I was looking forward to read this book after watching a TED talk [1] by the author where he talks about slow hunches and the commonplace book.

When we ask “Where good ideas come from?” there is a common believe they are born out of eureka moments, but the author give us a more descriptive answer to this question suggesting that eureka moments rarely exist and there isn’t a single source of ideas but rather there are a series of shared patterns and properties that recur to generate different kinds of innovations. The author calls those patterns the 7 patterns of innovations.

This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly … The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments … The more we embrace these patterns—in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools—the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

The author gives us a broad historical outlook on how some ideas where born and then introduce each of his patterns and how they made that idea possible.

Buy on amazon to follow along my highlights

Pattern 1: THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE

The first pattern introduced by Steven is called “the adjacent possible”.

What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

The term was coined by the scientist Stuart Kauffman to explain biological innovation but Steven uses it to show us how it can be used for ideas too. Anyone might be able to come up with extraordinary ideas but in order for them to succeed a previous set of ideas or innovations have to pre-exist. The adjacent possible are those openings that unlock as we create new stuff.

A great way to see the adjacent possible in action is to think of any web service that we use and then start going backwards. Let’s use Uber as an example, someone in the 60’s might have think of a device to order a taxi, but was it possible to do build that back then? No. That’s an idea which was “ahead of its time’. In order for Uber to exist, there were many doors that had to be unlocked - to list a few:

  • The Global Positioning System.
  • The Internet.
  • Amazon Web Services
  • The iPhone
  • Credit Cards
  • Online payments

The list can go on and on, building Uber was not just sheer luck but rather a combination of ideas that were there waiting for someone to bring them together and unlock a new door.

When talking about technology, I think Amazon Web Services was one of the biggest rooms with unlocked doors. Many services could be built because of them, and then those services contribute to the creation of more ideas.

Pattern 2: LIQUID NETWORKS

The second pattern is “liquid networks”. Steven writes on how the social flow of group conversations help ideas to connects. In the book the author shows through numerous examples how cities, the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse or the first market towns in Italy ended up being great places for new ideas to flourish.

Dunbar’s research suggests one vaguely reassuring thought: even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop. The lab meeting creates an environment where new combinations can occur, where information can spill over from one project to another.** When you work alone in an office, peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases. The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network**. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn’t magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

And so, most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person’s head. Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Pattern 3: THE SLOW HUNCH

This was one of my favorite chapters, not only because of the stories behind but because this is highly related with one of my side-projects: Kintrospect. The author uses the term slow hunch to show us how great ideas come into the world more as hunches than revelations, and then introduces the commonplace book as a secret to cultivate hunches.

Darwin, Milton, Bacon, Locke and Erasmus – they were some of the great thinkers mentioned in the chapter and how keeping a commonplace book help them reflect on their previous hunches to come up with new ideas.

And so, most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form. They have the seeds of something profound, but they lack a key element that can turn the hunch into something truly powerful. And more often than not, that missing element is somewhere else, living as another hunch in another person’s head. Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect; they provide a kind of dating service for promising hunches. They make it easier to disseminate good ideas, of course, but they also do something more sublime: they help complete ideas. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.” Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Pattern 4: SERENDIPITY

The fourth chapter talks about the creation of new ideas thanks to accidental connections. Serendipity is the world to describe such accidents. We have slow hunches in our minds, things we have taken or given to liquid networks and a world full of adjacent possibles, sometimes what we then need is just some neurons to fire at the same time to bring ideas to life.

But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

The author describes possible ways to cultivate serendipity like:

  • Walking
  • Reading
  • Technology

Google and Wikipedia give those passing hints something to attach to, a kind of information anchor that lets you settle down around a topic and explore the surrounding area. They turn hints and happy accidents into information. If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

The author touches on a very important subject and is the creation of walls around ideas, counter intuitive at what we have learned about the generation of new ideas.

The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas, when hunches can stumble across other hunches that successfully fill in their blanks, may seem like an obvious truth, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas, keeping them from the kind of random, serendipitous connections that exist in dreams and in the organic compounds of life. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. **They go by many names: patents, digital rights management, intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path …**

By making the ideas public, and by ensuring that they remain stored in the database, these systems create an architecture for organizational serendipity. They give good ideas new ways to connect. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

I want to mention here an article I read recently by M.G. Siegler title “The Age of Abundance” where he argues how technology is leaving serendipity behind.

In the move to perfection, we’ve left serendipity and randomness behind …

As Om puts it: The algorithmic world we live in puts convenience and speed ahead of these abstract concepts of human consciousness and connections. Facebook has blunted the idea of friendship, and relationships, LinkedIn has turned business relations into a spectator sport of likes, follows and recommendations. Algorithm writers forget that we all need narratives, stories we need to tell each other to have a real connection.

M.G Sigler - The Age of Abundance

Pattern 5: ERROR

In this chapter Steven shows us how the constant accumulation of error produces new ideas and like in other chapters, walk us through history to make his point.

The invention of the Audion sounds like a classic story of ingenuity and persistence: a maverick inventor holed up in his bedroom lab notices a striking pattern and tinkers with it for years as a slow hunch, until he hits upon a contraption that changes the world. But telling the story that way misses one crucial fact: that at almost every step of the way, de Forest was flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The Audion was not so much an invention as it was the steady, persistent accumulation of error. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

A point that really caught my attention in this chapter was how by being wrong we get force to explore and update our believes, challenging our comfortable assumptions.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore…

When we’re wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

As a coincidence, right after writing this I open my twitter account to see the following tweet by Naval:

Steven mentions Charlan Nemeth who through research came out to the conclusion that good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea has to be correct on some basic level, and we value good ideas because they tend to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise-free environments, because noise-free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

And concludes quoting Benjamin Franklin:

Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them. Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation. Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.” Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Pattern 6: EXAPTATION

Exaptation: **: **a trait, feature, or structure of an organism or taxonomic group that takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exaptation

This patterns show us how many inventions resulted from taking things that were not meant for that solution and putting them together to build something new. One of the examples in the book is how Gutenberg converted a machine meant to get people drunk into a printing press.

An important part of Gutenberg’s genius, then, lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem. We don’t know exactly what chain of events led Gutenberg to make that associative link; few documentary records remain of Gutenberg’s life between 1440 and 1448, the period during which he assembled the primary components of his invention. But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

This patterns was first coined by biologists to explain how

An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

And a classic example are bird feathers which

We believe initially evolved for temperature regulation, helping nonflying dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period insulate themselves against cold weather. But when some of their descendants, including a creature we now call Archaeopteryx, began experimenting with flight, feathers turned out to be useful for controlling the airflow over the surface of the wing, allowing those first birds to glide. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

The author also tell us how legendary innovators end up creating great ideas thanks to their many hobbies and how been curious about many things help us exapt ideas from projects to projects.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies …

**That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes. That movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve problems in another. ** Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

In modern era, I’d say Twitter is maybe one of the biggest example of exaptation out there, originally thought as a “micro-blogging” platform, it evolved into something that not even their founders thought it could do. How would you even describe Twitter today? Every time I open my feed there is someone doing something new with it: tweetstorms, polls, moments, personal notes saver, etc.

Pattern 7: PLATFORMS

The last pattern in the book are platforms and tell us how platforms open many doors in the adjacent possible. To make his point, Steven starts the chapter talking about Darwin’s theory of atoll formation, then moving through beavers which by creating dams gave life to a new ecosystem, and ends up the chapter talking about recent platforms and the things they have made possible.

Platform building is, by definition, a kind of exercise in emergent behavior. The tiny Scleractinia polyp isn’t actively trying to create an underwater Las Vegas, but nonetheless out of its steady labor—imbibing algae and erecting those aragonite skeletons—a higher-level system emerges. What had been a largely desolate stretch of nutrient-poor seawater is transformed into a glittering hub of activity. The beaver builds a dam to better protect itself against its predators, but that engineering has the emergent effect of creating a space where kingfishers and dragonflies and beetles can make a life for themselves. The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Here again the author talks about the coffee-houses and interests club as platforms for new ideas to come to life.

Most hotbeds of innovation have similar physical spaces associated with them: the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud’s Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse. All these spaces were, in their own smaller-scale fashion, emergent platforms. Coffeehouse proprietors like Edward Lloyd or William Unwin were not trying to invent the modern publishing industry or the insurance business; they weren’t at all interested in fostering scientific advancement or political turmoil. They were just businessmen, trying to make enough sterling to feed their families, just like those beavers constructing lodges to keep their offspring safe. **But the spaces Lloyd and Unwin built turned out to have these unusual properties: they made people think differently, because they created an environment where different kinds of thoughts could productively collide and recombine. **

Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

And also introduces other things like genres and they role as platform for the creation of new kind of works.

Genres supply a set of implicit rules that have enough coherence that traditionalists can safely play inside them, and more adventurous artists can confound our expectations by playing with them. Genres are the platforms and paradigms of the creative world. They are almost never willed into existence by a single pioneering work. Instead, they fade into view, through a complicated set of shared signals passed between artists, each contributing

Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Steven also talks about APIs and how companies have been evolving from that “secret sauce” to fostering the idea of an open platform for others to come and built on top of them. As an example Steven uses Twitter and all the mashups that were created thanks to their open API.

Conventional software assumes that API users are second-class citizens who shouldn’t get full access to the software’s secret sauce for fear of losing competitive advantage. Twitter’s creators recognized that there was another kind of competitive advantage that came from complete openness: the advantage that comes from having the largest and most diverse ecosystem of software applications being built on your platform. Call it cooperative advantage. The burden of coming up with good ideas for the product is no longer shouldered exclusively by the company itself. On an open platform, good ideas can come from anywhere. Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Here the author also talks about the possibility for governments to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform.

Government bureaucracies have a long and richly deserved reputation for squelching innovation, but they possess four key elements that may allow them to benefit from the innovation engine of an emergent platform. First, they are repositories of a vast amount of information and services that could be of potential value to ordinary people, if only we could organize it all better. Second, ordinary people have a passionate interest in the kind of information governments deal with, whether it’s data about industrial zoning, health-care services, or crime rates. Third, a long tradition exists of citizens committing time and intellectual energy to tackling problems where there is a perceived civic good at stake. And, finally, the fact that governments are not in the private sector means that they do not feel any competitive pressure to keep their data proprietary … But thinking of government as a platform—to borrow a phrase from Web visionary Tim O’Reilly—might be one way to carry out the promise of digital-age governance. Political leadership involves some elements that aren’t best outsourced to a liquid network; decision-making and oratory. But a good government is, at least in part, a government that comes up with innovative solutions to the problems of its citizens, or to the problems faced by bureaucracy itself.

Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From - Open in Kindle

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this book, I think the author makes a convincing case on his theories using history, biology and other things as evidence. I found the writing style easy to follow and entertaining. I’ve been a long time fan of Steven. If you are into cryptocurrencies, he published recently an article in the New York Times about it titled “Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble” and how it might end up contributing to something bigger than wealth and he’s just starting a mailing list called “Cabinet of wonders” - you can subscribe here

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  • Bold in quotes was added by me for emphasis.
  • I wrote the first draft of this article using Kintrospect - my tool for building digital commonplace books using your Kindle Highlights and other sources - that’s how you can click on the links to Kindle and get the app to open automatically for you.
  • [1]TED: Where good Ideas come from by Steven Johnson