In his remarkable book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson, illustrates the important aspects of creating an environment that can lead to birth of good ideas. He uses historical examples to highlight how specific features in the environment, directly led to the rise of world changing ideas like the Gutenberg press, the omnipresent post-it note and many life saving medical innovations. Before we dive into them, it would be best to understand the concept of Fractal patterns.
Fractal patterns
A fractal is a Mathematical curve that is self repeating. We can think of these as patterns that are infinitely repeating as we zoom in or out of anything (see image below).
Most innovation patterns are fractal in nature, i.e. they appear both at super high zoomed out levels, for ex our mega cities and at micro levels, eg our cellular structure. The reason this is probably true is because innovation, much like cellular reproduction depends on similar factors like exponential growth, adaptations, survival, etc, which in turn are affected by similar conditions.
The Adjacent Possible
First order innovations or evolutions can often lead to many times more innovative and often unanticipated creations many cycles later. The primordial soup led to the birth of organic life but it began with basic chemicals like Carbon Dioxide, Methane, Ammonia and some amino acids. Formaldehyde was a first order innovation and millions of cycles/years later we had humans walking the earth.
The adjacent possible is often a tiny improvement or evolution that is not remarkable on its own but opens up a new pathway of thinking about things.
He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication
Slow Hunches
Simply put, slow hunches, as the name suggests, are ideas taking shape in our subconscious, slowly. This concept challenges how we think about Eureka moments. Johnson says ideas don’t come to us in flashes but develop in our subconscious slowly. There’s usually no one single Eureka moment; or to say it differently, the Eureka moment takes a long time to build.
The author gives many examples in which ideas didn’t appear fully formed but remained hazy for quite a long period of time, continually alluding to something important. The example that has stayed with me is that of the famous pre-911 Phoenix memos. In the memos an FBI analyst described his hunch of possible terror threats related to aviation, after having come across news of many flight schools reporting suspicious behaviours by foreign nationals. The memo was shot down as being vague and speculative. A few months later, 911 happened.
Environments that want to support innovation need to be slow, support hypothesising, conjecturing, making errors and should not focus on instant gratification. They should also be open enough that slow hunches forming in different individuals can collide amongst each other.
Liquid Networks
True to the fractal nature of innovation, liquid networks are found everywhere in nature. Carbon atoms alone couldn’t have made life possible. They needed the primordial soup to enable free combinations of various atoms and molecules. Similarly, our brain is a dense network of neurons that support trillions on synaptic connections, allowing us to explore the intermingling of ideas.
Open exchange of ideas is almost directly linked to innovation. It is thus a matter of no wonder that almost all software today in the world is at least in some sense dependent on the work of open source communities that build over and improve existing open source code. The open nature of innovation is often challenged with the question of incentives, i.e. if every innovation is open and available for copying/modification, what incentive is there to innovate. The answer is it’s a tradeoff.
The more open an innovation is, the more likely it is to spread and adapt and evolve. The more closed, patented or walled an innovation is, the less is its impact on producing further innovation. True innovation lies in the delicate balance of free markets and university style academic research. Neither of them stand alone on their own and neither can claim to bring the promised goodness of the said innovation, without the other.
One of the more important aspects of open networks, or rather what supports it, is written notes. Writing down our learnings or experiences is a great way to support both germination of ones own slow hunches, and allowing others to explore the adjacent possible of what we’re dealing with. One of the more prolific note keepers known to us was Charles Darwin whose field notes inspired the theory of evolution. John Locke’s commonplace books were another innovative note keeping technique that made for totally different subjects to be entered in the same page, or succession of pages, allowing easy intermingling of ideas and sparking possible adaptations.
If you’re interested in note keeping, I use Obsidian and have written about organising book notes and daily planning workflow.
Errors lead to innovations
Just as DNA copying is error prone and leads to interesting innovations and changes, some noise in the environment can act as a catalyst for germination of new ideas. There are countless examples of errors leading upto groundbreaking discoveries. The famous one is that of the triode (vacuum tube) which Lee De Forest invented mistaking it to be something totally different. He was thinking he had discovered gas powered signal tracking but it eventually led to amplification of electrical signal and something that powers almost all our electronic gadgets. An environment that does not shoot down erroneous conclusions stands to gain from the scientific insights that come from failure.
Exaptation
Exaptation is the transformed use of something that evolved or was invented to do something totally different. Assimilating concepts and concocting new alternate ways of using them dates back almost a thousand years. The movable type press invented by Gutenberg was inspired by the screw fix wine making devices that were ubiquitous in the early 15th century in the Rhine area. This is where the importance of variety of experiences come in and why possessing Range seems to be so important.
We need amalgamation of different contexts and ideas to generate exaptation. A coffee house is known to have encouraged this amalgamation. Open cafeterias and water coolers are a great way to encourage this in your team/organisation.
To summarise, in the last 200 years, most of our world changing innovations have come from networks and collaborative efforts. Sole individuals or companies tinkering with things in their labs have had a minute impact on the world.
The key component of an environment that produces innovation is collaboration and open networks. A slow paced culture that encourages slow hunches and inculcates a habit of not being dismayed by errors. Only those ideas that are liberated amount to massive changes. Ideas that are copied, improved, distributed become better and end up changing the world. This is why in recent times mere economic motive doesn’t lead to big innovations as that means protecting ones ideas from the improvements done by ones competition.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.