These are reading notes on Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation by Steven Johnson (Penguin, 2011). They are adapted from David Drysdale's Moby Diction notes.
1The thesis
Innovation does not arrive in a flash of insight. It comes from a longer process that moves across networks of adjacent possibilities. Silos and walls block it. Ideas spread faster in open environments, where other people can react to them and build on them. There ideas get recontextualized and connected in surprising ways, which promotes serendipity.
Johnson leans on biological metaphors to explain how creativity works. The adjacent possible is one of them.
2Key ideas
2.1The adjacent possible
The adjacent possible is the open space of directions the future can take, the realm of the possible at a given moment. Greater change is possible but unlikely to reach beyond that adjacent space. Innovation moves in small, incremental steps, not leaps.
An idea that jumps too far past the adjacent possible is unlikely to be adopted soon. We call it an idea "ahead of its time." Innovative environments help people explore the adjacent possible and recombine ideas in creative ways.
Johnson borrows the term from Stuart Kauffman, who used it for the way simple biological systems take small steps toward complexity. Richard Rumelt's "proximate objective" is a related notion: an objective close enough to be feasible.
2.2Ideas are networks
An idea is a cluster of neurons firing together to form a conscious thought. A hunch can be the first, germinal stage. Over time it collects connections, mutating, evolving and growing stronger, until it catalyzes into a thought. These networks need to be both densely populated and plastic. They must be able to reconfigure as conditions change and new adjacent possibilities appear.
2.3Ideas are constellations
Ideas are not self-contained, discrete objects. They emerge as connections between thoughts. Walter Benjamin wrote that "ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars." Seemingly random proximity between thoughts becomes a pattern once we start to see it.
Brain science points the same way. Johnson reports that an idea forms when separate neurons start firing together in new ways and adapt as new adjacent possibilities show up. Two habits help this along: Ahrens's principle of atomicity, and decontextualizing a thought to look at it anew.
2.4Ideas are remixes
Johnson cites Robert Darnton's account of early modern readers in England. They did not just consume ideas. They remixed them in commonplace books, wrote about them, and set them against information from other sources.
"Remix" has become a popular metaphor for creativity since postmodernity. Unlike "pastiche," it usually carries a positive sense. It describes ideas that take shape through de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing other interpreted ideas.
2.5Innovation thrives in open environments
New ideas are built from the scraps of other ideas we have met. When we piece the scraps together in new ways, we create. Siloed societies and organizations block the flow of ideas between minds. Johnson calls the lost benefit "information spillover."
- Rigid hierarchies with central authority tend to innovate less than marketplace societies, where people and ideas circulate. A marketplace enlarges the pool of minds that can generate, share and riff on ideas.
- Contact with other perspectives puts ideas in revealing new contexts. Cross-pollination also promotes exaptation, which is a trait moving from one context to a new use in another.
- Today we guard our best ideas as secrets, and that may hurt our shared ability to innovate. Secrecy insulates ideas from the collisions that drive stronger innovation. Patent law and digital rights management, in a way, reward slowing innovation down.
- Innovative systems walk a line between order and chaos. They allow randomness and serendipity but stay stable enough for ideas to cohere. Innovation is not unstructured. Implicit rules act like a "genre," a platform that lets some people play safely and others experiment. A genre gives a stable set of resources to reuse, repurpose and riff on.
2.6Fostering serendipity
According to Johnson, "serendipity" comes from a Persian fairy tale by way of Horace Walpole. Walpole wrote that the protagonists made discoveries "by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." There is power in veering off the beaten path and following ideas where they lead.
We can foster serendipity by designing our physical and mental environments so that ideas collide. Unconscious states such as dreaming can provoke collisions that give new insight. Another way is to force encounters with ideas and writing we have forgotten. Some software tools do this, and so does Luhmann's zettelkasten.
2.7Exaptation
Exaptation describes a trait that evolved for one purpose and gets adapted to a completely different function. Johnson borrows the idea from Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba's work in evolutionary biology. He uses it to explain how shared environments promote creativity: distinct interests and passions overlap and mix, and they produce new perspectives.
2.8Strength of weak ties
Johnson suggests that weak ties help exaptation along and force encounters with other "idea spaces." The concept comes from a 1973 essay by Mark S. Granovetter.
2.9Optimize to be wrong, not right
This idea comes from Barry O'Reilly's writing, which the notes connect to Johnson's chapter on error. Organizations should try to invalidate as many ideas as they can. Small initial investments spread across many ideas "narrow the cone of uncertainty" and help the organization find the most useful solution.
- Rigid business plans and roadmaps push an organization to spend heavily on confirming its first idea instead of dropping it early.
- Organizations anchor on those ideas and fall into confirmation bias. They look for support instead of judging the idea on its merits, and that creates waste.
- Progress in innovation is not the number of ideas you execute. It is the number of bad ideas you invalidate.
- Several cheap ideas tested in parallel invalidate more ideas, faster. Each failure makes the product or solution stronger.
Johnson argues that finding errors helps us look at things in new ways and rethink our assumptions. We should embrace noise and error.
3What to take from it
- Aim for the next small step, not a leap that lands outside the adjacent possible.
- Keep ideas in circulation. Siloing them, or patenting everything, slows the collisions that produce better ones.
- Build in meetings between people who do not usually meet. Weak ties and shared spaces bring new idea spaces into view.
- Resurface old notes on purpose, with a tool or a method like the zettelkasten.
- Measure an experiment by what it rules out.
4Sources
- Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Seven Patterns of Innovation. Penguin, 2011.
- O'Reilly, Barry. "Optimize to Be Wrong, Not Right." Barry O'Reilly (blog), April 6, 2017.
- Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes. 2017.
Adapted from David Drysdale's Moby Diction notes.