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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