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OPEN-SOURCE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

One of the more significant developments in terms of creativity in the past decade has been the advance of open-source platforms that permit asynchronous but real-time, mass collaboration to occur. A phenomena that has been the subject of recent books like Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect and Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams; or, become a functioning business model as with Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext; or, a metaphor for the evolution of a new dynamic of warfare, as in John Robb’s book, Brave New War. And nearly everyone with an ISP is familiar with Wikipedia and most have at least heard of Linux.

The open source concept is a very useful one because it has efficiency, in both the evolutionary and economic senses, adapting faster than closed, hierarchical, competitors and at lower transactional cost ( the price for these advantages is diminished control and focus). As with scale-free networks, it was the advent of the internet and the web that brought the potential of mass collaboration to the attention of economists and social scientists. But did mass collaboration on the cognitive level (the physical level is as old Stonehenge or the pyramids) only start with the information revolution ?

Probably not.

If we look back far enough in the history of great civilizations, you will find semi-mythological figures like Homer or Confucius to whom great, even foundational, works of cultural creativity are attributed. Intellects of a heroic scale who were philosophers and kings, lawgivers, prophets or poets and who produced works of timeless genius. Except that they may either not have existed or their works represent efforts of refinement by many generations of anonymous disciples ( eventually, scholars) who interpreted, polished, redacted and expanded on the teachings of the revered master.

This too was mass collaboration, over a much longer time scale and of a much more opaque character than Wikipedia. Scriptural works went through a similar process, whether it was the scribes of King James, or a medieval Ulemna favoring some teachings of the Hadith over others, or Jewish sages translating the Torah into Greek, despite occasional claims of divine inerrancy, most religious texts were shaped by a succession of human hands.

What the Web has done is to vastly accelerate and democratize the process of mass collaboration and render it more transparent than ever before.

BUILDING AN INNOVATIVE-INTERSECTIONAL IDEA SOCIETY -PART II.

In Part I. , we looked at John Kao’s call for a more innovative America and Howard Gardner’s analysis of the mindsets that would be required for creative, innovative endeavors. In Part II. we continue with the analysis of Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect .

Blogfriend Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has referenced The Medici Effect many times in the past two years; in his initial post on Johansson’s work, Steve gave a superb summary of the Medici Effect concept:

“In his very interesting book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Frans Johansson talks about the value of creating a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas. The Medici’s, of course, were a wealthy and powerful Italian family who played an important role in the Renaissance. The family’s wealth permitted it to support artists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, whose combined intellect helped burst the historical pall known as the Dark Ages”

Johansson’s thesis is that breakthrough innovation is generated most frequently at “the intersection” where two or more different domains meet rather than by predictable, linear, improvements within one field (” directional innovation”). Intersectional opportunities are increasing, Johansson argues due to increased migration, trends toward scientific consilience and ready access to the improved computational tools of the information revolution.

In The Medici Effect, Johansson tackles both cognitive tools as well as social environment that facilitate innovative thinking and productivity. Like Edward DeBono’s lateral thinking exercises, Johansson encourages conscious and methodical attempts to find novel, intersectional, combinations of concepts; he points to cultivating an autotelic mindset; reversing one’s premises to smash through “associative barriers”; using multiperspectivalism ( agreeing here with Howard Gardner); and defusing the social factors that inhibit organizations from effectively brainstorming. These are all solid suggestions, though most have been made elsewhere as well.

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More attention is paid in The Medici Effect to the social environment that is interactive with the innovator in helping to create a climate conducive to synthesis and the generation of insight. moreover, Johansson identifies the creation of a dynamic and stimulating “community”as a critical factor for sustaining an innovation:

“Garfield offer’s two reason for Magic’s [ a sword & sorcery card game that was a cult hit] success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles”

Gaming is itself, a very powerful tool for teaching adaptive thinking skills and for driving the assembly of a “ value network” that can be turned toward productive purposes. Indeed, Johannson spends a great deal of time discussing the potential of these networks to function as a two-edged sword in regard to innovation. Moreover, the social and financial organization clustered around the innovator can be determinative in the success of the innovation in a way that is wholly counterintuitive, according to Johansson. Excess support brings restrictions in the form of vested interests from old value networks, stigmatizing failures that are a necessary part of the learning curve and blunting internal motivation with the distracting prospect of extrinsic reward. There is cognitive strength in ” staying hungry” and needing to stretch resources with value-added thought ( see Don Vandergriff’s Raising the Bar).

What Is To Be Done?:

Looking elsewhere, like The Smithsonian Magazine’s “37 under 36 Young Innovators” we see many mining Johansson’s intersections or using Gardner’s Synthesizing and Creative Minds but these bright folks are social outliers. What we need is re-engineering of institutional cultures and structures, particularly that of our educational system to balance the development of analytical prowess with generative, creative, synthesisizing, capacities. John Hagel recently had a post at Edge Perspectives with a number of sage suggestions for driving innovation:

“Diversity. As Scott Page and others have persuasively suggested, new insight and learning tends to increase with cognitive diversity. This principle highlights the importance of designing institutional arrangements that extend well beyond a single institution, with particular attention to the opportunity to connect to diverse pools of expertise and experience. Diversity can often be enhanced by connecting into spikes – geographic concentrations of talent – and by targeting “brokers” within social networks, creating a multiplier effect in terms of the number of participants that are potentially accessible.

Modularity. When activities are tightly specified and hard-wired together, the opportunities for experimentation and tinkering are very limited. Segmenting people and activities into discrete modules with well-defined interfaces can help to create much more space and opportunity for distributed innovation and learning.”

Read the rest here.

In practical terms, what does this mean for schools, corporations, universities and governments ? In my view, “hard-wired” hierarchy with rigid requirements, stiff penalties and centralized decision-making is going to have to be relegated to niches in the future rather than being the dominant form of organization that it is today. Hierarchy, with it’s mania for control and accountability, remains useful for transactional delivery systems upon which reputations depend, logistical flows upon which production processes depend and security procedures upon which safety may depend. That being said, hierarchy will have to yield to more lateral, more collegial, more networked, more ecologically oriented models of connectivity where the generation of new ideas represents the lifeblood of an organization.

Hierarchy is Newtonian; Free Scale and Modular Networks are Darwinian. An innovation nation is, by definition, adaptive.

ADDENDUM:

Sir Ken Robinson ” Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

APPLIED NEUROLEARNING

My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).

The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily “must reads”.

It’s a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!

BUILDING AN INNOVATIVE-INTERSECTIONAL IDEA SOCIETY -PART I.

My friend Shane Deichman had an important post at Wizards of Oz – a review of Dr. John Kao’s new book, Innovation Nation (Kao’s site is here). I have not read the book yet but Shane’s review of Kao’s work struck a chord with my interest in educational reform. We are living in a transformative era but our educational system’s paradigm, structures and methodologies are looking dangerously anachronistic. Shane writes, in part:

“He is also a man with a true “long view” – a vision not just for our immediate future, but for this and the next century. In Innovation Nation, Kao describes the evolution of “innovation models” – from individual achievement to today’s “version 4.0” that rapidly adapts best practices across a globally diffuse environment of open architectures and collaboration. America is the “incumbent”, but also seemingly blind to the challenges posed by emergent innovation powers like Singapore, Denmark and Finland.

The book continues with an honest critique of America’s education system, comparing and contrasting our response (in terms of funding, curriculum development, teacher training, school construction, etc.) to Sputnik and President Kennedy’s famous challenge at Rice University in 1962 to today’s sagging U.S. aptitude test scores and lackluster performance in math and science. John compares the high barriers to entry (both literally and figuratively) of our nation’s immigration system to that in global innovation hot spots, along with the perils they bring.”

Read the rest here.

What can be done to ramp up American creativity and innovation ? Many things, most of which are outside the scope of this post, but Kao hones in on addressing the fundamentals, which includes our educational system and also our culture ( or rather, our institutional cultures). Together they compose a social platform that will either inhibit or accelerate the rate of innovation in America.

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Looking at the cognition of creative thinking and innovation.

Two books that might help in re-engineering the culture in the direction that Kao envisions are that of fellow Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s Five Minds For the Future and also The Medici Effect by strategic consultant Frans Johansson. While both authors explore individual thinking and the mentalities of organizations, Gardner, a popular guru in the field of educational psychology, emphasizes the former.

Gardner’s book explores five “minds” or cognitive approaches that he believes will be important for the 21st century. They are:

“The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of
major schools of thought, including
science, mathematics, and history, and of
at least one professional craft.

The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one’s
responsibilities as a worker and as a
citizen.”

While the last two are outside of this discussion, the disciplinary mind has been discussed here many times under the auspices of the term “vertical thinking” and Gardner does an excellent job on explaining how that kind of training for subject mastery creates a base for the development or refinement of other kinds of thinking.

Having the disciplinary mind of a vertical thinking expert is particularly complementary to the practice of horizontal thinking, though many experts resist horizontal thinking out of habitual analytical reductionism, the legacy of academic culture or ego, fearing to be seen operating outside one’s area of known competence. Gardner likes to make the analogy of an intellectual laser vs. a searchlight in comparing the two.

Gardner, under the influence of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, divides the cognitive activities of horizontal thinking, into the Synthesizing Mind and the Creative Mind, which would be drawn upon during the process of innovation. Like Csikzentmihalyi, Gardner’s definition of creativity is product-oriented and scalar – the results of creative thinking must approach a certain, tangible, magnitude of effect to count – “Big C” creativity, in Gardner’s words.

I’ve never agreed with that distinction. First, it discounts the effect of stochastic tinkering, which are simply creative tweaks on the micro scale that can be very significant, especially when collectively harnessed on a wikinomic/mass collaboration platform. Secondly, the small scale creativity is a necessary developmental step to take, cognitively speaking, before running with grand accomplishments later in life. Even geniuses and polymaths like Isaac Newton and Mozart who demonstrated tremendous creative breakthroughs of a global impact at a relatively young age, went through periods of early, if precocious, experimentation.

Gardner’s chapter on synthesis is worth the price of the book alone as he gives it a thorough summative treatment, detailing eight kinds of synthesis that have four components and three kinds of motivations. John Boyd wrote of the process of synthesis as a “dialectical engine”; if so, Gardner would consider metaphors to be the spark plugs of integration and innovation, a valuble tool that helps connect a brain with a “massive modularity” in physiological structure. Gardner considers accomplishment of true interdisciplinarity to be hard but acquisition of “multiperspectivalism” among practitioners to be a realistic goal for synthesis.

Creative Minds, in Gradner’s view, are interactive, working within a ” social field” that validates their accomplishments but are not confined to the boundaries of a disciplinary field that inhibits most practitioners from discovery or innovation. He is very cautious of ” false creativity” or precipitous claims of “creativity” from those jacks-of-all-trades who have yet to master a single domain. Writing on American public schools in the 1980’s, Gardner states:

“In schools (and in after school sites) the compelling need was for the achievment of genuine mastery of a recognized discipline: not only was there no need for educators to wave the flag of creativity; it might have been counterproductive to do so. Only through the honing of discipline would genuinely creative options emerge.” (Gardner, 85)

Gardner’s books are often of an uneven quality of depth. His chapter on the Creative Mind is not nearly as thorough as the one on the Synthesizing Mind ( not surprising as Gardner has not laid out a convincing case, in my view, why the two ought to have been separated in the first place; moreso, by his section on their interrelationship). He does give more practical examples from the corporate world and discuss the potential of online platforms for creativity in terms of a Wikipedia –Britannica continuum.

Innovation depends upon the ability to generate new insights and bring these to practical fruition. Cognitively, our tools would include metaphors, analogies, visualization, consciously systematic lateral thinking in the syle of Edward DeBono and harnessing the powers of intuition and imagination in a conceptually-rich intellectual environment.

End Part I.