Nurturing Creative Environments
Innovators won’t want to miss this fascinating presentation on TED.com by writer and entrepreneur Steven Johnson. It’s a journey from 17th century British coffee houses to the cold war and ending at Starbucks.
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Don’t have 17 minutes to enjoy his engaging stories and illustrations? That’s OK, here is the 3-minute version.
· An idea is not a single thing but rather a network of neurons firing in sync.
· New ideas come from existing ideas stitched together in different ways.
· Ideas are most likely to happen in chaotic environments, with people from different backgrounds. Johnson illustrated this with a story of a researcher who actually studies video footage he had taken in science labs. He found that breakthrough ideas most often occurred, not over the microscope but around the conference table when the team gathered to talk about what they were having trouble with or where they had made mistakes.
· Important ideas often have long incubation periods, often lingering for decades as a person will have a feeling that a problem is there but don’t have all the tools available to solve it. Allow those hunches to connect with those of others – you may have half an idea, someone else has half that can turn your idea into something larger than the sum of its parts.
Johnson calls this the slow hunch and uses a story of Darwin to illustrate. In his autobiography, Darwin writes of the Eureka moment that led him to figure out natural selection. However, when a researcher took time to scour Darwin’s personal notebooks he found that Darwin had actually had the idea several months prior to that moment which caused it to actually come into view in his mind.
Do you have a story about an unexpected breakthrough moment of your own? Are you interested in being part of a creative team? Contact IdeaConnection to learn more.
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