Life Finds a Way

by Andreas Wagner

  As a university educator and researcher, I also received other field lessons in the perils of rote training and conformism. One of them came during a half-year research stay at a government research institute in Singapore. Most doctoral and postdoctoral researchers I met there had survived the rigors of Singapore’s schools and universities, which are well reputed in Asia. Aside from being exquisitely polite, the researchers were technically highly competent and excelled at analyzing mountains of data. However, their training had not prepared them to take the essential step toward a creative career: leave behind the authority of your professor and bushwhack your own trail, following only the lead of the questions that excite you. It is sad to think what could have become of these bright and hard-working kids, whose research had a robotic quality and lacked creative spark, if their education had nurtured that spark.

  But along my path I also frequently stumbled upon diamonds in the rough, like Amit, candidates with less than stellar scores whose minds shone brilliantly. Once these diamonds had been cut by years of scientific research, they sparkled through their experiments and theories, which went on to command international attention. Students like these were often neither the most single-minded nor the straight-A students. Their college grades might have taken a dip when they played in a band, pursued competitive sports, or traveled around the world, but in mysterious ways all those distractions helped make them more passionate and creative in their work. More than half a century ago, Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal—a father of modern neuroscience—already knew this when he recommended that one choose “students… who being endowed with an abundance of restless imagination, spend their energy in the pursuit of literature, art, philosophy, and all the recreations of mind and body. To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality, they are channeling and strengthening them.”34

  Observing the rise of these scientists also taught me a few lessons about building and running a team of creative researchers—currently some twenty members strong—that maps evolution’s adaptive landscapes.

  Rule one I already mentioned. Before you hire a person, really get to know her. No test score is a substitute for lengthy interviews, writing samples, presentations, and conversations with references.

  Rule two is about autonomy. If a researcher has the skills and the passion, give him the freedom to pursue it. That’s why members of my team usually develop their own research projects. They usually come up with multiple options—divergent thinking—which we whittle down to the one that is most original, feasible, and exciting.

  And we must be patient. Many great projects are difficult. They navigate a complex landscape, and, like for Dante, the road to heaven often leads through multiple hells—months of fits and starts and failed experiments. If fear of unemployment lurked behind every failure, a researcher’s imagination would stop leaping and bounding and would gamely climb up the nearest hill to stay there.

  A final rule, this one also familiar: diversity pays. I don’t just mean the diversity of skills in any one person’s head (that too), but also the diversity of a team whose members have different backgrounds. Even though we are all interested in biological evolution, my team has hosted not just biologists, but also computer scientists, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians. Each has their own vantage point on the landscape of human knowledge.

  This kind of diversity is essential to thriving research collaborations, where success has as many parents as a team has members. This is not just one man’s opinion. A 2007 study analyzing almost twenty million scientific works published over a half-century demonstrated that scientific teamwork has been becoming inexorably more important than solitary work. The reasons are obvious in science and engineering, where research has become ever more costly and may require equipment from multiple laboratories. But teams replace individuals also in the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. And even in mathematics, historically the purview of the lone genius, much successful research is now performed in teams. Indeed, the most influential research publications—those cited more than a thousand times—are six times more likely to have been written by teams than by solitary scientists.35

  In sum, academic research, like childhood education, is enhanced by autonomy, diversity, failure tolerance, and the recombination of knowledge. Landscape thinking can not only help explain why, it can also help neutralize two threats that loom over today’s fundamental research.

  The first comes from how traditional universities are organized, where researchers are neatly boxed up in departments—economics, physics, art history, biology. When collaborations span different departments, these very boxes can hinder the successful recombination of skills and ideas. Fortunately, university researchers fed up with academiosclerosis have options—small organizations like the Institute of Higher Studies in Berlin, Germany, or the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These are institutions that exist for one purpose: recombining knowledge. They may host a few or no permanent resident scientists, but rather numerous visiting scholars from all disciplines, who stop by for anywhere from a few days to a few years to exchange ideas.

  I have been visiting the Santa Fe Institute regularly for almost twenty years, and on these visits, I never know who I will meet—writers, physicists, educators, archeologists, or biologists. But I do know that kicking around ideas with them will be as stimulating as LEGO is to children. Many of their ideas linger in my mind for weeks, eventually germinating into new research projects and discipline-crossing books—like this one.

  The tricks by which small institutions can accelerate recombination are hard to emulate at larger universities. One of them is smallness itself, which avoids anonymity. By constantly bumping into each other, visitors are bound to engage. Then there is a semi-secluded location, preferably outside a city center, which prevents people from wandering off for lunch or coffee—they talk to each other instead. Shared meals served on-site achieve the same effect. And finally there is the physical space. Large and comfortable communal areas stimulate scientists to exchange ideas, contrasting with the small and shared offices given to even the most distinguished visitors. (Try enforcing that at a university.)

  While institutes like these are no substitute for the teaching portfolio and billion-dollar infrastructure of universities, they are models for effective recombinators of the future. They already leave a footprint far beyond their size and have produced hugely influential collaborations in areas as different as sociology and biology.36

  But while such institutes can combat academic provincialism, they are powerless against the second, even greater danger for Western science: to become a victim of the spectacular success it has seen since World War II.

  In the United States, the foundations of this success were laid by visionaries like Vannevar Bush, science advisor to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Bush wrote a 1945 document entitled “Science: The Endless Frontier” that helped transform the United States from a scientific backwater to a global discovery engine. In this document, Bush argued that the government should fund basic research that is unconcerned with immediate application—the kind that led to the discovery of antibiotics. He envisioned “affording the prepared mind” of the researcher “complete freedom for the exercise of initiative.”37

  His vision helped create funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, which has supported the work of countless US academics, including more than two hundred Nobel laureates.38 Yet Vannevar Bush would be dismayed to see what is becoming of the freedom that he envisioned.

  Just like education, scientific research has become hypercompetitive. A primitive social Darwinism would welcome that development, but the landscape perspective exposes its dangers. In today’s US universities, more than one hundred thousand biomedical faculty help manufacture sixteen thousand new Ph.D. or M.D. researchers every year. These researchers join an army of more than thirty thousand postdocs, who
all scramble for scarce academic positions.39 And for the select few who make it, the hassles are just beginning. They enter a competition for funding so intense that they have little time for the very research they excel at. Instead, they write proposal after multipage proposal, which compete with hundreds of other proposals at funding agencies like the National Science Foundation, where success rates in some areas of science have dropped to below 5 percent. In other words, the average young university scientist—already one of a select few with an academic job—has to write twenty proposals before being able to do what he is good at. And without that funding, his career will end before it has really begun.40 The experts reviewing those proposals are so overwhelmed that they are looking for any excuse to reject a proposal they read. Young scientists know that well, and they also know that expert panels are filled with older scientists who tend to be conservative. An original and unusual proposal can be just the excuse a conservative expert is waiting for. The natural reaction: stick to safe research. Such research is like a cookie-cutter suburban home compared to a radically innovative building like the Sydney Opera House: any reasonably competent builder could assemble it. In other words, such research is guaranteed to succeed, but it will not produce any breakthroughs. Hypercompetition turns visionary architects into uninspired craftsmen.

  Whether experts recommend a proposal for funding also depends on a scientist’s track record. To evaluate that record one must read an applicant’s work, but given the number of applicants, that’s completely out of the question. So the seduction of using a single number akin to a student’s test score is irresistible. In science, that number is the number of citations a researcher’s work has received. Citations are great for studying broad historical patterns, but they are dangerous when evaluating the work of young scientists. They can be especially misleading when evaluating groundbreaking work, which may take years to become recognized and cited.41 By the time the world has caught up, the young scientist may be driving a taxi.

  These are some symptoms of academic hypercompetition, which reduces diversity among scientists just as it does among pupils. The resulting homogenization has been quantified in economics research in the United Kingdom, where the government is granting or denying research funding to entire university departments based on the collective impact of the departments’ researchers. Between 1992 and 2014, economics funding became concentrated at fewer universities, which therefore attract a greater percentage of students. They publish in fewer journals, research more mainstream subjects, and teach orthodox, mainstream economics.42

  The problem with this trend: most scientific revolutions originate far from the mainstream. When everybody scrambles up the same hill, a landscape of knowledge remains unexplored, and discoveries like antibiotics or the DNA double helix go unmade. Hypercompetition produces scientific monoculture, just like high-stakes testing does in schools.

  But what to do?

  The post-War golden age of increasing research funding is a distant memory, so universities will need to curtail the number of academics they produce.43 That’s one part of the solution. Another part emerges from the landscape view and from the importance it places on allowing the occasional failure: give young and promising academic researchers a modest amount of research funds, independent of any competitions they win—not much, but enough to pursue unusual ideas.44 Don’t take that money away if they fail, so they can try another idea. If they succeed, let them compete to obtain more funds to progress more quickly.

  Safe but modest funding not only takes the sting out of failure and helps young researchers cross the personal research hell that can precede breakthrough discoveries. It also steers them away from the latest research fashions—the kind they need to pursue for publishing in fashionable journals. It helps young scientists remain explorers, regardless of whether they end up on the Discovery channel.

  This experiment is ongoing in some European countries. Among them is Switzerland, where providing such safe funding is standard practice.45 Being a tiny country, Switzerland cannot produce the same quantity of research output as the United States. But, remarkably, if one tallies its research products per capita, Switzerland is either on a par with or ahead of leading nations—including the United States—in the number of publications, their influence in several fields, and the number of Nobel Prize winners. There are multiple reasons for this, but among them is that the best Swiss universities provide academic researchers the means—via limited safe funding—to traverse the valleys that lead to the highest peaks. The message is one for politicians everywhere: dialing back on relentless competition is not synonymous with wasting taxpayer money. Done right, it can be a recipe for innovation.46

  Most businesses that develop new products cannot take the long view on exploring creative landscapes that Switzerland’s academia has taken. They need to transform ideas into products within months or at most a few years. That’s why most of them do not develop radically new technologies, which might take decades to commercialize. Rather, their research and development tweaks or optimizes existing products. In other words, their R&D is mostly D and much less R, climbing nearby hills rather than distant mountains.47

  Perhaps for this very reason, surveys of business leaders reveal that they value university research very highly, not just for the future employees it trains, but also for the diversity of knowledge it creates. In the landscape view, university and industry have a symbiotic relationship. The first jumps to distant places, the other ascends from there in smaller steps.48

  But some companies have broken this traditional relationship. They spend decades commercializing discoveries made in academia, such as graphene, genetic engineering, or computer-controlled machines. Others operate their own engines of discovery.49 Such unusual companies hold especially valuable lessons for how to run creative businesses.

  Historically, among the first—and certainly the best known—was AT&T and its research laboratory, Bell Labs, which mothered innovations as groundbreaking as transistors, solar cells, lasers, and fiber optics. When its star rose half a century ago, landscape thinking had not yet left biology, but the principles on which Mervin Kelly ran it—he was one of Bell Labs’ chief architects—could be taken straight from Landscapes 101.

  The first is diversity. Kelly paired physicists with electrical engineers, thinkers with doers, scientific celebrities with rookies, all in the same space, to create the remote associations we now know are essential for the highest creativity. The second is freedom and time—lots of them. Years could pass before some projects would bear fruit, which was only possible because no product had to be rushed to market. Time buys the luxury of failure.

  These principles are simple, so why doesn’t everybody follow them? In the words of physicist Phil Anderson, whose Nobel Prize was itself a product of Bell Labs: “Never underestimate the importance of money.” Bell Labs was sponsored by a giant telephone monopoly with deep pockets.50 Only some of today’s wealthiest companies like Google can afford the patience needed to innovate.51

  Such patience is important in determining whether a company’s research breaks new ground. Teresa Amabile and her team have studied multiple companies where creativity affects the bottom line and have learned valuable lessons about what works for them and what doesn’t. One of their lessons is about patience. Many of us feel that tight deadlines spur our creativity, but according to Amabile’s research, extreme pressure puts the brakes on creative thinking. Workers with sufficient time to solve a problem will usually find more original solutions than those under adrenaline-raising pressure. What is more, once the stressed-out workers have met a tight deadline, they often experience a creativity “hangover” in which their minds produce ho-hum ideas for days.52

  Encouraging creativity also requires breaks and vacation. When Socrates warned us of the “barrenness of a busy life” more than two thousand years ago, he may have already realized that important ideas need time for incubation. And today’s psychological research shows th
at creative people, even though they sometimes work themselves into exhaustion, also take more time off than others.53 The positive effects of letting a mind roam free are even measurable. For example, in the accounting company Ernst and Young, every ten additional hours of vacation help improve an employee’s performance review by 8 percent.54

  A third lesson is that a creative team’s members must differ in skills, interests, and perspective. The reasons are obvious from landscape thinking—diversity allows the recombination behind remote association. Unfortunately, many managers are not ready for that lesson, perhaps for the same reason as teachers prefer docile over rebellious pupils. They assemble homogeneous teams whose members are like-minded, eager to work together, and therefore have high morale. But Amabile’s work shows that homogeneous teams are creativity killers.55 They ascend minor hills and create mediocre solutions.

  Building a creative team of adults is certainly not easier then herding creative children. It requires vision, intuition about what motivates people, self-confidence in the face of conflicts, and a tolerance of large egos. But companies that are up to the task can become creative powerhouses, like design company IDEO, best known for the first Apple mouse. Its leaders excel at building diverse teams, and these teams in turn have not just created products as different as body-hugging office chairs and wearable breast pumps, they have also reaped hundreds of design awards in the process.56

  A fourth lesson is that human creativity requires the freedom to explore a landscape, the same kind of freedom that genetic drift allows in evolution’s adaptive landscapes. Managers who subject every idea to layers of review or early criticism are poison to creativity. Selection is important, but not early on. And even managers who reward originality can go wrong: praise is helpful, but cash prizes are not. Not only do they make employees feel manipulated by management, but they also turn creators into mercenaries. In other words, they eliminate the intrinsic motivation—creating for the fun of it—that is so important for exploration.57