"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm
frightened of old ones."
~ John Cage
I find the progress of innovation and the diffusion of new ideas
fascinating subjects. Where innovations come from and how they permeate the
world has been studied with increasing frequency in the last ten to fifteen
years. Today there is no shortage of information on innovation and how to spark
creativity. A great book on the subject of innovation is “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators”
(http://innovatorsdna.com/). Jeff Dyer,
Hal Gregersen and Clayton M. Christiansen extensively document how
entrepreneurial innovators as varied as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Howard
Schultz (founder of Starbucks) and many others developed so many groundbreaking
ideas. The authors’ findings are broken down into what they call five
“Discovery Skills.” Even if you are not an entrepreneur the concepts can help
you bring fresh ideas to your writing, art or profession.
The Discovery Skills are:
- Associating: “the ability to make surprising connections across areas of knowledge, industries, or geographies”
- Questioning: Keep asking the powerful, simple questions “Why?” and “Why not?”
- Observing: Watching the way things work in different environments can often help connect “common threads across unconnected data”
- Networking: Especially beyond your normal realm of contacts to generate new ideas
- Experimenting: Typically, not the conventional laboratory type but trying things out, often in the real world, to answer “what-if” questions.
The resistance to innovation is equally fascinating. Today some of the
most useful, commonplace things in our everyday lives were once crackpot ideas,
ridiculed by experts and common folk alike. Most of us are probably familiar
with the scorn heaped on electric lights, airplanes, automobiles and computers
when they were first introduced. There were lots of good reasons why they would
fail. They were too expensive, too complicated, destroyed some status quo or threatened
the livelihoods of powerful people. There was lots of resistance, lots of
inertia working against change.
Resistance to older, more basic inventions may be more surprising.
Writing, for example (yes the written word) was once a new idea and some people
just didn’t like it. Socrates, for one, was dead set against it. He was a big
proponent of memorization. Plato quoted Socrates as saying writing “destroys
memory,” “weakens the mind” and is an “inhuman thing.” In the world of Socrates
(Greece, about 400 BC) writing was an innovative new technology. It was more
expensive than using human memory and difficult to implement. The new writers
were using existing tools (sharply cut reeds and clay tablets) in new ways. Clay
and reeds had been around for a long time but nobody had used them together in
a way that facilitated communication. The brave citizens who wanted to write not only
had to learn how to use these silly new tools correctly, they had to overcome
resistance to doing something completely new and also overcome the ridicule of
their peers.
But you might be thinking that Socrates is generally understood to be a
pretty bright guy. How did he miss the writing thing? It should have been a
natural fit for him with his education and position as a major thought leader
of his era. Couldn’t he see it coming? Why wasn’t he on the development team? My
theory is that he missed the whole point of writing and its obvious potential
because he didn’t have good enough “discovery skills,” especially when it came
to circulating and connecting with people who thought and did things
differently than he did. He didn’t network enough with people from different
backgrounds, with different jobs, different experiences. While Socrates was an
innovative philosopher and one of the great thinkers in recorded history he
wasn’t necessarily open to ideas outside his area of expertise. A little too
insulated, he spent much of his life in the same place (Athens) talking to the
same people (aristocratic young Athenians) about the same things (knowledge and
virtue).
Nothing wrong with knowledge, virtue or
Athenians but sometimes you need to expand your horizons, even when you’re a
great thinker in your field. Do you want to be in on the next big idea or
improve on some promising smaller ideas? Break out of your routine or, better yet, sharpen
up your discovery skills to create new routines that nurture fresh ideas. Get
out of the same old space. Mix it up a little. Meet some interesting new people.
Ask lots of questions. Experiment. Don’t let yourself get fenced in. Who knows, you may even be inspired to invent
something as revolutionary as writing.
