If you read a lot of blogs and books about innovation, one recurring
theme is that too many ideas are not good enough. Objectively, this may be true
– if we define the situation in a certain way. I am in the process of reading
Turing’s Cathedral (by George Dyson) about the beginning of the computer era. One
of the interesting dynamics in this story relates to the relationship between
theory-focused and applications-focused people. Mostly, they did not get along.
That is the stereotype, but what is clear is that the people developing the
computer were dependent on the theoreticians for ideas, but not just any ideas.
The people focused on theory were able to suggest mental models of the world
that could be applied to the real world.
I learned about an era of technology development that I knew
nothing about, including something about the extraordinary people who were part
of this story. The story was amazing at the time, and looking back makes it
seem more amazing.
The earliest computers were asked to solve simple problems
and the primary issue was how to get the computer (hardware) to work. Very
clever people used these relatively simple machines to do very complex
calculations. As those hardware problems
were resolved, the problem became one of programming. In other words, how would
a programmer express the problem in the programming language of the computer?
In the flow of this conversation was the following passage.
In the real world,
most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It is
easier to draw something that looks like a cat than to define what, exactly,
makes a cat looks like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and
eventually something appears that resembles a cat. An answer finds a question,
not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless
scribbles (and unused neural connections) are left behind.
In innovation, the two extremes of innovation might be
incremental and transformational. We often think about them as points on a
continuum, but maybe they exist on completely different dimensions. Maybe we have
also reached the point when our ability to solve problems exceeds our ability
to describe problems. If true, then maybe transformation arises from answers
finding questions, but incremental innovation arises from questions finding
answers. This is why transformation often shocks. People did not “see” the
problem, until somebody used the answer to shine a light on the problem.
Maybe one of the problems with some of the inadequate ideas
is that business leaders have not been looking for the problem that they have
been given the answer for.
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