"Where Good Ideas Come From"

I recently finished a book by the author Steven Johnson called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natura History of Innovation.  I read one of Johnson's earlier books, The Ghost Map, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (fitting, right?), which tells how the physician John Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead helped to determine the cause of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London.  Both books were really very good, and I suspect I will be checking out some more of Johnson's books in the near future (he's written 13 so far).  

If you don't feel like reading the book, Johnson covers the highlights in a TED Talk called "Where good ideas come from", or you can keep reading, as I am going to summarize Johnson's main points here.  It may be easier to start by revealing where good ideas don't come from.  We have a rich vocabulary to describe how many of us believe innovation occurs - a Eureka moment, light bulb moment, epiphany, "stroke of genius" etc - however, ideas rarely come about in such a manner.  

Great innovations typically occur slowly over time and often involve - dare I say, require - social interaction.  Johnson reviewed nearly 200 different great ideas from the pencil to the parachute and found that in virtually all of these cases, the ideas came from a group of individuals having a conversation together about a certain problem.  As a matter of fact, in his Ted Talk, Johnson says that great ideas often start in coffehouses, claiming that the English coffeehouse famously played a significant role in the Enlightenment, which occurred at the end of the 17th century and lasted to the early 19th century.  Here is where different people from different backgrounds gathered together to talk - here is where creativity blossomed.

Great ideas almost always build upon other ideas - as one reviewer of the book put it, "Every great idea is a combination or mutation of an idea that has already been brought to life. Ideas brought to life in products that are already out there are the building blocks of innovation – not thoughts."  In other words, innovation looks a lot like evolution.  Good ideas have to be molded and shaped over time, often building on platforms that already exist.  They often borrow from other, older ideas in this manner (a process Johnson calls exaptation).  They require connections and networks ("coffeehouses"), as well as a little bit of old-fashioned luck to turn something old into something new.  If, as the saying goes, "fortune favors the bold", when it comes to innovation, "chance favors the connected mind."

Johnson borrows a concept from the physician, theoretical biologist, and complex systems theorist Stuart Kauffman called the "theory of the adjacent possible".  Simply stated, the "adjacent possible" can be defined as the set of all possibilities available to individuals, organizations, communities, etc at a given point in time in their evolution.  There may be an infinite number of possibilites available, but more often than not the possibilities that are just beyond our reach, the ones in the immediate vicinity and not somewhere in the distance, are the ones that truly matter.  "The history of cultural progress," Johnson writes, "is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time."

Innovation, in other words, comes from the ideas that are just out of our reach - innovation is incremental and builds upon older ideas.  Ideas are bricolage.  Think of the famous scene in the 1995 movie "Apollo 13" in which the NASA engineers had to "fit a square peg into a round hole" literally to jerry-rig a carbon dioxide scrubbers in the lunar command module ("We gotta find a way to make this, fit into a hole for this, using nothing but that").  The "nothing but that" was the "adjacent possible"!

Building upon the "adjacent possible" concept above, Johnson says that innovation occurs at the edge between order and chaos.  Think of the transition states between solid, liquid, and gas (i.e., ice, water, steam).  Solids are rigid, ordered, and static.  In contrast, gases are chaotic and prone to disperse.  Liquids though are able to fit the shape of any container they are placed inside.  They are not really rigid, though they aren't prone chaotic either.  Here, in the liquid networks, where things are close enough to diffuse into nearby areas, is where innovation occurs.

Johnson talks about the story of Charles Darwin, who claimed in his autobiography that his theory of natural selection just magically popped into his head one day (a "Eureka moment").  He actually stated the exact day of September 28, 1838 and exactly what he was doing at the time (he was reading Thomas Malthus' famous essay on population).  However, Darwin's own notebooks (he kept meticulous notes throughout his career) told a very different story.  His theory of natural selection had been forming in his mind for several years - it was what Johnson calls a "slow hunch" - this too is exactly how Tim Berners-Lee invented the "World Wide Web".  In other words, ideas have a certain defined incubation time - they have to linger, to percolate, to simmer.  Here is a good reason to keep what is called a commonplace book, a place to write down and remember all of your ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem.  Similarly, this is why companies such as Google and 3M set aside a certain portion of their employees' time each week (at 3M it's known as the "15% Rule") to work on side projects or cultivate ideas.  Again we have the analogy that great ideas evolve over time.

Johnson also talks about the importance of "serendipity" or chance.  To be honest, I wasn't sure that I completely agreed that his examples represented "serependity".  However, he talked about a species of water flea known as the Daphnia, which apparently reproduces asexually under normal circumstances and, when subjected to stressful conditions, such as harsh weather, starts producing males in order to change to sexual reproduction.  Johnson writes, "When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect."  When things are going well, it makes a lot of sense to keep doing what you are doing, but innovation is required when things are not going well.

Johnson goes on to talk about the fact that innovation, because it occurs gradually and in stages, often creates a lot of dead ends or errors.  The 19th century English economist, William Stanley Jevons said, "In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one."  He goes on to tell of all the great inventions that came about as a result of an error (the best example is the antibiotic, penicillin).  as the adage goes, "To err is human" (and to be completely honest, "Error is what made humans possible in the first place!").  He also talks about the psychologist Charlan Nemeth, who wrote a book called In Defense of Troublemakers and the power of dissent to prevent groupthink.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think you will too.