Where good ideas come from | Steven Johnson — Transcript

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1. 0:15Fifty-two minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here.
2. 0:20This is the Grand Café here in Oxford.
3. 0:23I took this picture
4. 0:24because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England,
5. 0:29in 1650.
6. 0:30That's its great claim to fame.
7. 0:32And I wanted to show it to you,
8. 0:34not because I want to give you the Starbucks tour
9. 0:36of historic England --
10. 0:37(Laughter)
11. 0:39but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial
12. 0:42to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings
13. 0:47of the last 500 years,
14. 0:49what we now call the Enlightenment.
15. 0:51And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment
16. 0:55in part because of what people were drinking there.
17. 0:58Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture,
18. 1:03what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank --
19. 1:06day in and day out, from dawn until dusk,
20. 1:08was alcohol.
21. 1:10Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice.
22. 1:12You would drink a little beer with breakfast
23. 1:14and have a little wine at lunch,
24. 1:15a little gin, particularly around 1650,
25. 1:18and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day.
26. 1:21That was the healthy choice, because the water wasn't safe to drink.
27. 1:24And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse,
28. 1:27you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day.
29. 1:30(Laughter)
30. 1:32And you can imagine what that would be like in your own life --
31. 1:35and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day --
32. 1:38(Laughter)
33. 1:39and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life.
34. 1:43You would have better ideas.
35. 1:44You would be sharper and more alert.
36. 1:46So it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened
37. 1:50as England switched to tea and coffee.
38. 1:52But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important
39. 1:55is the architecture of the space.
40. 1:57It was a space where people would get together,
41. 1:59from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise,
42. 2:02and share.
43. 2:03It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex.
44. 2:07This was their conjugal bed, in a sense; ideas would get together there.
45. 2:10And an astonishing number of innovations from this period
46. 2:13have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.
47. 2:17I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses
48. 2:19for the last five years
49. 2:21because I've been kind of on this quest
50. 2:24to investigate this question of where good ideas come from.
51. 2:27What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation,
52. 2:33unusual levels of creativity?
53. 2:35What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity?
54. 2:39And what I've done is,
55. 2:41I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse,
56. 2:44I've looked at media environments like the World Wide Web,
57. 2:46that have been extraordinarily innovative;
58. 2:48I've gone back to the history of the first cities;
59. 2:51I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rain forests,
60. 2:55that involve unusual levels of biological innovation.
61. 2:57And what I've been looking for is shared patterns,
62. 3:00signature behavior that shows up again and again
63. 3:04in all of these environments.
64. 3:05Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from,
65. 3:08that we can take and apply to our own lives
66. 3:10or our own organizations or our own environments
67. 3:13to make them more creative and innovative?
68. 3:15And I think I've found a few.
69. 3:16But what you have to do to make sense of this
70. 3:19and to really understand these principles is,
71. 3:21you have to do away with
72. 3:23the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us
73. 3:27towards certain concepts of idea creation.
74. 3:30We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration.
75. 3:35We have the "flash" of insight,
76. 3:37the "stroke" of insight,
77. 3:39we have "epiphanies,"
78. 3:40we have eureka moments,
79. 3:42we have the "light bulb" moments, right?
80. 3:44All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are,
81. 3:49share this basic assumption,
82. 3:51which is that an idea is a single thing.
83. 3:54It's something that happens often in a wonderful, illuminating moment.
84. 3:59But, in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to begin with
85. 4:03is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level.
86. 4:07I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain.
87. 4:09An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons
88. 4:12firing in sync with each other inside your brain.
89. 4:14It's a new configuration that has never formed before.
90. 4:18And the question is: How do you get your brain into environments
91. 4:21where these new networks are going to be more likely to form?
92. 4:24And it turns out that, in fact, the network patterns of the outside world
93. 4:28mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of a human brain.
94. 4:32So the metaphor I'd like to use,
95. 4:35I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent --
96. 4:39a lot more recent than the 1650s.
97. 4:43A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero
98. 4:45has an organization called Design That Matters.
99. 4:48They decided to tackle this really pressing problem
100. 4:52of the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates
101. 4:55in the developing world.
102. 4:57One of the things that's very frustrating about this
103. 5:00is that we know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context,
104. 5:05if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple --
105. 5:08we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments.
106. 5:11So the technology is there.
107. 5:13These are standard in all the industrialized worlds.
108. 5:16The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator,
109. 5:19and you send it off to a midsized village in Africa,
110. 5:23it will work great for a year or two years,
111. 5:25and then something will go wrong and it will break,
112. 5:28and it will remain broken forever,
113. 5:30because you don't have a whole system of spare parts,
114. 5:33and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise
115. 5:35to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment.
116. 5:37So you end up having this problem where you spend all this money
117. 5:40getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries,
118. 5:43and it ends up being useless.
119. 5:45So what Prestero and his team decided to do
120. 5:47was to look around and see: What are the abundant resources
121. 5:50in these developing world contexts?
122. 5:51And what they noticed was,
123. 5:53they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves,
124. 5:56but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road.
125. 5:59There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in all these places.
126. 6:03They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working.
127. 6:06So they started to think,
128. 6:07"Could we build a neonatal incubator
129. 6:10that's built entirely out of automobile parts?"
130. 6:13And this is what they came up with.
131. 6:15It's called the NeoNurture device.
132. 6:17From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing
133. 6:19you'd find in a modern Western hospital.
134. 6:22In the inside, it's all car parts.
135. 6:23It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth,
136. 6:26it's got door chimes for alarm,
137. 6:27it runs off a car battery.
138. 6:29And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota
139. 6:32and the ability to fix a headlight,
140. 6:34and you can repair this thing.
141. 6:35Now that's a great idea,
142. 6:36but I'd like to say that, in fact,
143. 6:38this is a great metaphor for the way ideas happen.
144. 6:40We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know,
145. 6:43are like that $40,000, brand-new incubator,
146. 6:45state-of-the-art technology.
147. 6:46But more often than not, they're cobbled together
148. 6:48from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
149. 6:51We take ideas from other people,
150. 6:53people we've learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop,
151. 6:56and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.
152. 6:59That's really where innovation happens.
153. 7:01And that means we have to change some of our models
154. 7:03of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right?
155. 7:06I mean, this is one vision of it.
156. 7:08Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge.
157. 7:11This is a statue from Oxford.
158. 7:13You know, you're sitting there, thinking a deep thought,
159. 7:16the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity.
160. 7:19In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this.
161. 7:23This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern,
162. 7:27but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then.
163. 7:29This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together,
164. 7:33where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions,
165. 7:37people from different backgrounds.
166. 7:38So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative,
167. 7:42we have to build spaces that, strangely enough, look a bit more like this.
168. 7:45This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here.
169. 7:49And one of the problems with this is that, when you research this field,
170. 7:52people are notoriously unreliable
171. 7:54when they actually self-report on where they have their own good ideas,
172. 7:58or their history of their best ideas.
173. 8:00And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar
174. 8:04decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach
175. 8:07to figuring out where good ideas come from.
176. 8:09He went to a bunch of science labs around the world
177. 8:12and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job:
178. 8:15when they were sitting in front of the microscope,
179. 8:18when they were talking to colleagues at the watercooler ...
180. 8:21And he recorded all these conversations
181. 8:23and tried to figure out where the most important ideas happened.
182. 8:26And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab,
183. 8:29we have this image -- you know, they're poring over the microscope,
184. 8:32and they see something in the tissue sample,
185. 8:34and -- "Eureka!" -- they've got the idea.
186. 8:36What happened, actually, when Dunbar looked at the tape,
187. 8:40is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas
188. 8:43did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope.
189. 8:46They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting,
190. 8:50when everybody got together and shared their latest data and findings,
191. 8:53oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having,
192. 8:56the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering.
193. 8:59And something about that environment --
194. 9:01and I've started calling it the "liquid network,"
195. 9:03where you have lots of different ideas that are together,
196. 9:06different backgrounds, different interests,
197. 9:08jostling with each other, bouncing off each other --
198. 9:11that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.
199. 9:14The other problem that people have is,
200. 9:16they like to condense their stories of innovation
201. 9:18down to shorter time frames.
202. 9:20So they want to tell the story of the eureka moment.
203. 9:23They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there,
204. 9:25and I had it all, suddenly, clear in my head."
205. 9:27But, in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record,
206. 9:30it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods.
207. 9:36I call this the "slow hunch."
208. 9:38We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct
209. 9:42and blink-like sudden moments of clarity,
210. 9:46but, in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades,
211. 9:50in the back of people's minds.
212. 9:51They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem,
213. 9:54but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them.
214. 9:57They spend all this time working on certain problems,
215. 9:59but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in,
216. 10:02but can't quite solve.
217. 10:04Darwin is a great example of this.
218. 10:05Darwin himself, in his autobiography,
219. 10:07tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection
220. 10:11as a classic eureka moment.
221. 10:13He's in his study, it's October of 1838,
222. 10:17and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population.
223. 10:19And all of a sudden,
224. 10:21the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head,
225. 10:24and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work."
226. 10:27That's in his autobiography.
227. 10:29About a decade or two ago,
228. 10:30a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber
229. 10:32went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period.
230. 10:36Darwin kept these copious notebooks,
231. 10:38where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch.
232. 10:41And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection
233. 10:46for months and months and months
234. 10:48before he had his alleged epiphany reading Malthus in October of 1838.
235. 10:53There are passages where you can read it,
236. 10:55and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook,
237. 10:58from the period before he has his epiphany.
238. 11:00And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense,
239. 11:03had the idea, he had the concept,
240. 11:05but was unable to fully think it yet.
241. 11:08And that is, actually, how great ideas often happen --
242. 11:11they fade into view over long periods of time.
243. 11:13Now the challenge for all of us is:
244. 11:15How do you create environments
245. 11:17that allow these ideas to have this long half-life?
246. 11:19It's hard to go to your boss and say,
247. 11:21"I have an excellent idea for our organization.
248. 11:23It will be useful in 2020."
249. 11:25(Laughter)
250. 11:26"Could you just give me some time to do that?"
251. 11:29Now a couple of companies like Google have innovation time off, 20 percent time.
252. 11:32In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization.
253. 11:36But that's a key thing.
254. 11:38And the other thing is to allow those hunches
255. 11:40to connect with other people's hunches;
256. 11:42that's what often happens.
257. 11:43You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half,
258. 11:46and if you're in the right environment,
259. 11:48they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts.
260. 11:51So in a sense,
261. 11:52we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property --
262. 11:55you know, building barricades,
263. 11:57having secretive R and D labs, patenting everything that we have
264. 12:00so that those ideas will remain valuable,
265. 12:03and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas,
266. 12:06and the culture will be more innovative.
267. 12:08But I think there's a case to be made
268. 12:10that we should spend at least as much time, if not more,
269. 12:13valuing the premise of connecting ideas
270. 12:15and not just protecting them.
271. 12:17And I'll leave you with this story,
272. 12:19which I think captures a lot of these values.
273. 12:21It's just a wonderful tale of innovation, and how it happens in unlikely ways.
274. 12:27It's October of 1957,
275. 12:30and Sputnik has just launched.
276. 12:32And we're in Laurel, Maryland,
277. 12:34at the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins University.
278. 12:39It's Monday morning,
279. 12:40and the news has just broken about this satellite
280. 12:43that's now orbiting the planet.
281. 12:44And, of course, this is nerd heaven, right?
282. 12:47There are all these physics geeks who are there,
283. 12:49thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened."
284. 12:53And two of them, two twentysomething researchers at the APL,
285. 12:56are there at the cafeteria table,
286. 12:58having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues.
287. 13:01And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach.
288. 13:04They start talking, and one of them says,
289. 13:05"Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing?
290. 13:08There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space
291. 13:12that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal.
292. 13:14We could probably hear it, if we tune in."
293. 13:16So they ask around to a couple of their colleagues,
294. 13:19and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that.
295. 13:21That's an interesting idea."
296. 13:23And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception,
297. 13:27and he's got a little antenna set up with an amplifier in his office.
298. 13:31So Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office,
299. 13:33and they start noodling around -- "hacking," as we might call it now.
300. 13:37And after a couple of hours, they start picking up the signal,
301. 13:40because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track;
302. 13:43it was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily,
303. 13:46because they were afraid people would think it was a hoax, basically,
304. 13:49so they made it really easy to find.
305. 13:51So these guys are sitting there, listening to this signal,
306. 13:54and people start coming into the office and saying,
307. 13:56"That's pretty cool. Can I hear?"
308. 13:58And before long, they think, "Jeez, this is kind of historic.
309. 14:01We may be the first people in the United States listening to this.
310. 14:04We should record it."
311. 14:05So they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder
312. 14:08and start recording these little bleep, bleeps.
313. 14:10And they start writing down the date stamp, time stamps
314. 14:13for each little bleep that they record.
315. 14:16And then they start thinking,
316. 14:18"Well, gosh, we're noticing small little frequency variations here.
317. 14:21We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling
318. 14:26if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect."
319. 14:30And they played around with it a little bit more
320. 14:33and talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other specialties.
321. 14:37And they said, "You know,
322. 14:38we could actually look at the slope of the Doppler effect
323. 14:41to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antenna
324. 14:44and the points at which it's furthest away.
325. 14:46That's pretty cool."
326. 14:47Eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project
327. 14:51that hadn't been officially part of their job description --
328. 14:53they get permission to use the new UNIVAC computer
329. 14:56that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL.
330. 14:59And they run some more of the numbers,
331. 15:01and at the end of about three or four weeks,
332. 15:03turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory
333. 15:05of this satellite around the Earth,
334. 15:07just from listening to this one little signal,
335. 15:09going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do
336. 15:12over lunch one morning.
337. 15:15A couple weeks later, their boss, Frank McClure,
338. 15:18pulls them into the room and says,
339. 15:20"Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something
340. 15:22about that project you were working on.
341. 15:24You've figured out an unknown location
342. 15:27of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground.
343. 15:32Could you go the other way?
344. 15:33Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground
345. 15:36if you knew the location of the satellite?"
346. 15:38And they thought about it and they said,
347. 15:40"Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here."
348. 15:43So they went back and thought about it
349. 15:45and came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier."
350. 15:48And he said, "Oh, that's great,
351. 15:49because, see, I have these new nuclear submarines"
352. 15:52(Laughter)
353. 15:53"that I'm building.
354. 15:54And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile
355. 15:57so that it will land right on top of Moscow
356. 15:59if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
357. 16:03So we're thinking we could throw up a bunch of satellites
358. 16:05and use it to track our submarines
359. 16:08and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean.
360. 16:11Could you work on that problem?"
361. 16:12And that's how GPS was born.
362. 16:16Thirty years later,
363. 16:17Ronald Reagan, actually, opened it up and made it an open platform
364. 16:20that anybody could build upon,
365. 16:22and anybody could come along and build new technology
366. 16:25that would create and innovate on top of this open platform,
367. 16:29left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it.
368. 16:32And now, I guarantee you, certainly half of this room, if not more,
369. 16:38has a device sitting in their pocket right now
370. 16:40that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space.
371. 16:43And I bet you one of you, if not more,
372. 16:45has used said device and said satellite system
373. 16:48to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last --
374. 16:52(Laughter)
375. 16:53in the last day or last week, right?
376. 16:56(Applause)
377. 17:00And that, I think,
378. 17:01is a great case study, a great lesson
379. 17:04in the power -- the marvelous, unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power --
380. 17:09of open innovative systems.
381. 17:11When you build them right,
382. 17:12they will be led to completely new directions
383. 17:14the creators never even dreamed of.
384. 17:16I mean, here you have these guys
385. 17:17who basically thought they were just following this hunch,
386. 17:20this little passion that had developed,
387. 17:22then they thought they were fighting the Cold War,
388. 17:24and then, it turns out, they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.
389. 17:28(Laughter)
390. 17:29That is how innovation happens.
391. 17:31Chance favors the connected mind.
392. 17:33Thank you very much.
393. 17:35(Applause)