Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

From an early age, the Swiss scientist Max Kleiber had a knack for testing the edges of convention.

If you measure how quickly a new technology progresses from an original idea to mass adoption, then it turns out that HDTV was traveling at the exact same speed that color television had traveled four decades earlier.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

newborn

Good ideas are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them.

We like to think of our ideas as $40,000 incubators, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

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.

A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.

to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.

Most astrobiologists—scientists who study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe—believe that if we are ever to discover convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life, be it on Mars or in some distant galaxy, it, too, will turn out to be carbon-based.

For reasons we will see, high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations.

the rise of urban networks triggers a dramatic increase in the flow of good ideas.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.

The Act of Creation.

The book’s index, for instance, lacks a single reference to that great engine of supercreativity, the city.

But Dunbar’s study showed that those isolated eureka moments were rarities. Instead, most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.

The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors, which is one reason so many Web-era companies have designed their work environments around common spaces where casual mingling and interdepartmental chatter happens without any formal planning.

The idea, of course, is to strike the right balance between order and chaos.

How Buildings Learn,

A new idea is something larger than that: it’s a new perspective on a problem, or a recognition of a new opportunity that has gone unexplored to date.

hunch

perspiration

nouri...

Inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists—they all like to tell the stories of their great breakthroughs as epiphanies, in part because there is a kind of narrative thrill that comes from that lightbulb moment of sudden clarity, and in part because the leisurely background evolution of the slow hunch is much harder to convey.

“How incredibly stupid not to think of that.”)

Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

reverie

Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

DEVONthink,

The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with work environments that encourage the architecture of serendipity.

Paradigm shifts, in Kuhn’s argument, begin with anomalies in the data, when scientists find that their predictions keep turning out to be wrong.

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it.

Dunbar found that the scientists tended to treat these surprising outcomes as the result of flaws in their experimental method: some kind of contamination of the original tissue perhaps, or a mechanical malfunction, or an error at the data-processing phase. They assumed the result was noise, not signal.

dissent,

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

“Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.

Their ability to build on top of these existing platforms explains why three guys could build

YouTube in six months, while an army of expert committees and electronics companies took twenty years to make HDTV a reality.

In Twitter’s case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base.

It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.

One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software that has been created by third parties.

Stacked platforms are like that: you think you’re fighting the Cold War, and it turns out you’re actually helping people figure out where to have lunch.

caved

It is in the nature of good ideas to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them,

For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking.

But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch.

litigiousness.