Patterns to Good Ideas

Where do good ideas come from? This sounds impossible to answer. Don’t ideas come in a flash, a la the Eureka moment, the lightbulb moment? How can that be explained? Surprisingly, Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From, argues that there are certain patterns to the origin of good ideas.

 

Take Charles Babbage, the man called the father of the modern-day computer. Sure, it was a great idea, but it took centuries before his idea could be realized. Which is why Johnson prefers to call him the great grandfather! And that quip brings us to Johnson’s first point: most good ideas need to come from the area that scientist Stuart Kauffman described as the “adjacent possible”:

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things.”

Most change and innovation is usually restricted to what lies just beyond the current state. Anything too far outside the realm of the adjacent possible is an idea “ahead of its time”. This isn’t to say those ideas aren’t good, just that if they’re too far ahead, we won’t be able to recognize them as good ideas.

(Interestingly, this explains why lots of ideas are discovered by multiple people at (almost) the same time e.g. sunspots were found in 1611 in 4 different countries, the law of conservation of energy was found 4 times in the late 1840’s. Why? Those ideas were in the adjacent possible).

 

Another must-have is the need for “liquid networks”. The network part is clear – it means lots of connections, so one hears of multiple ideas from different disciplines. Large cities are better than small towns on this front. And the liquid part? The backdrop needs to be an environment that is capable and willing of adopting changes and ideas.

 

Good ideas take time to evolve. They usually start off as hunches:

“(Hunches) start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength.”

Linger for decades? That’s why Johnson calls it the “slow hunch”:

“If one examines the intellectual fossil record closely, the slow hunch is the rule, not the exception.”

 

You probably guessed the problem with such slow hunches:

“Keeping a hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales.”

They need to be retained over long periods, even when they started off hazy. That’s why Darwin took such extensive notes all his life. A caveat though:

“You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands.”

A system to search through them later is also helpful a la Google. Even better are some tools these days that can connect different notes not just based on exact keywords but even their meanings and common connections.

(On a side note, you’d think intelligence agencies would have such systems and tools but that’s often balanced by other constraints e.g. the need for secrecy, and the risk of spies and traitors. That leads to segregated, restricted access to hunches and information in turn leading to missed connections all too often).

 

Kekulé is supposed to have figured out the structure of benzene via a dream of a snake devouring its own tail. But that’s not quite what happened. Rather, he remembered an ancient symbol of snake eating its own tail (ouroboros) and then related that to the possible structure of benzene. The word for such “unlikely collisions and discoveries” is, of course, serendipity. So why does serendipity strike you in the shower, a dream, or a long walk? Because they “remove you from the task-based focus of modern life”. Today, the Internet, if used right, is an easy source of serendipity. You look up something, see a link to something else, and as you surf, you might stumble upon something interesting and new.

 

The guys who discovered the cosmic background radiation in physics were trying to tune their (giant) antennas and stumbled upon a background hiss that wouldn’t go away. This incidentally is a common aspect to new ideas but very counter-intuitive: all too often, what we thought of as noise turns out to be a signal! Like Alexander Fleming with penicillin. So why is “noise” so helpful?

“Noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.”

 

And lastly, Johnson says there’s exaptation. Huh? He explains:

“An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.”

Feathers evolved to keep the dinosaur warm, but then they got “exapted” for flight. Gorilla glass was invented for military purposes (it doesn’t break easily), but then got exapted to become the screen of our beloved smartphones.

 

All in all, that’s why Johnson says it’s good to flit around for ideas:

“It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes. That movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve in another.”