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Blogfriend Charles Cameron left the following comment on my knowledge expertise post but I’m promoting it here ( while I munch a quick bite to eat and digest his remarks) because it will resonate with the interests of a number of my other readers.

I’ll update later tonight with a response:

“I’d like to propose that the reason, as you say, that “a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas” is so powerful isn’t because the more “people” the merrier – its because the more “diverse fields” the merrier.

Each new expert, if expert in one field, brings one new family of “frames” together, and it is the viewing of the known facts (and occasional anomalies) in new frames that provides the unexpected glimpses.  So that in fact the most useful expertise would be in (almost content free) frames – in knowing a wide variety of angles from which to look at each situation.

But I’d like to take this farther, and then deeper.

I’m speaking of frames, but those are fairly easily gathered by a decent collector, since they don’t on the whole challenge people’s existing emotions – the assumptions which exemplify our worldviews, to which we tend to be emotionally attached, are harder to get at – and deeper still there the archetypes in which our entire sense of reality is anchored, shifts in which, like psychedelic drug experiences, shake us to the foundations.

For a practical minded child of the enlightenment to question some position proposed by John Cain or Hillary Clinton is not too difficult. To admit one’s own foolishness after offering unwanted though well-intentioned advice to a confirmed alcoholic is harder. But to question the law of cause and effect as commonly understood seems, well, suicidal.

And yet that’s what, for instance, al-Ghazali did, and the Islamic world is still halfway of the opinion that he is right.  As an author under the pseudonym Spengler put it in a recent article for Asia Times:

There are no intermediate causes, in the sense of laws of nature. Mars traverses an ellipse around the sun not because God has instituted laws of motion that require Mars to traverse an ellipse, but because Allah at every instant directs the angular velocity of Mars. … Allah is everywhere doing everything at all times. He sets the spin on every electron, measures the jump of every flea, the frequency of every sneeze.

That’s a hard one for us to swallow, as is the neo-Platonist view – popular with Marcilio Ficino, the leading light of the Platonic Academy in Medici Florence – expressed here by Plotinus, (and echoed by Shakespeare in a familiar phrase):

Men directing their weapons against each other- under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their sport – this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to go away earlier and come back the sooner. … Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing.

These views – that all the world’s a play, that each sparrow falling, each arrow or bullet fired, each airplane tilted towards a distant tower is held between the fingers of a God – they seem unnatural to us, they are foreign, medieval we c all them, archaic even – and yet the hold some terrible compulsion for us, they are the stuff of dreams, and for those whose “niveau mentale” is less firmly fixed in the twenty-first century and its certainties, they can unleash a fervor we find it hard to understand.

My point in quoting al-Ghazali and Plotinus is to show, as Erich Auerbach showed in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, that realities at odds with what seems like reality to us have significant histories and can inspire powerful emotions and impassioned acts that leave our western speculative imaginations standing in their dust.

The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.

All this requires a sort of intellectual courage … and a poetic / archaic cast of mind.

Well, that’s one end of an Ariadne’s thread…

I hope to follow the thread deeper into the labyrinth in upcoming posts.”

Steve DeAngelis had an excellent and timely post on the cognitive diversity involved in the creative process of innovation, working off an article in The New York Times, Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike:

“The Curse of Knowledge”

“There is a lot of denial when it comes to the curse of knowledge. Nobody likes to admit that they are incapable of thinking out of the box. Entrepreneurs pride themselves on being able to envision the “next big thing.” Designers and inventors are always looking for better ways to do things. The good ones have learned tricks that help them break down the walls of knowledge. According to Rae-Dupree psychologists have conducted experiments that demonstrate that a person’s first instinct is to think about old things rather than new things. That’s not really surprising since we can only think about what we know.

‘Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called ‘tappers,’ a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called ‘listeners,’ were asked to name the songs. Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent. The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not ‘hear’ it in their taps?’

….Rae-Dupree notes that there are ways to “exorcise the curse.” I have written about one of those ways before. Frans Johansson calls it “The Medici Effect” in his book of the same name. He argues in favor 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. Getting people with different knowledge bases together means that none of them can remain within the walls of their own knowledge domain for long. As a result, good ideas normally emerge”

Read the rest here.

Acquiring disciplinary expertise typically takes approximately a minimum of 7-10 years for the student to master enough depth of knowledge and requisite skill-sets to become an expert practitioner. In many fields, notably pure mathematics, theoretical physics and musical composition, this period of early mastery is often the most fruitful in terms of significant contributions of new discoveries or the kinds of innovations that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner consider to be “Big C” creativity. Einstein’s papers on Relativity or Newton’s early exposition of the Laws of Motion being the great historical examples of paradigm-shifting innovators. If a practitioner remains entirely in that field for their career, cultivating an ever greater and rarefied depth of knowledge ( and thus having fewer true peers and more disciples) further contributions are likely to be of the “tweaking” and “critiquing” variety. Useful but not nearly as satisfying as the grand “breakthrough” moment.

I suspect that the reason for this decline in major creativity has to do with two realities of expertise:

First, the analytical-reductionist emphasis on vertical thinking; cognitively, for an acknowledged expert, there is a great deal more time spent on mere data retrieval, interpretation within accepted frames and scanning patterns for consistency than there is original problem solving, questioning premises, speculating, imaginative brainstorming, analyzing anomalies and thinking analogically. The latter are too often the tools of the novice, the student, the child, the layman trying to grasp in the process of learning what  they do not yet fully understand. Too often these powerful ( though tiring and time consuming) cognitive skills are set aside in favor of operating on “autopilot” once the student has achieved mastery. Unless consciously practiced, the hard thinking tends to stop when one is constantly confronted by the routine.

Secondly, disciplinary fields, like all forms of collective human endeavor generate their own cultures with accepted norms, rituals, in-group terminology, orthodoxies, implicit and explicit rule-sets, authoritative hierarchies, politics, and peer presssures. As one gains seniority it becomes harder and harder to rock the boat because challenging one’s peers brings professional risk, social ostracism and conflict while validating the community’s beliefs yields rewards, advancement and praise. A phenomenon of human nature that has been observed by thinkers as disparate as Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn and Howard Bloom. Vested interests are irrational in their own defense. It is here that knowledge can be come a “curse” and expertise a form of incompetency or blindness to the larger picture ( “educated incapacity” in Herman Kahn’s terminology).

The answer to this problem requires actively determining how we will think about our knowledge. Steve pointed to cultivating “the Medici Effect” of multidisciplinary interaction in his post, a highly effective practice for organizations who want a work force rich in “intellectual catalysts”. To this, I would add another important set of variables: freedom and time. Seemingly non-productive activities, when we are “fooling around” appear to permit an indirect processing of information that leads to a burst of insight about the problem we have failed to consciously solve ( the “idea came to me in the shower” effect). Time needs to be set aside to explore possibilities with acceptance that not all on them are going to pan out ( Frans Johnansson covers these points at length in The Medici Effect). Permitting employees autonomy strikes at the power and culture of American middle-level management, which is why inculcating such practices often founder, even when introduced support of organizational leaders ( “leadership” and “management” are entirely different outlooks) due to the passive or active resistance of those whose position or status in the organization depends upon exercising control.

On the individual level, novelty is an important stimulus toward horizontal thinking. New concepts and experiences stoke our curiousity and “wake” our brains out of the usual, habitual, patterns in which we operate. Attention levels increase as we begin to operate at the beginning of the learning curve and start to recognize parallels and connections between old and new knowledge. We can also make deliberate choices to think “outside the box’ by voluntarily changing our position, perspective and scale, reversing our premises, engaging in counterfactual thought experiments and other lateral thinking exercises. In this way, we are more likely to be behaving metacognitively, aware of both our own thinking and more alert to the nature of the information that we are receiving.

We have something of a paradoxical situation. An untrained mind, looking at a field with “new eyes” is the one most likely to notice that which has eluded the expert of great experience but is least able to make use of, or even assess critically, the importance of their insights. A trained, disciplinary, mind has the capacity to extrapolate/interpolate, practically apply new insights or think consiliently with great effect but is the mind least likely to have any insights that could conflict with the major tenets of their disciplinary worldview.

Having the best of both worlds means avoiding either-or choices in cognition in favor of both. Analytical-reductionism and Synthesis-consilience have to be regarded by serious thinkers as tools of equal value. Imagination and vision should be as important to the genetic microbiologist or physical chemist as it is to the artist but they should be regarded as a complement to the scientific method and logical, critical, analysis, not as a substitute. Looking for alternative choices to a course of action should be valued as highly as correctly identifying the likeliest outcome of the action. We can embrace intellectual curiousity and shun “paralysis by analysis”.

Crossposted at Chicago Boyz.

John Robb puts on his futurist hat and engages in some imaginative scenario thinking (PDF) over at Global Guerillas. Note John’s comment:

“The goal of this brief is to get people thinking about the future in a way that helps them make decisions today.”

John has the methodology right. Most experts, habituated to the over-use of analytical thinking, will try to nit-pick scenarios like these to death from the inception , either reflexively or intentionally in order to avoid having to reexamine cherished ideological assumptions, instead of engaging in the thought experiment. This is the major cultural-cognitive reason bueaucracies and academic institutions are notoriously poor at thinking outside the box or anticipating anything other than directly linear outcomes of policies. 

Analytical-reductionism was a reasonable enough epsitemological approach for the 19th and 20th centuries of the “Second Wave”, “Mass Man”  industrial-bureaucratic nation-states. It’s not enough for the more heterogeneous, alinear, high-velocity, “complex networks as evolving ecologies” of the 21st century. We need other cognitive tools in our kit alongside analysis.

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?”

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.