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It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.

-Steven Johnson

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It May Not Be

Steven Johnson

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It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.

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The Trick To Having Good Ideas Is Not To Sit Around In Glorious Isolation And Try To Think Big Thoughts. The Trick Is To Get More Parts On The Table.

One Of The Founding Moments Of Public Health In The 19th Century Effectively Poisoned The Water Supply Of London Much More Effectively Than Any Modern Day Bioterrorist Could Have Ever Dreamed Of Doing.

Some Great Minds Become Great By Turning The Rubble Of An Exploded Paradigm Into Something Consistent And Meaningful. Others Become Great By Laying The Gunpowder, Grain By Grain. Every Important Revolution Needs Both Kinds Of Minds To Complete Itself.

What You End Up Seeing When You Look At History Is That People Who Have Been Good At Pushing The Boundaries Of Possibility, And Exploring Those Frontiers Of Good Ideas And Innovations, Have Rarely Done It In Moments Of Great Inspiration. They Don't Just Have A Brilliant Breakthrough Idea Out Of Nowhere And Leap Ahead Of Everyone Else.

When It's A Sharing And Improvisational Meeting, Where You're Riffing Off Other People's Ideas, That Actually Can Be Productive.

Those That Regularly Come Into Contact With People Having Diverse Interests And Viewpoints Are More Likely To Come Up With Innovative Ideas.

It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.

Legendary Innovators Like Franklin, Snow, And Darwin All Possess Some Common Intellectual Qualities—a Certain Quickness Of Mind, Unbounded Curiosity—but They Also Share One Other Defining Attribute. They Have A Lot Of Hobbies.

The Adjacent Possible Is A Kind Of Shadow Future, Hovering On The Edges Of The Present State Of Things, A Map Of All The Ways In Which The Present Can Reinvent Itself.

The Fusion Of Art And Technology That We Call Interface Design.

It Is Extraordinary How Safe Flying Has Become. You Are Now Statistically More Likely To Be Elected President Of The United States In Your Lifetime Than You Are To Die In A Plane Crash. What An Amazing Achievement As A Society! But What We End Up Focusing On Are The Catastrophic Failures That Are Incredibly Rare But Happen Every Now And Then.

I Suspect Millions Of People From My Generation Probably Have Comparable Stories To Tell: If Not Of Sports Simulations Then Of Dungeons & Dragons, Or The Geopolitical Strategy Of Games Like Diplomacy, A Kind Of Chess Superimposed Onto Actual History.

Nothing Really Says ... Interactivity - Which Was So Exciting And Captures The Real, The Web Zeitgeist Of 1995 - Than 'click Here For A Picture Of My Dog.'

In A Peer Network, No One Is Officially In Charge. It Doesn't Have A Command Hierarchy. It Doesn't Have A Boss. So, All The Decisions Are Somehow Made Collectively. The Control Of The System Is In The Hands Of Everyone Who Is A Part Of It.

What I'm Saying Is Individuals Have Better Ideas If They're Connected To Rich, Diverse Networks Of Other Individuals. If You Put Yourself In An Environment With Lots Of Different Perspectives, You Yourself Are Going To Have Better, Sharper, More Original Ideas. It's Not That The Network Is Smart.

The Patterns Are Simple, But Followed Together, They Make For A Whole That Is Wiser Than The Sum Of Its Parts. Go For A Walk; Cultivate Hunches; Write Everything Down, But Keep Your Folders Messy; Embrace Serendipity; Make Generative Mistakes; Take On Multiple Hobbies; Frequent Coffeehouses And Other Liquid Networks; Follow The Links; Let Others Build On Your Ideas; Borrow, Recycle; Reinvent. Build A Tangled Bank.

Most New Movements Start This Way: Hundreds Or Thousands Of Individuals And Groups, Working In Different Fields And Different Locations, Start Thinking About Change Using A Common Language, Without Necessarily Recognizing Those Shared Values. You Just Start Following Your Own Vector, Propelled Along By People In Your Immediate Vicinity. And Then One Day, You Look Up And Realize That All Those Individual Trajectories Have Turned Into A Wave.

Calculus, The Electrical Battery, The Telephone, The Steam Engine, The Radio - All These Groundbreaking Innovations Were Hit Upon By Multiple Inventors Working In Parallel With No Knowledge Of One Another.

If You Look At History, Innovation Doesn't Come Just From Giving People Incentives; It Comes From Creating Environments Where Their Ideas Can Connect.

That Strange New Zone Between Medium And Message. That Zone We Call The Interface.

This Is Not The Wisdom Of The Crowd, But The Wisdom Of Someone In The Crowd. It’s Not That The Network Itself Is Smart; It’s That The Individuals Get Smarter Because They’re Connected To The Network.

Chance Favors The Connected Mind.

Being Right Keeps You In Place, Being Wrong Forces You To Explore.

Good Ideas May Not Want To Be Free, But They Do Want To Connect, Fuse, Recombine. They Want To Reinvent Themselves By Crossing Conceptual Borders. They Want To Complete Each Other As Much As They Want To Compete

How Could So Many Intelligent People Be So Grievously Wrong For Such An Extended Period Of Time? How Could They Ignore So Much Overwhelming Evidence That Contradicted Their Most Basic Theories? These Questions, Too, Deserve Their Own Discipline: The Sociology Of Error.

We Are Often Better Served By Connecting Ideas Than We Are By Protecting Them.

Keeping A Slow Hunch Alive Poses Challenges On Multiple Scales. For Starters, You Have To Preserve The Hunch In Your Own Memory, In The Dense Network Of Your Neurons. Most Slow Hunches Pass In And Out Of Our Memory Too Quickly, Precisely Because They Possess A Certain Murkiness. You Get A Feeling That There's An Interesting Avenue To Explore, A Problem That Might Lead You To A Solution, But Then You Get Distracted By More Pressing Matters And The Hunch Disappears. So Part Of The Secret Of Hunch Cultivation Is Simple: Write Everything Down.

Organizations That Empower Folks Further Down The Chain Or Try To Get Rid Of The Big Hierarchal Chains And Allow Decision Making To Happen On A More Local Level End Up Being More Adaptive And Resilient Because There Are More Minds Involved In The Problem.

If You Look At Where Innovation - Defined As Ideas, Not As Commercial Product - Tends To Live, The University System Is Remarkably Innovative.

Popular Culture, On Average, Has Been Growing More Cognitively Challenging Over The Past Thirty Years, Not Less. Despite Everything You Hear About Declining Standards And Dumbing-down, You Have To Do More Intellectual Work To Make Sense Of Today's Television Or Games - Much Less The Internet - Than You Did A Few Decades Ago.

Most Of The Time, Criticism That Takes Pop Culture Seriously Involves Performing Some Kind Of Symbolic Analysis, Decoding The Work To Demonstrate The Way It Represents Some Other Aspect Of Society.

Every Childhood Has Its Talismans, The Sacred Objects That Look Innocuous Enough To The Outside World, But That Trigger An Onslaught Of Vivid Memories When The Grown Child Confronts Them.

We Are Strangely Biased, As Individuals And Media Institutions, To Focus On Big Sudden Changes, Whether Good Or Bad - Amazing Breakthroughs, Such As A New Gadget That Gets Released, Or Catastrophic Failures, Like A Plane Crash.

As Much As We Sometimes Roll Our Eyes At The Ivory-tower Isolation Of Universities, They Continue To Serve As Remarkable Engines Of Innovation.

When You Don't Have To Ask For Permission Innovation Thrives.

This Is How Great Intellectual Breakthroughs Usually Happen In Practice. It Is Rarely The Isolated Genius Having A Eureka Moment Alone In The Lab. Nor Is It Merely A Question Of Building On Precedent, Of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, In Newton's Famous Phrase. Great Breakthroughs Are Closer To What Happens In A Flood Plain: A Dozen Separate Tributaries Converge, And The Rising Waters Lift The Genius High Enough That He Or She Can See Around The Conceptual Obstructions Of The Age.

The Economics Of Television Syndication And Dvd Sales Mean That There's A Tremendous Financial Pressure To Make Programs That Can Be Watched Multiple Times, Revealing New Nuances And Shadings On The Third Viewing. Meanwhile, The Web Has Created A Forum For Annotation And Commentary That Allows More Complicated Shows To Prosper, Thanks To The Fan Sites Where Each Episode Of Shows Like 'lost' Or 'alias' Is Dissected With An Intensity Usually Reserved For Talmud Scholars.

The Problem Is, There Are Definitely Some Genuinely Lame Things On Television, And There's More At The Bottom Of The Barrel, Because The Barrel In A Sense Has Gotten Bigger.

Bottom Of The Barrel

We Need To Play Each Others Instruments.

One Of The Stories I Love Is How Gutenberg’s Printing Press Set Off This Interesting Chain Reaction, Where All Of A Sudden People Across Europe Noticed For The First Time That They Were Farsighted, And Needed Spectacles To Read Books (which They Hadn’t Really Noticed Before Books Became Part Of Everyday Life); Which Then Created A Market For Lens Makers, Which Then Created Pools Of Expertise In Crafting Lenses, Which Then Led People To Tinker With Those Lenses And Invent The Telescope And Microscope, Which Then Revolutionized Science In Countless Ways.

I Love Those Stretches Where I've Just Been A Writer - When I Haven't Been Doing Internet Start-ups - Where I Pretty Much Eliminate Meetings From My Life.

Who Is Giving The Orders To Ants? No One. They Are Self-organizing. Each Of Our Immune Systems Get Smarter Over The Years As Its Biochemical Parts Share Information, And It Responds With Individualized Defenses, But It Isn't Conscious And It Has No Memory. The Host Of That Party Didn't Decree That Everyone Would Gather In The Kitchen, But It Happened Anyway. Emergence Means We Sometimes Act In Concert For Better Or Worse.

Silicon-based Life May Be Impossible For One Other Reason: Silicon Bonds Readily Dissolve In Water.

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