Where good ideas come from

Speaker: Steven Johnson

I love this talk and this search for where good ideas come from. For anyone in business or with an entrepreurial bent this is an important question to consider - particularly if you want to ensure you have the very best and most original ideas possible.

The talk is superbly presented and is thoroughly engrossing. It starts of by asking such wonderful questions as were 17th century coffee houses a place where ideas could have sex, and did coffee itself really cause the flowering of innovation that resulted in great thinkers such as Darwin.

Transcript

Time: 18:16

Yeah, a few minutes ago I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the grand cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffee house to open in England and in 1650. That's its great claim to fame and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the enlightenment. And the coffee house played such a big role in the birth and the enlightenment in part because of what people were drinking there, because before the the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank, both elite and mass folks drank day in and day out from, from dawn until dusk was alcohol.

Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin, particularly around 1650 and top it off a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice, because the water wasn't safe to drink and so effectively until the rise of the coffee house, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day and you can imagine what that would be like right in your own life, and I know this is true for some of you, if you were drinking all day and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You will be sharper and more alert, and so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England. Switch to tea and coffee, but the other thing that makes the coffee house important is the is the architecture of the space.

It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share it with a space, as Matt really talked about where ideas could have sex. Right And this was their conjugal bed in a sense. Ideas would get together there and an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffee house somewhere in, in their story. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffee houses for the last five years because I've been kind of in on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation Um, unusual levels of creativity. What's the kind of environmental What is the space of creativity And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the Coffee House I've looked at like media environments like the worldwide web that have been extraordinarily innovative, have gone back to the history of the first cities.

I've even gone to biological environments like coral reefs in rain forests that involve unusual levels of biological innovation. And what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all these environments, are there recurring patterns So we can learn from that. We can take and kind of apply to our own lives, our own organizations or own environments to make them more creative and innovative and I think I found a few, but what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand that these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which are kind of conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation, right We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration, right We have the, kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight.

We have epiphanies. We have Eureka moments. We have the light bulb moments, right All of these concepts is kind of rhetorically Florida is they are share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a, in a wonderful, illuminating moment. But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level, right I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain and idea. A new idea is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. Right, and the question is how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are gonna be more likely to form, and it turns out that in fact the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world, of the, of the human brain.

So the metaphor I like to use is actually I can take from from a story of of a great idea that's quite recent, a lot more recent than the the 16 fifties. He's a wonderful guy named Timothy Pressero who has a company called an organization called design that matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is so we know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically it's very simple. We can have infant mortality rates in those environments. So the technology is there. We have these. These are standard in all the industrialized world. The problem is if you buy a $40,000 incubator and you send it off to a mid sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years and then something will go wrong and it will break and it will remain broken forever because you don't have a whole system of spare parts and you don't have the on the ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment.

And so you end up having this from where you spend all this money getting aid and all this advanced electronics to these countries and then it ends up being useless. So what Presto and his team decided to do is to look around and see what are the kind of abundant resources in these developing world context. And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of dvrs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. Right There's a Toyota four runner on the on the street and all in all these places, they seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts and this is what they ended up coming with. It's called the neo nurture device.

From the outside it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm, it runs off a car battery, and so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight and you can repair this thing. Now that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that in fact this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state of the art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts had happened to be around nearby. We take ideas from other people, from people that we've learned from, for people we run into in the coffee shop and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.

That's really where innovation happens and that means that we have to change. Some of our models have kind of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like. Right I mean this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple. This is a statue that Newton was Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know where you're sitting there thinking of deep thought and the apple falls from the tree and you have a theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right This is hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops look like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people are likely to have kind of new, interesting, unpredictable collisions, people from different backgrounds.

So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that strangely enough will look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like. It's part of my message here and one of the problems with this is that people are actually. When you. When you researched this field, people are notoriously unreliable when they actually kind of self report on where they have their own good ideas or their history of of their best ideas. And a few years ago, wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the big brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleagues at the water cooler and all these things, and he.

And he recorded all these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the, you know, the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image, you know, they're pouring over the microscope and they see something in the tissue sample and Oh, Eureka, they've got the idea what happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape, is it in fact, almost all the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table, at the weekly lab meeting when everybody got together and share their latest data and findings. Oftentimes when people shared the mistakes, they were having an error, the noise in the signal they were, they were discovering and something about that environment and started calling it the kind of the liquid network where you have lots of different eyes, ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other.

That environment is in fact the environment that leads to innovation. The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter timeframes, so they want to tell the story of the Eureka moment. They want to say, there I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head, but in fact, if you go back and look at historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the slow hunch. We've heard a lot recently about kind of hunch and instinct and kind of blink like a sudden moments of clarity, but in fact a lot of great ideas linger on sometimes for decades in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there is an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them.

They spent all this time, you know, kind of working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve. Darwin is a great example of this. Darren himself, in his autobiography, he tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic Eureka moment. He's in his study. It's October of 1838, and he's reading Motha sexually on population and all of a sudden the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, at last I had a theory with which to work. That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago. A wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from these from this period, and darn kept these copious notebooks where you wrote down every little Ida had every little hunch and what gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading malthus.

And in October of 18, 38 there passages where you can read it and you think like you're reading from a Darwin textbook from the period before. He has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin in a sense had the idea. He had the concept but was unable to fully thinking it yet, and that is actually how great ideas often happen. They fade into view over long periods of time. Now the challenge for all of us is how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long halflife right It's hard to go to your boss and say, I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 20 slash 20. Uh, could you just give me some time to do that Now, a couple of companies like Google, they have innovation time off 20 percent time where in a sense those are hunched, cultivating a mechanisms in an organization.

But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches. That's what often happens. You have half of an idea. Somebody else has the other half and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, building barricades, having secretive r and d labs, patenting everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas and the culture will be more innovative, but I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. And I'll leave you with this story which I think captures a lot of these values and it's just a, just a wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways.

It's October of 1957 and sputnik has just launched and we're in Laurel, Maryland at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University and it's Monday morning and the news is just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course this is nerd heaven, right There are all these physics geeks who are. They're thinking, oh my gosh, this is incredible. I can't believe this has happened. And two of them to 20 something researchers that the apl or they're at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues and these two guys and then gyre and wife and back and they start talking and one of them says, Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing There's this manmade satellite up there in outer space. It's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal we could probably hear it if we tune in.

And so they asked around to a couple of their colleagues and and everybody's like, no, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's, that's an interesting idea. And it turns out wife and black is kind of an expert in microwave reception and he's got a little antenna setup with an amplifier in his office. And so guyer wife Rebecca go back to the box office and they start kind of noodling around, hacking as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours they actually start picking up the signal because the Soviets made sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 megahertz so that you could. You could pick it up really easily because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax basically, so they made it really easy to to find it and so these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal on and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, wow, that's pretty cool.

Can I hear Well, that's great. And and before long they think, well Geez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it. And so they bring in this big clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep bleeps and they start writing down the date stamp timestamps for each for each little bleep that they record and then they start thinking, well, Gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling. If we. If we do a little basic math here using the doppler effect and then they played around with it a little bit more and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kinds of specialties and they said, Geez, you know, I think we could actually look at the slope of the doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antenna and the points at which its furthest way.

That's pretty cool and eventually they get permission. This is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description and they get permission to use the new, you know, Univac computer that takes up an entire room that they just gotten at the AP on. They. They run some more of the numbers at the end of about three or four weeks. It turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the earth. Just from listening to this one little signal going off on this little side hunch that it had been inspired to do over over lunch. One morning, a couple of weeks later, their boss, Frank Muchler, pulls him into the room and says, Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground.

Could you go the other way Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground if you knew the location of the satellite And they thought about it and they said, well, I guess maybe you could, um, let's, let's run the numbers here. And so they went back and they thought about it and they came back and said, actually, it'll be easier. And he said, oh, that's great because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building and it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem

And that's how gps was born. Thirty years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would, that would create an innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now I guarantee you certainly half this room, if not more, has a device sending in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said, satellite system to locate a nearby coffee house somewhere in the last and the last day or last week. Right

Thank you.

And that I think is a great case study, a great lesson in the power of the marvelous kind of unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power of open, innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed up. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch and this little passion that had developed. Then they thought they were fighting the Cold War and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind. Thank you very much.

Thanks.

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