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Everyone seeks the small investment that leads to “unicorns.” The answer is a question, which while seemingly “small” has massive effects; this, I’m suggesting, is what defines a “good” question.
By understanding why some ideas cause massive change, while others don’t, we can learn to more effectively construct and target questions that produce so-called genius breakthroughs. Why questions are those that will lead to breakthroughs, especially when why is challenging a known truth.
The principle for deviation here is this: To question begins a “quest,” and a journey into the unknown. The most insightful quest begins with “Why?”… especially when targeted at what you assume to be true already. Because your truths are highly connected assumptions, change them and you may change the whole system.
But information is agnostic. Meaning isn’t. The meaning you make with this knowledge is up to you.
diversity of experience is a transformative force for the brain because new people and environments not only reveal our assumptions to ourselves, they also expand our space of possibility with new assumptions.
it took him eight months to learn to steer the bike, riding it every day for five minutes. (It took his young son only two weeks, thanks to his young brain’s neural plasticity, which results in an ability to incorporate feedback (read: experience; trial and error) faster than adults.)
Another key for seeing differently is not to move through the world comfortably. Whether literally or metaphorically, in one’s body or in one’s mind, we need to get dirty, to get lost, to get swallowed by the experience. This could sound clichéd, but it’s nonetheless true… and necessary to reiterate loudly, given the speed of the sprint in which much of the Western world is running toward health and safety. (We’re rushing so fast toward mitigating against short-term risk that to stand still in our society is to become relatively risky!) Don’t be a tourist of your own life, taking your
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Our research on evolving artificial life systems has shown that diverse populations are more likely to find the optimal solution than a less diverse population. What is more, they were more likely to exhibit more “contextual” behavior (i.e., conditional behavior) when they evolved in uncertain environments (where there was a one-to-many relationship between stimulus and reward) relative to unambiguous environments (where there was a one-to-one relationship between a stimulus and reward). Their neural processes were also more complex.
As the insightful marketing guru Rory Sutherland pointed out to me, the success of Uber is less about disrupting the taxi industry (which most ascribe it to be) and more in line with our own research on uncertainty, in this case our need for certainty about where the taxi is and when it will arrive.
As Rory pointed out, stress in bus shelters in London was dramatically reduced when Transport for London installed LED displays telling people when the next bus would be arriving. Even if the wait was considerable, knowing that it was considerable made the experience more emotionally tolerable.
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn’t actually our environment as such, or our” intelligence, or even—ironically—the challenge of reaching the mythical “aha” moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity.
What is more, we want to thrive in every sense. To achieve this requires taking risks in perceptions, which requires us to be deviant.
if you want to go from A to B, then you must actively engage with the world. But the first step to get to B is to go from A to not-A. To be in not-A is to be in uncertainty, to experience the stimulus without the requisite meaning of the past. The key is to choose to look away from the meanings we have been layering onto stimuli.
Someone bumps into you on the street. Your first automatic response could be: What an asshole! That is “A.” But just stop. Don’t go to A. Go to not-A. Perhaps the person who bumped into me is ill; that’s why they stumbled, and they may need help. Or they may indeed be an asshole. Don’t know more. Stopping gives you the chance of knowing less, of halting the perception-narrowing force of the cognitive biases that we are always trying to confirm, of taking the jerk out of the knee-jerk and sitting with the meaninglessness of the stimuli, even if it doesn’t feel meaningless.
In stressful situations in which creativity often loses out to your fight-or-flight response drives, just stopping actually engages a different chemical in your brain than the distress-induced cortisol. It releases oxytocin, which is quantifiably associated with more empathic and generous behavior (as well as other behaviors). Through generosity and empathy we listen much more creatively. So, you can actually create better living through your own chemistry.
Free will lives, not in going to A, but in choosing to go to not-A. Free will lives in changing the past meanings of information in order to change future responses.
the solution evolution itself has given us to uncertainty.
It is a way of being that can profoundly change how we live… a way of being that applies to most things innovative and pathbreaking, a way of being that is defined by five principles that form the backbone of this whole book: I. Celebrating uncertainty: to approach “stopping” and all the questions this stopping spawns from the perspective of gain, not loss. II. Openness to possibility: to encourage the diversity of experience that is the engine of change, from social changes to evolution itself. III. Cooperation: to find value and compassion in the diversity of a group or system, which expands
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Humans are very much like bonobos. It has allowed us to engage with the world and learn because in play uncertainty is celebrated.
What do you get if you add intention to play? SCIENCE.
The human brain is balanced between excitation and inhibition.
In an ecology of innovation you can frame creativity as saying yes to more new ideas.
You don’t want to ask yourself, “Hmmm, is there a way I could see this differently?” Because the answer is, yes, there is. But you probably shouldn’t try. The wise decision is to get out of the way as efficiently as possible.
Either you have lots of brain cells and each one fires only once in your lifetime, or you have only one brain cell that fires continuously throughout life. It turns out that the brain employs both strategies.
When it grows, it is adding connections, and therefore complexifying itself: adding dimensions to the space of possibility, and forging new pathways of neuroelectric connectivity.
the questioning process that Ives pioneered through the design group at Apple—the governing idea that, even though the company has an unequivocally great and successful product, they must keep asking themselves, Why can’t we make this better?
Alternating cycles of creativity and efficiency are what the most successful living systems did (and still do), and this is the process that Silicon Valley/tech culture has effectively rebranded as their own.
The human brain doesn’t strive for perfection. We are wired to find beauty in the imperfect.
Ecotomes produce most biological innovation, but they are also where the most risk is involved, since as we all know, transitions bring uncertainty: the transition from youth to adulthood, from a familiar home to a new home, single life to married life (and often back again), childless life to parent life, working life to retired life.
It is movement between that is innovation: to be innovative is not to live at the edge of chaos, but to be at the edge of chaos on “average.”
Full says that the people coming from different fields “are naïve to the other’s field.”
This is simply to say that for innovation we need diversity of group, which includes the “group” inside each of us.
an approach called the information deficit model, in which the aim is to convince by providing more measured data.
This isn’t to say that it can’t be questioned, only that to go from A to not-A, you need a purchase, a base, in addition to the ability to forgive,
It’s the act of just stopping, of going from A to not-A… of “ecovi.” It’s why “failures” can lead to successes.
we project everything we perceive onto the world, including the world of others: their beauty, their emotions, their personalities, their hopes, and their fears.
While what you perceive about another person is indeed in reference to your interactions with them, your perceptions still take place internally to you, though they arise from the dialectic space between you and them. This means that their personality is in a very literal sense your personality transposed. Their fears are your fears transposed. Yes, people do exist objectively… just not for us, ever.
with people there is an objective constancy that transcends their ambiguities that the brain must interpret. This is their why.
we look for the invariant aspects of an object, such as its reflectance properties, which in color vision is called color constancy. We’re effectively looking for character constancy in people, so that we can predict their behavior.
It is possible that it is this consistency, this elusive constant that deviates from an average, that we are trying to touch in others… what we might call their soul. But this constant that others possess isn’t a normative thing… it’s their personal deviation.
So what we need to teach our children and each other is the ability to “just stop” when listening, not only while in conflict but always—in order to listen differently. Listening is the diminishment of the answers we project onto the world. It lets in the possibility of the question, the possibility that through questions my assumptions might come to map onto your assumptions, which is when we feel “connected.”
It is about making a new future past. By choosing to re-mean the meanings of a past experience, you alter the statistics of your past meanings, which then alters future reflexive responses. You change what you’re capable of.
To be is to be perceived. —George Berkeley
