Where Good Ideas Come From

Do you want a great book to read? Are you thinking and looking to the future as to what you may want to do? Each one of us is special. For some of us, it may take a bit longer to get where you want to go but you will get there. A great book that I just finished reading is: "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation" by Steven Johnson.

Patterns play a key role in good ideas coming together. Johnson states that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. There are 7 patterns and the more you embrace these patterns around YOU (home, work, play. etc), the better you will be at tapping yourself for extraordinary thinking. Your ideas should not be protected, let them run free. Share, connect them, let them run free.

Pattern One: The Adjacent Possible. As you explore what is around you, this will open up new doors to you. You start out at here but when you move to the right, you are touching new ground now. This new ground now opens up new, additional ground around that point. This was not available to you when you first started.

Pattern Two: Liquid Networks. How to push your brain toward more creative networks? You have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks or people or ideas exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible. Don't be shy here, get out there and be a part of networks that you enjoy.

Pattern Three: The Slow Hunch. Keep an idea in the back of your mind. Sustaining the slow hunch is less a matter of sweat than of cultivation. You give a hunch enough nourishment to keep it growing and plant if in fertile soil, where its roots can make new connections. Then you give it time to bloom.

Pattern Four: Serendipity: Serendipity is built out of happy accidents but what makes them happy is the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens a door to the adjacent possible that you had overlooked. How can serendipity moments occur: going for a long walk, extended bath/shower, reading (carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books/essays in a condensed amount of time). Technology helps. Have your own collections of quotes, ideas, random discoveries, hunches. Steve Johnson uses DEVONthink for himself. Wikipedia definition of Serendipity: the property of making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated, or the occurrence of such a discovery during such a search.

Pattern Five: Error: When we're wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on is own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them. The trouble with error is we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. You should transform error into insight.

Pattern Six: Exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. Wikipedia example: a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behavior. Bird feathers are a classic example: initially these evolved for temperature regulation, but later were adapted for flight. Real life examples are cities and media.
The most creative individuals have broad social networks that extend outside their organization and involve people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks are three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks.

Pattern Seven: Platforms: Stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don't need to know how to "do X or understand Y", you just use it and build upon it. Open platforms generate new ideas. Keep your ideas open and not closed.

Hats off to Steve Johnson!