Where Good Ideas Come from Chapter 4: Serendipity

·       The hunch requires an environment where surprising new connections can be forged: the neurons and synapses of the brain itself and the larger cultural environments that the brain occupies.

·       Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semi-random fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams. Most of those new neuronal connections are meaningless, but every now and then, the dreaming brain stumbles across a valuable link that has escaped waking consciousness.

·       Wagner found that after an initial exposure to the numerical test, “sleeping on the problem” more than doubled the test subject’s ability to discover the hidden rule.

·       Dreams are the minds primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions to creative insight.

·       This pattern of a slow hunch crystallizing into a dream-inspired epiphany recurs in what may be the most famous reverie in the history of science.

·       Neurons share information by a more indirect channel; they synchronize their firing rates. Large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency – referred to as phase locking.

·       Brain also requires periods of electrical chaos – where neurons are completely out of sync with each other.

·       Every extra millisecond in the chaotic mode added as much as 20 IQ pts – longer spells of phase-lock deducted IQ points – though not as dramatically.

·       The more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. It’s counterintuitive in part because we tend to attribute the growing intelligence of the tech world with increasingly precise electromechanical choreography.

·       The electric noise of chaos allows the brain to experiment with new links. The phase-lock mode is where the brain executes against an established plan or habit. The chaos mode is where the brain assimilates new information, explores strategies for responding to a changed situation.

·       You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.

·       Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure 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.

·       **The challenge of course is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections on all appropriate scales; in the private space of your own mind: within larger institutions; and across information networks of society.

·       One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll.

·       Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection it had overlooked and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity; why didn’t I think of that before?

·       While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we can absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

·       The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that possible combinations are limited by the reach of your memory – solution Reading vacations

·       Devonthink – features a clever algorithm that detects subtle semantic connections between distinct passages of text.

·       Has the internet reduced serendipity?

·       Reading via the internet – may allow users to hone in (via filters) on what they need to know quickly versus meandering – also more likely to find info from people who think like us – decreasing diversity.

·       But connective tissue of hyperlinks allows you to explore related topics

·       Reading the newspaper increases serendipity – have to pass all of the other pages enroute to the info or article you’re looking for.

·       The web does allow for more people to publish thus increasing diversity

·       Internet may make too much noise and chaos, thus the need for filters.

·       Surfing and browsing the web increases serendipity.

·       Google and Wiki give hints to other related info thus increasing serendipity

·       Patenting, building walls between ideas decreases serendipity – many firms are moving away from this practice publishing ideas for others to improve upon - Nike

·       Traditionally, orgs that have a strong demand for innovation have created a closed play-pen for hunches – R&D labs. But protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve or transform them.

·       Brainstorming opens up the flow of ideas and hunches in a more generative fashion but tends to be more regimented. Brainstorming is less effective than practitioners would like it to be.

·       **Secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse – to recombine vs. cloister.

·       Tapping the collective intelligence – the individual employee has a provocative and useful hunch and the group helps to complete the hunch by connecting it to other ideas that have circulated through the system.