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I was marveling at an advertisement in the Minneapolis airport last week, and I wasn't alone...
There were four billboards for Traveler's Insurance side by side along a stretch of a wall leading to the "F" gates. They were all the same. Each was internally lit with a large red umbrella in the middle, a white background and a tag line in the upper left hand corner. That's it.
That's it until someone walked by and cast their shadow on any one of them.
Picture a fall day and you're riding your bike through a pile of dry leaves. You plow through the middle of them and leaves scatter in a zillion directions. In the same way, when you walk by these billboards and your shadow hits them, these umbrellas blow apart, pieces flipping all over the billboard like leaves. A big difference between the leaves and these pieces on the billboard though, is that after you scatter the umbrella with your shadow, the pieces gather back together, creating the large umbrella again.
I actually thought at first the pieces were leaves fluttering about, but upon closer inspection, I found they were tiny little umbrellas that made up the larger umbrella.
And I was fascinated. How does a shadow cause these pieces to break up and flutter about? And it was precisely the shadow. Only the part that the shadow hit fluttered. If a short person walked by, then only a portion of the handle would fly. If you just caught a corner of the umbrella then only that corner would fly.
I stood mesmerized. And then I found I wasn't the only one.
There was a young man over my right shoulder taking pictures of them with his cell phone. There was an elderly couple who watched and smiled. And then there were the kids, who could never be satisfied with just walking by. They had to stop, wave their arms, jump up and down to make the umbrellas disperse and come back together again.
I stood in awe at the ingenuity. Who came up with this? Who put it on paper the first time? Who was sitting in a room and conceptualized it? Who then developed the idea and made it practically possible?
Human beings are cool. Our creative brilliance is jaw dropping.
Thirty-three miners in Chile are rescued after sixty-nine days by men and women using tools that had never existed before that moment. Ingenuity.
And, too, for all my fury at BP's leadership failings leading up to the oil spill, the creativity it took to come up with a permanent cap on the fly really was astonishing. It seemed to take so long because the gush of oil was like sand running out of an hourglass to us. It drove us crazy. But the engineering accomplished in that amount of time was breathtaking and groundbreaking.
Saving miners, protecting the ecosystem, or simply putting wonder in the eyes of another human being... Let your people think...they might amaze you. | 
