becoming a millionaire overnight, achieving fame and fortune by winning a talent contest … these are the ideas behind bestsellers and top rated television programs. We talk the talk of hard work, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, scraping and scrapping and saving for our dreams; these are the bedrocks upon which America was built and, thus, they remain a part of our societal DNA. As one of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, said, “The way to wealth depends on just two words, industry and frugality.” In theory. But in reality, for more reasons than we can count, they are less and less the walk of America.

Economists speak of “frugality fatigue” as a driving force behind folks living in debt. As a species, we aren’t always very good at delayed gratification. We want what we want now and we’ve built a society that feeds this human habit in so many ways. Thus, when we also hear the popular mantra “do more with less” in our workplaces and business, it’s not something that we necessarily want to hear. It becomes a very negative thing. It wears us out, after awhile. We get stretched too thin. We simply cannot do more and more with less and less. In this sense, frugality becomes our enemy.

But is it? Was Mr. Franklin wrong? Or is there a way to look at “do more with less” that prompts something beyond stress?

According to Navi Radjou, an innovation strategist in Silicon Valley, the answer to that question is yes. In his thought-provoking TED Talk, Creative Problem-Solving in the Face of Extreme Limits, he outlines his theory of frugal innovation. In this brief talk, he gives lots of examples of people living in conditions where resources are often extremely limited, yet rather than limiting their ability to solve problems, the situation actually enhances their creativity and results in solutions that they would likely never come up with in a land of plenty.

They can magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of high value. In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of frugal innovation.

~ Navi Radjou

We hardly need to live in abject poverty to take advantage of this idea. Librarianship, and any profession struggling with finding its footing and value in tough times, can tap into the one resource that’s common in most every situation, human ingenuity. Radjou calls it our most abundant resource. We need to find ways and create situations that foster our ingenuity. Maybe, the pressure cooker of a “do more and more with less and less” work setting can be the impetus for this. Maybe not knowing what’s coming next, not knowing where we belong, not knowing how to define and/or redefine ourselves is just the environment we need to push us towards creative solutions.

In many ways, I’m glad that I’ve entered my new role as an evaluator without a lot of traditional knowledge and background in the subject. Yes, I’ve been reading and studying up on the basics, but lacking the resource of years of experience and know-how, I find that I’m able to come up with some different thoughts and ideas and solutions that I probably wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. It’s like the team that enters the big game for the first time. They don’t know enough to know to lose.

One of the great things about evaluating the impact of clinical and translational research is that nobody really knows exactly how to do it yet. This is what I tell myself. It helps me put aside any anxiety of knowing that I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing, and sets me free to try all sorts of things in doing my job. It’s my way of making the most out of my limited resources and thus practicing frugal innovation. And that can be downright exciting.

Tags: frugal innovation, frugality, human ingenuity, Navi Radjou, problem solving, TED Talks

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Categories Day-to-Day, Evaluation, Skills

Thinking with Pictures

8 Sep

I wrote the other day that I drew a picture to help me figure out the methodology of the study and where the different sources of data fit in. Drawing pictures helps me a lot. And I’m not alone. In fact, if you do the slightest bit of reading into the literature on how we think and perceive and remember, you’ll quickly find that our brains are arranged to take in information visually almost 3 times more than our other 4 senses combined. We are visual thinkers. Sadly, though, we live in a society based much more on verbal and written communication. That might explain why we’re so confused, but I’ll resist the urge to digress onto that thought.

I’m fascinated with the topics of visual communication and visual literacy and visual note taking. I’m also really lucky to be married to someone who teaches in this field (as a subset of graphic design) and so I’m privy to a lot of great books and journals and magazines. Between Lynn’s teaching and my interest, we’ve developed quite the library.

I’ve also been lucky in that I was recently asked to speak on a panel at the upcoming “Emerging Roles Symposium” being hosted by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. During the panel, I’ll be talking about my role supporting eScience. There are several panels and a whole bunch of great speakers and topics. It’s going to be a terrific program and I couldn’t be more pleased to take part.

The invitation also came with another to teach a continuing education class. If you’re flying all the way across the country for a meeting, you might as well make the most of it. Of course, I said, “Sure!” Note that I said “Sure!” before ever agreeing on what I’d teach. In the back of my mind though, for a long while, had been the thought to develop a class around my interest and knowledge of visual communication, and so I proposed this to the CE Committee. The result – Bullet Point 1, Bullet Point 2, Bullet Point 3… the Audience Flees: Visual Communication Skills for Effective Teaching and Presentations – a class that, up until I got distracted by writing this blog post, I was working on this morning.

I thought I’d merge my class prep into this post by sharing the bibliography that I’m putting together. These are just some of the books that I’m using, but it’s a great collection to get you started on getting to know this topic. When I think about the skill set needed to be an embedded librarian, I think that two of the most important skills one must have for success are creativity and problem solving (critical thinking, analytical thought, however you might describe it). Or better put, maybe the one skill needed most by an embedded librarian is creative problem solving and one of the best ways to hone our creative problem solving skills is to practice visual thinking. So without further ado, here’s a small library to get you going (presented visually, of course):