Where good ideas come from?

This book is a classic and I read it many years ago, right after it was released in 2010. But, like all classics, it's becoming more and more valid and important.

Where good ideas come from?

This is one of those million-dollar questions, and Steven Johnson was bold enough to try answering it in "Where good ideas come from: the seven patterns of innovation." I must say: if he didn't get it exactly right, he came very close. The guy did a lot of research and discovered some really interesting things.

He starts by burning down the myth of the solitary genius (I loved it!).

Steven makes an analogy with Darwinian evolution theory and explains that life, just like ideas, depends mainly on favorable environments and connections to exist. Ideas are never isolated; both on the scale of our brain, where zillions of neurons are useless if not connected (and the more connections and recombinations, the better), and at the level of an organization, a city, or a country.

Johnson studied further and identified 7 environmental/behavioral patterns for developing new and good ideas. See if you have everything you need here.

1. The Adjacent Possible

Ideas evolve from others; the adjacent possible deals with the combinations you can make at each stage.

Using Darwinian theory, Steven gives the example of the primordial soup in the formation of the planet: with those elements, a certain number of combinations were possible.

Each combination gives rise to other variations, in a sequence that can form a cell. Then, more combinations, variations, and possible results.

What he means is that you need to explore the adjacent possibilities (reachable at this evolutionary stage) to move forward; you can't jump directly from a cell to a hippopotamus.

Johnson says the adjacent possible is like doors in a room. Each one you choose to open leads to another room with other doors, and the unfolding is infinite. But you can't skip entire rooms; you have to walk the whole path.

He gives examples of inventions that didn't work because they were developed at a time when the adjacent possibles, or the doors available to be opened, weren't enough or adequate (the necessary door was two or 3 rooms away).

Example: YouTube wouldn't be the success it is if it had been created in the 80s, as the web couldn't handle videos with today's ease and didn't yet have broadband.

So, before developing an idea, you have to look at the doors to see the immediate development. Sometimes, you need to wait a bit longer.

Here's a practical example I personally experienced: an innovative project that didn't have the necessary adjacents at the time.

2. liquid networks

Now some fairly obvious news, but it shocked me a bit: it's practically impossible to innovate in small towns.

Actually, it's not that you can't, but in metropolises, the possibilities for connections (and adjacent possibles) are much greater, making the environment more favorable. Big cities are proven to be more creative than villages.

Steven comments that people have tried many definitions for the word idea referring to lightning bolts, lightbulbs, flashes, epiphanies, and eurekas, but they've missed what ideas really are. For Johnson, good ideas are connections. In principle, neural connections in someone's head. But these connections are the result of other external connections (experiences, information, etc).

To have good ideas, two preconditions are necessary: a large network (it's not possible to have brilliant ideas with just 3 neurons, for example) and that this network has the ability to adapt and adopt new configurations. But one must pay attention: it's not that networks are intelligent; individuals become more intelligent when they connect to it.

This is why larger cities can be more conducive to good ideas; they bring together more different people, cultures, ways of organization. In short, the mix is richer. When individuals connect to this network, they have more elements to recombine; their adjacent possible increases with the size of the network they're in.

The same applies to companies; if they're connected with others, or their own employees are connected, the possibility of having good ideas increases.

3. slow intuition

As Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) has already demonstrated quite well, intuition is when our brain works in the background with all the connections it has accumulated on that subject and others, related or not, until the line of reasoning is complete.

Then, the person thinks they had a hunch, an epiphany, and starts shouting eureka like crazy. But the work is much slower than imagined. Connections take years to find a way to link to each other and also depend on adjacent possibles.

That's why Steven criticizes brainstorming sessions as they are typically done; the probability of connections between participants finding a path among the adjacent possibles in such a short time is quite unlikely.

The author recommends that all ideas and information be recorded and reviewed frequently (a habit that Darwin had).

4. serendipity

This word originates from a Persian tale, where three kings went to visit a princess and discovered several things they weren't looking for along the way. Serendipity is finding solutions by chance (classic example: the microwave oven, which was invented after a researcher discovered it melted chocolates in his pocket).

For this, one must constantly provoke unusual connections and think about how they could be unfolded; but the history of internal connections has to be prepared for the tuning, otherwise nothing happens.

The web can help a lot when we surf and find interesting topics we weren't looking for, for example, but the mind has to be prepared, otherwise it's just a waste of time.

Another curious (but also obvious) thing is that unusual connections aren't made in order; this works better in chaos.

5. ERRORS

People who have more good ideas also make more mistakes (of course, they make more connections).

The funny thing is that sometimes we think there's an error just because we don't have an explanation for the phenomenon.

The scientists who discovered signs of the Big Bang spent more than a year thinking that the spots they were seeing were problems with the telescope (and sometimes they are, there's no way to know).

6. Exaptation

This is a term borrowed from biology, which describes organisms optimized for specific functions but later used successfully for other purposes.

In innovation, the classic example is Gutenberg's press, which was inspired by grape presses for making wine. Or the World Wide Web, which was born in a laboratory to serve as a research platform for hypertexts and today serves so many things that no one had thought of before.

Or even GPS, which was conceived for military purposes and is now omnipresent in taxis in big cities.

7. PLATFORMS

No good idea starts from scratch; one must always stand on the shoulders of giants, as the great Isaac Newton used to say.

If you used open platforms (whether technological, mathematical, literary, artistic, or whatever) to develop your idea, be generous and also make your platform available to those who follow. Everyone wins this way.

CONCLUSION

Johnson talks more about the growing trend of developing ideas in networks. It's worth knowing more.

Finally, he manages to summarize the entire book in one paragraph:

"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 others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank of ideas."

One more reason to love Berlin. And I didn't even know it.