James' World 2

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Credit…Fran Caballero

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Over the last 25 years of my career, I’ve found that organizations big and small often struggle to create repeatable approaches and processes that keep them truly competitive. 50 years ago, a little-known children’s book introduced the “SCAMPER” model as a way to help teachers foster creativity in their classrooms. It’s an amazingly simple tool, and unbelievably powerful for pushing thinking beyond “business as usual.”

Here’s how it works. SCAMPER is an acronym. SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to Another Use, Eliminate, and Reverse. This acronym is used to help prompt people to think differently than the norm. Each letter prompts people to answer a question related to the framework. It’s flexible. Select one letter or move through them in sequence.

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[Source photo: Solovyova/iStock]

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A wooden spoon gliding over cast iron. Barely tall enough to see over the stove, Lamar Cornett watched his mother, a cook, make his favorite dish of scrambled eggs.

That first cooking lesson launched a lifelong journey in food. Cornett has spent over 20 years in Kentucky restaurants, doing every job short of being the owner. The work is grueling and tense but rewarding and rowdy, and so fast-paced that the pandemic shutdown was like lightning on a cloudy day.

“It was almost like there was this unplanned, unorganized general strike,” Cornett said.

In those rare quiet moments, millions of restaurant workers like Cornett found themselves thinking about the realities of their work. Breaks barely long enough to use the restroom or smoke a cigarette. Meals inhaled on the go. Hostile bosses, crazy schedules, and paltry, stagnant pay.

To top it off: rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often obligated to tolerate. And lately, testy diners have only gotten more impatient as they emerge from the pandemic shutdowns.

Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave.

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With eight separate, flexible plates of shell held together by a skirt of muscle called a girdle, chitons look a bit like armored pebbles, ready for battle. The marine mollusks aren’t actually suited for action. They spend most of their time stuck in place, suctioned to rocks in the intertidal zone. While they’re clinging, their radula, a sort of tongue barbed with scores of sharp “teeth,” scrapes algae and other food from the surface. For chitons, that’s about as exciting as it gets.

They might seem simple, uncomplicated, even boring, but Lauren Sumner-Rooney, an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, thinks that reputation is a little unfair. “Even things that we’ve considered very, very simple,” she says, “may have a lot more going on.”

Sumner-Rooney roots for underdogs. She’s fascinated, for instance, by Astyanax mexicanus, a cave-dwelling tetra fish that evolved without eyes, and cave salamanders, whose ghostly pallor and gangly limbs are adapted to a lightless life. Her work focuses on brain structure in poorly understood animals such as chitons or tusk shells, which use tentacle-like organs called captacula to assist in gathering food.

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Do chitons have brains? What is a brain, anyway? Photo credit: Dilettantiquity / CC by 2.0.

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The scene is a familiar one: an urban park, with young couples picnicking, dog owners playing fetch, parents chatting while their children scamper around. Marie – a young child – becomes entranced by a new wonder of her world – maybe a springtime butterfly, maybe another child throwing an impressive fit. Eventually, looking away from her intense focus, she realizes that the world has shifted around her and that her parents are no longer in sight. Interest and elation morph into concern and fear, as she holds back her tears and begins to search. Just around the corner, she finds her father, who scoops her up, and, as quick as her fear started, it dissipates; her world is complete and safe again.

From the moment we are born, we are hardwired to seek attachment to others. Throughout our lives, relationships that involve attachment serve as sources of emotional security, joy, and companionship, while at other times, pain and grief. Compared with those of other animals, human relationships are staggeringly multifaceted. Yet despite this, what lies at the core of our relationships is an elaboration of a phenomenon whose roots across the species spectrum are wide and deep. As we wend our way through life’s course – from infancy to adolescence to adulthood to loss – attachment holds a strong grip on our lives, shifting to accommodate our changing needs. While the roots of this phenomenon tell us much about who we are, they tell us just as much about mysteries that remain unanswered in evolution, psychology, neuroscience, and more.

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Photo by Jianan Yu/Reuters

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