Where Good Ideas Come From
Notes
the adjacent possible
Adjacent, i.e., nearby, possibilities constantly emerge in a multitude of settings for a multitude of entities. When these possibilities are explored, yet new possibilities emerge. The concept of the “adjacent possible” was introduced by Stuart Kauffman (1996; 2000) in evolutionary biology and complex adaptive systems to explain how biological evolution can be seen as exploration and actualization of what is adjacent possible, i.e., available at hand. The concept has now disseminated into a wide range of research fields including economy, innovation studies, technological evolution, cultural evolution, learning processes, recommender systems, and design studies.
The “adjacent possible” can be defined as “the set of possibilities available to individuals, communities, institutions, organisms, productive processes, etc., at a given point in time during their evolution” (Loreto 2015, p. 9). The concept of the “adjacent possible” is useful for understanding how new possibilities emerge, and how they are constrained, discovered, explored, actualized, developed, reconfigured, designed, and so on, in an interplay between what is actual and what is possible for specific entities in specific settings.
common-place book
- book where you put everything you’ve read and thought, and you use this to synthesize new ideas, forcing serendipity
- common in the 18th and 19th century – e.g. Darwin and others
Diverse, horizontal networks were, in Reuf’s analysis, three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. (166)
third place
- sociologist Ray Oldenburg talks about the third place, not work, not home, that is a tide pool of learning and innovation
exaptation
- a trait that evolves to serve another function over time
- e.g. feathers, which began as temperature regulation but then led to the ability to fly
innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks (123)
the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop (61)
genius requires genres […] Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them. (191)
Summary
This book starts with Darwin’s great idea for evolution, and traces the environment in which great ideas arise. Firstly, great ideas are only those that are adjacent to what is currently possible. Babbage’s Analytical Engine was impossible in the early 19th century because it was such a quantum leap from anything else that existed at the time. To build that adjacent possible, you need to be within liquid networks that expose you to new, diverse thinking. From there, you can start with a slow hunch, the germ of a great new idea, and iterate on it over and over. Eureka moments are truly rare, as most great ideas percolate in the back of your subconscious for some time before popping miraculously to the surface. Within this liquid networks, serendipity conspires and new ideas recombine with slow hunches to build a great idea. Every good idea needs to be iterated on, and error is a honing device to make ideas stronger. Sometimes, you might have ideas that were once thought to be utilized for a certain application, but can be exapted to a new use, like vacuum tubes were for boolean algebra via logic gates. Finally, you need an environment, or a platform, where all these ideas can intermingle. Perhaps a city, or a social media site, or a salon in the 18th century, it doesn’t matter.
Those, Johnson posits, are the ingredients to create good ideas. Johnson concludes the book by building a four quadrant graph and positioning all key inventions of the last 200 years within that plot. What he finds is that within the “fourth quadrant”, as he calls it, an environment that is not market-driven but are the result of networked environments (and not the product of a lone genius reclusively inventing), we find the most prominent and numerous inventions within the last 100 years.
Thoughts
fascinated by where ideas come from. you look at some of the greatest inventions or breakthroughs in the last 100 years, they seem to come out of these melting pots: bletchly park, or bell labs, or building 20 at MIT, or Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, or the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT. They all follow a similar pattern, stick a bunch of really smart interdisciplinary people in a place and let them think about stuff. maybe im a hegelian on this – any progress comes from conflict, either with other ideas or you from the past. I need to write and off-board my thoughts more often. the self isn’t a continuity despite feeling like it, and I can’t be forced to directly reckon with my past thinking unless I persist it in some external repository. Then, past me can be the thesis to present me’s antithesis, and build a new synthesis.
I like the take on the city as a spark for innovation. I do wonder if cities are the sites of all innovation – when you look at most folks who came to Bell Labs for example, they were predominantly from farms and Bell Labs wasn’t located deep within a city.