So it seems that Twitter is just a frivolous development not really worthy of our attention and surely no serious person would bother with it. But then that’s what they said about the telephone too…

Which got me thinking. When I worked in a science environment we had lots of really clever people (it was rocket science) and one of the problems was that they got old and retired – how inconsiderate. Succession planning and knowledge transfer was a nightmare. All that knowledge went with them so we ended up having to bring them back in when they should have been enjoying a well earned retirement. We used to daydream about being able to slurp all the knowledge out of their heads with a psychic vacuum cleaner.

And it’s not just in science either.

One serious Twitter-er is Stephen Fry and most people think he’s a comic genius and quite clever too. How about if we could figure out how he does it?

The idea of modelling excellence already exists in many fora – NLP for example – and the idea is that you break down the thinking into little bits. One way of doing that is to have the person speak out loud everything they are thinking in all it’s glorious detail – images, sounds, smells, feelings etc. So you start to see where I’m going with this?

If those people at the forefront of their professions were to Twitter their thoughts when they are doing what they do best then we might have a chance of understanding their genius. In fact, if we were to know who helped shape their thinking, who their phone-a-friend is, what they do when they get stuck, how they problem solve…

Obviously they would have to have an altruistic gene to open up their thinking to us mere mortals but think of the benefit to mankind.

Imagine being able to see inside Einstein’s head!