The first day of this year’s Tech Summit featured an inspiring presentation from the man who Prospect magazine called one of the “Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future.”
A best-selling author and the host of a national television show, Steven Johnson is at his core a masterful storyteller. He’s also keenly focused on the future while digging up incredibly interesting stories from history and then insightfully gleans valuable lessons for us all.
Steven focused his presentation on innovation – How does it take place and where does it come from?
His belief is that the idea of a lone-wolf genius sitting alone before being struck by a lightening bolt of inspiration is generally wrong. The words we actually use to describe innovation are often off base, too, according to Johnson. The metaphors dominated by light bulb moments to describe a breakthrough as some sort of sudden illumination isn’t accurate, he said.
“When you go back and truly study the history of transformative ideas, the Eureka moment is almost always a myth,” he told the audience at the Tech Summit. “The Ideas that are truly transformative come into the world as a slow hunch before they crystallize into something that is actionable and usable.”
He said the lesson for all of us is that we need to build systems and practices that allow slow hunches to remain alive and eventually turn into the innovative ideas we need to move forward.
Some interesting research to back up this case for collaboration over isolation came when a researcher decided to monitor a science lab. With video cameras in offices, labs and open areas such as cafeterias or staff lounges, the researcher was able to discover that the greatest ideas didn’t come when a scientist was hunched over her microscope alone in a lab.
Almost all the important breakthrough ideas didn’t happen alone in the lab. The biggest ideas happened around the conference table at the weekly staff meeting, when everybody got together and shared their latest data and findings. This was especially true when people shared their mistakes. It was something about that environment -- where you have lots of different ideas coming together from people with different backgrounds and different interests – that created the energy and the collaboration needed to lead to real innovative ideas.
A supportive story on this collaborative environment (and one Johnson has shared during one of his great TED Talks) harkens back to the introduction of the coffee house in England. There are a couple factors in play here: 1. Caffeine started to replace alcohol so people were generally more stimulated than drunk; and 2. People from all types of backgrounds were coming together in a relaxed environment where ideas were shared and true collaboration took place.
This, Johnson said, is why so many great innovations – be it in art, literature, industry or politics – can be traced to the coffeehouse.
Diverse groups are collectively smarter than homogenous groups, Johnson said. Having people with different personal and professional backgrounds is important to ideas and innovation. When you put people with different perspectives together, the room gets smarter.
The room at the Tech Summit certainly benefited from Johnson’s thoughts on innovation and what all of us can do to promote it in our offices or in our personal lives.
