Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation
By Steve Johnson
If you want to decode the origins of innovation, read this book. Steve Johnson provides deep insights into the environments required for good ideas to flourish. He provides concrete ways we can be more innovative in our lives and businesses. Handpicked highlights below…
- Good ideas and innovations don’t just pop out of thin air. There’s no such thing as an overnight success.
Society likes to romanticize inventions, attributing good ideas to eureka moments and innovations to overnight successes. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, says that reporters used to get annoyed when he told them there was no single epiphany that led to him creating the web. To the reporters, the web simply didn’t exist the day before, Tim must have had a lightning-strike of inspiration. The truth though, is that it was a decades long thought process where different ideas and influences swirled through his mind until “a new concept jelled.”
Good ideas are “built out of a collection of existing parts,” says Johnson. They often start as incomplete thoughts and half-formed hunches in our minds. The more these hunches connect with other ideas, they recombine, reshape, and take on forms that were unimaginable at the start.
In our brains, good ideas arise when thousands of neurons form a network and fire in sync for the first time. The more ideas and experiences we have, the more our neurons are stretched and prodded to make new connections. To have more good ideas, put more spare parts on the table. Read more, meet interesting people, seek out new experiences, write everything down. Marinate on the new ideas and seek out moments that remove you from the distractions of daily life, this is when the neurons connect. Go for walks, take long showers, soak in a tub, meditate. “Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had overlooked and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity; why didn’t I think of that before!” This overlaps with the concept of mindfulness embodied by many successful people, from Steve Jobs to hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio (future post alert!).
- Cities and the web are “engines of innovation.”
Environments that encourage the free flow of ideas are crucial for good ideas to seed and spawn innovations. Cities and the web form networks as people with different knowledge and expertise can connect randomly and share ideas. According to Johnson, “Both environments are dense, liquid, networks where information easily flows along multiple unpredictable paths.”
They spark what Johnson calls “exaptations,” or instances where tools are repurposed and used in new, novel ways. Think of using a match to provide light in a dark room or start a fire on a cold night. Johannes Gutenberg created his famous printing press using equipment that was intended for making wine. Dr. Stephane Tarnier invented the incubator for babies after seeing a similar device being used on baby chickens at the zoo in Paris.
- Successful innovations are uncovered at the Adjacent Possible.
The Adjacent Possible is “a kind of shadow future hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” There are boundaries and limitations in the present, there are only certain things that can exist. Creation arises when people explore these boundaries and find ways to expand them. Johnson compares it to a house that magically grows as doors are opened, one door leading to four new doors that can be explored.
For an innovation to stick, it needs to come at the right time. As Johnson notes, “technological and scientific advances rarely break out of the Adjacent Possible; the history of cultural progress is almost without exception a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time.” Anyone that skips the adjacent possible and probes the distant possible will almost certainly fail. For example, in the days of dial-up internet, the iPhone simply couldn’t have existed.
- Keep a commonplace book.
The greatest minds of Enlightenment Europe, Francis Bacon and John Locke to name a couple, obsessively kept what they called “commonplace books.” In essence, the books were personal encyclopedias. They weren’t quite journals, but rather compilations of interesting passages, quotes, diagrams, and so on. The idea was that a commonplace book would “lay up a fund of knowledge” that could be drawn upon at any point in life, in any pursuit. It helps preserve your hunches so they can be revisited in the future with complementary ideas and info.
Charles Darwin’s commonplace book is a famous example. He was constantly writing about new ideas, questioning assumptions, taking notes, and documenting his streams of consciousness. Importantly, he regularly reviewed his old notes, which led him to see new connections he had missed before. “His ideas emerge as a kind of duet between the present tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper.”
It was ironic to read about the commonplace books because it put words to the idea behind this website. Wisdom Snacks is my commonplace book to an extent. It’s where I want to deeply explore new ideas and boil them down to essentials that I can draw upon at any point and share with others.
- If you’re not failing and making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.
It’s simple, “Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.” This echoes James Freeman’s comments about constraints leading to creativity. When you’re wrong, you’re forced to “challenge assumptions and adopt new strategies.” It can lead to exaptations and continued probing of the Adjacent Possible.
In fact, research shows, environments that foster a certain level of noise and error are better for birthing good ideas. Compare the corporate giants who build systems to eliminate error and maintain status quo to the start-ups whose missions are built around failing faster. “Move fast and break things” is a Facebook motto after all.
While the goal isn’t to make mistakes, they are inevitable along “the path to true innovation.” If you’re not making mistakes, you should be trying harder.
- Organizations and businesses are better off connecting ideas rather than protecting them.
How can Apple consistently deliver such innovative products despite its notorious lockdown mentality? According to Johnson, Apple’s development process “looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line;” it’s noisy, messy, and chaotic, yet it prevents “good ideas from behind hollowed out as they progress through the development chain.”
Apple calls its process Parallel Production. Throughout product creation, Apple brings its various departments together to brainstorm solutions and strategies. Everyone from design and engineering to sales and marketing will be asked for their input. It’s noisier and more contentious than a typical product cycle, but it’s a process that nurtures and elevates the best ideas of the bunch.
The FBI, on the other hand, is an institution that has encouraged secrecy, the use of security clearances, and sharing information only on a “need to know” basis. These silos of information, while intended as a protective measure, only hinder communication within the organization. Prior to 9/11, this system-wide secrecy prevented the FBI from connecting the research of two employees that, together, could have connected some of the dots on the pending attacks.
“The truth is,” says Johnson, “Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free but they do want to connect, fuse, and recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.”
This book was definitely worth the read. For more brain food from Steve Johnson, check out his TED talk below.
Want to read? Click here to buy Steve’s book on Amazon (affiliate link, thanks for your support!).