Where Do Good Ideas Come From?
Which setting do you think is more likely to produce a good idea? A quiet room in the library, the auditorium where a prestigious lecturer holds the floor, or a crowded coffee house in the late afternoon?
If you guessed the library, you’re to be forgiven for imaging that the good ideas are solitary achievements. If you imagined it was the lecturer, you can be excused for thinking we get our best ideas from experts. But if you instead suspected that it might be the crowded coffee house, then you already know something essential about creativity. It is largely about connection and conversation.
Creativity, that is, emerges not from discovering ideas, but from sharing them. From tossing them out to see what others think, how they might improve, adapt, or change them. And ideas come from receiving the half-baked ideas of others and combing them with the half-baked ideas you’ve been carrying around until you’ve got a full-baked idea on your hands. (I realized I just changed from a temporal to spatial metaphor, but there you go – maybe it’s only a half-baked metaphor!)
Which is perhaps why more and more innovative companies are doing away with offices and even cubicles and are instead creating open space in which their employs can work, talk, share ideas, solve problems and, in general, come up with more good ideas.
But ideas also take time. They rarely come as flashes of immediate genius but rather crystallize over time. It’s what Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
But little of that can happen apart from connection and conversation, bumping regularly into other people and their ideas. As Steven says, “chance favors the connected mind.” Certainly that’s something I’ve discovered – and been grateful for – in the opportunity to connect with you via this space. Which means, I suppose, that the next time you or I need a killer idea, we should hang out at a coffee house, or cafeteria, or pub…and probably not once, but again and again. Bummer. 🙂
I’ll place Steven’s TED Talk below, followed by an animated (quick draw) video that summarizes his ideas, particularly around the issues of environment (places where people bump into each other) and time (the slow hunch). In case you’re in a hurry, the second video is just 4 minutes long. But do watch one of them, as it may affect the way you think about both how and where you spend your time.
Note: If you received this post by email, you may need to click here to watch the video.
This is great! I saved this post in my inbox and just watched the videos today. (Lent was definitely stifling my creativity…) Easter season it turns out is the right time to receive these good insights. Flowers are now blooming here in Portland, OR, showers showering, ideas incubating. Oregon Synod is actively trying to create the kinds of spaces and connections suggested by these videos. One such is the Soul Cafe online community (www.soulcafe.org) as well as the use of listening/organizing tools in our congregations to evoke ideas and connect people. We need these strategies to faithfully feel our way ahead in these changing times. Thanks for your ongoing blog- I rarely write but very often appreciate your efforts (especially the poetry!)