Cutting through the bell curve

When coming up with new innovation, designs, or just another idea, sooner or later there will come an idea that few people like.

The normal distribution curve is shaped with most of its value surrounding the mean. This is the curve many things in nature follow – most of us are somewhere around the average intelligence, for example. Most people are somewhere around the average height with few tall and short individuals. And most of us have somewhere around the average ability to imagine what the future looks like.

If we were to plot ideas along a bell curve, we would have the few rare brilliant concepts in the far right, where most people in the middle of the bell curve would fail to appreciate.

So sometimes truly great ideas are so out of the box it is a statistical certainty that they are lost to the appreciation of the masses.

The question is, what will you do when you find next idea surrounded by nay-sayers – will you listen to them, or will you push forward with head held high?

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Howard Chen
Vice Chair for Artificial Intelligence at Cleveland Clinic Diagnostics Institute
Howard is passionate about making diagnostic tests more accurate, expedient, and affordable through disciplined implementation of advanced technology. He previously served as Chief Informatics Officer for Imaging, where he led teams deploying and unifying radiology applications and AI in a multi-state, multi-hospital environment. Blog opinions are his own and in no way reflect those of the employer.

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