- by Steven Johnson (2011)
Good ideas don't really have a 'Eureka' moment, and don't come in a flash as is popularly believed. Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From lays out an entertaining recipe for nurturing an environment for incubating good ideas.
The Adjacent Possible. From Suart Kauffman (p30) Johnson explains that the "... number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but finite." The more one knows, the more that knowledge is able to potentially touch on some other knowledge to engender a new idea. New ideas are simply new connections of existing ideas. And new connections can't happen unless two ideas come in contact (are adjacent) with each other. "Exploring the boundaries of the finite possible expands those boundaries."
"Environments that block or limit new combinations - by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, or by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges will ... generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration." (p41)
"The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table" (referring to the Apollo 13 problem solving session at NASA wherein they put all the parts available to the astronauts on a table in front of the engineers who had to brainstorm a survival strategy for the troubled mission). (p42)
To enable the mind to use more creative networks, place it inside the environments that share the same network shape (fractal nature of creativity).
The Slow Hunch. Part of the secret of hunch cultivation is to write ideas down. Darwin, Milton, Bacon, Locke, Franklin all used copious notes in a commonplace book - assorted notes on readings, observations, ideas.
Serendipity. Recent experiments by German neuroscientist Ullrich Wagner - subject assigned tedious math tasks (repetitive transformation of 8 digits into a different number) there was a hidden rule to the transformation that those subject who 'slept on it' were able to figure out at more than twice the rate of a control group. "Dreams are a chaotic improvement in exploring the adjacent possible." (102).
An idea is serendipitous only if it fills in the missing piece of a puzzle you have been thinking about or working on. (109)
Errors. Not all great ideas result from direct connection - some result from errors - Fleming (mold - penicillin), Daugerre (spilled mercury worked on silver plates). Greatbach (pacemaker), deForest (gas flame influenced by spark led to vacuum tubes). Edison's 99% perspiration vs. 1% inspiration.
"The errors of the great mind exceed in numbers those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous ones must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded"-British economist Wiliam Stanley Jevons (136)
"Error isn't simply a place you have to suffer through on your way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions." (137)
Being wrong and acknowledging it doesn't open new doors to the adjacent possible but it forces us to look for them.
Resist the natural tendency to dismiss error as an artifact - it may be signal not noise. Penzias and Wilson's discovery of background radiation 'noise' in the universe they eventually realized was remnant radiation left over from the big bang - earning them a Noble Prize in physics.
Exaptation. = Repurposing. eg.: feathers evolved for warmth but became airfoils for flight. Gutenberg exapted the wine press using moveable type (both inventions already existed) to print bibles.
Cities are ripe for exaptation. More dense with different viewpoints, more adjacent possibility. They enable more subcultures - more people in niches who share uncommon interests come in contact with each other. There are more chances for the oddball entrepreneur to survive. A great example is the umbrella store downstairs from the hotel I am writing this post in in New York. It has been there for many years and they do a remarkable business in nothing but umbrellas and canes.
A study at Stanford's business school in the late '90s showed that innovation increases when your close connections are more diverse and reach outside your corporate/family/friend/professional culture. Connections tend to converge with better (more innovative) solutions more frequently.
Platforms. eg.: Darwin's theory of coral reef formation. The coral reef is a platform (the scleractina polyp makes aragonite skeletons that persist for millennia) for exceptional diversity (1-100 million distinct species!) in nutrient-poor waters.
Beavers are platform species: (platform builders in nature are now called ecosystem engineers). "The platform builders and ecosystem engineers don't just open doors in the adjacent possible - they build an entire new floor. In felling trees to create dams, they turn swamps into ponds, literally forming new ecosystems.
Modern platform examples occurred at Johns-Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory in 1957 when Sputnik was launched. Two young researchers (Guier & Weiffenbach) took a microwave receiver, taped the 20 mhz signal from Sputnik for posterity. They noticed a doppler shift in the frequency as it passed overhead, and analyzed it to figure out Sputnik's trajectory. Their director (McClure) asked if it could be done the other way around - to figure from a know satellite position the unknown position of something (a ballistic missile submarine, it turns out) on the surface of the earth. Satellite navigation was born.
Other modern platforms include the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley Freud's Wednesday salons at 19 Bergstrasse, the 19th century coffeehouse "Where ideas go to have sex".
"Physical platforms have a natural appetite for trash, waste and abandoned goods." (199) ex: artificial reef, coral living on an exoskeleton abandoned by it's host (200).
P201 - Garbage exchange Coral reefs -
sun -> zooxanthellae (algae) --> O2, sugars --> coral polyps --> CO2, N2, Phosphates --> back to zooxanthellae.
Brent Constanz looked at the model used by coral reefs (which suck up CO2 to build structures), and founded his company Calera which makes Portland cement using CO2.
The 4th Quadrant. Four quadrants of innovation:
1. market/individual 3. market/networked2. non-market/individual 4. non-market/networked
Most real innovation n the past 200 years has been in the 4th quadrant - due to dramatically increasing communication availabilities. He has an interesting discussion in which he debunks the treasured american notion that great ideas come in isolation through simple hard work using the Carrier air-conditioning company example, showing that Carrier was a rare example and he still needed the right situation.
Johnson's final thoughts are worth a final quote, summing up the 'tips' if you will, for nurturing our own good ideas:
"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let other build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank."
