Life Finds a Way

by Andreas Wagner

  Relatedly, business creativity also needs autonomy, just like Bell Labs pioneer Mervin Kelly realized. Developers may have to meet strategic goals, but how to get there should be left up to them. Without such autonomy, Bell Labs’ scientists would not have discovered the transistor, a breakthrough innovation that could not have been made to order.58 Such autonomy also buys the freedom to commit errors, dead ends from which a creative journey has to retrace its steps. While traditional businesses invest top dollar to prevent such errors, psychologists who study organizations declare that investment to be wasted. Rather, errors need to be managed to minimize their negative consequences and to amplify their positive consequences—learning and innovation.59 After all, they are not only unavoidable, but they can also lead to serendipitous discoveries, like Teflon, penicillin, and vulcanized rubber.60

  All this goes to show that creative businesses run on the same fuel that helps educate creative citizens and accelerate basic research. That’s just natural. After all, they also explore the landscapes of creation. And thinking in terms of these landscapes provides a single framework to explain the successful practices of creative businesses.

  If creativity is a national asset, as Barack Obama posited in 2010, then governments should aim to grow this asset. Landscape thinking can help us see how the right laws and regulations can achieve that.

  Let’s first talk about diversity. Part of it is a numbers game—the more people that explore a landscape, and the more diverse their skills are, the more of them will succeed in finding new peaks. The industrial revolution, for example, became possible only when science and engineering were no longer the privilege of a few aristocratic scientists and began to be practiced by many craftsmen who needed to make a living. Their trials—and errors—created a huge burst of technical innovations.61

  But numbers are not everything. A society’s bouquet of skills can be a riot of wildflowers or a bunch of tulips. Laws that regulate schools and universities influence which it is going to be. Most Chinese schools and universities, for example, are not just branches of the government. Their curricula are also controlled by the government, as are those of private schools. Only international schools are beyond the government’s reach, and they provide a unique opportunity at cultural recombination. Alas, they are off-limits to Chinese citizens.62 (Western education is more diverse, but to the extent it will continue to teach to the test, its future will also spell monoculture.)

  Even when a nation does not grow enough diversity at home, it could import such diversity through skilled migrant workers. Countries that suppress recombination through migration do so at their peril. A case in point is Japan, a notoriously homogeneous society where foreigners account for only 1.5 percent of the population. Japanese companies complain about useless university graduates without international experience, but they prefer to hire precisely those homegrown graduates lacking unorthodox training and foreign experience. Even more important, Japan is not a welcoming place to foreign talents: a measly 3 percent of students in Japan’s universities are foreigners, and their numbers are even falling. Moreover, fewer than 4 percent of university professors are foreign. It is perhaps no coincidence that many Japanese businesses struggle to compete abroad, and only two Japanese universities rank in the top 100 worldwide.63

  Other countries do much better, with 25 percent of science and engineering graduate students being foreign in the United States, and as many as 40 percent in countries like the United Kingdom and Switzerland. And this diversity matters. It matters even in the microcosm of creativity tests, where participants who have lived in different countries score better. As for the macrocosm of major creative works, we just need to remind ourselves that 44 percent of US Americans with outstanding contributions to science and society are recent immigrants.64

  But room for improvement exists even in countries that are permeable to immigrants. For example, foreign students are excluded from a major source of research funding for US graduate students—training grants made to universities by government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health. The smart policy—advocated by academic leaders—is to include foreign students.65 And industry leaders like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have complained for years that US universities train countless foreign math and science Ph.D. students, only to send 40 percent of them back home because of draconian visa policies. All the while, US technology companies hungry for their skills are left starving.66

  Tech is not the only sector that benefits from the diversity created by migration. An example with hard data is the fashion industry, where sales and profits of fashion houses are driven by one creative product, the fashion collection. Single individuals wield enormous influence on this product—and on the financial bottom line of their fashion house. These influencers are creative directors like Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, or Tom Ford, who define the creative vision of a collection. Many of them have extensive international experience or multicultural backgrounds. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, has a Swedish father and a German mother and commutes between France and Italy for his work. Every fashion season, the collections that he and other creative directors produce are rated for their creativity. The raters are the very industrial buyers that determine whether a collection makes it into stores. These ratings, which are published in the prominent trade magazine Journal du Textile, can help link a director’s international experience to both a collection’s creativity and its profitability. A 2015 study did just that for collections of 270 fashion houses rated by more than sixty buyers during twenty-one fashion seasons. And it produced a clear answer: the more years a director spent living outside his home country, the more creative his collections were. The study sheds new light on Lagerfeld’s ability to elevate not one but two companies, Chanel and Fendi, into the top ten of global luxury brands.67 But, more important, it underscores the importance of making country borders permeable to skilled labor.

  Advocates of strict immigration policies could learn not just from such modern examples. They could also use a history lesson. What I have in mind are not just the life histories of the great artists we have encountered, painters like Paul Gauguin and Raphael, whose itinerant lives helped them create new styles of painting. I mean a lesson about the creative ebbs and flows of entire civilizations, like those studied by creativity researcher Dean Simonton, who analyzed how the creative output of five thousand Western writers, philosophers, scientists, and composers fluctuated over two and a half millennia, from 700 BC to 1800 AD.

  Like others before him, Simonton found that most eminent creators emerged in times of political fragmentation, such as Renaissance Italy and ancient Greece, when many independent states co-existed.68 Such fragmentation enhanced a region’s cultural diversity and promoted the recombination of ideas.

  In contrast to fragmented societies, large empires like the Roman and Ottoman empires brought forth fewer influential thinkers. But even in such empires, diverse minority cultures with divergent interests persisted. They made their presence felt periodically through political upheavals like revolts and rebellions. And just like a burst of wildflowers follows a desert rain, a bloom of creative work often followed about a generation after such upheavals.69

  Simonton also studied the creative history of Japan between 580 AD and 1939 AD. During this time, spanning more than a thousand years, Japan alternated between periods of openness to foreign influence and periods of near complete isolation. Combing through historical records about eminent creators in areas as different as literature, sculpture, medicine, and philosophy, Simonton tallied the numbers of these creators at any one time. He also recorded foreign influences on Japanese culture, such as how many immigrants rose to eminence, how many creators went abroad to study, and how many admired foreign ideas. And, sure enough, shortly after a period where such foreign influences increased, Japan brought forth more individuals with notable and outsized contributions to Japanese culture.70

  These lessons from Japan�
��s history apply worldwide and to this day, at least for science. In a 2017 study of 2.5 million scientific publications, those countries that produced the most impactful publications were also the most open to immigrating scientists, to the mobility of their homegrown researchers, and to international scientific collaborations.71

  But enough about diversity and recombination on a national and global scale. What about failure?

  A nation’s attitude toward failure is written in its customs, regulations, and laws, like those that govern businesses. Among them are bankruptcy laws. In most European nations, draconian bankruptcy laws punish creative entrepreneurs with failed start-up companies and can turn them into lifelong financial cripples. Add to that the social disgrace of business failure, and you have a foolproof recipe for stifling business innovation.

  The tacit assumption behind punishing bankruptcy laws is this: business failure results from incompetence or irresponsibility. But in the United States, with its many start-up companies, the statistics tell another story. Even entrepreneurs with a previously successful start-up company have a less than one in three chance to succeed in their next business venture.72 Much like success in biological evolution, business success is a lottery, and that holds also for the best and the brightest. That’s why entrepreneurial giants like Nolan Bushnell, founder of the hugely successful 1970s Atari brand of video games, later produce major flops, forgotten companies like uWink and PlayNet.73 It’s another example of the hit-or-miss nature of creativity.

  To enhance rather than suppress such creativity, the sting needs to be taken out of failure, and some societies are making progress in this area. The Silicon Valley mantra of “fail fast, fail often” speaks to this progress, as do increasingly popular social events where entrepreneurs share their experience with failure and celebrate it as a learning opportunity. They include the wildly successful FailCon conferences and the saltily named Fuck Up Night, a social event that originated in Mexico City. Within a few years, Fuck Up Night spread to more than two hundred cities in seventy-five countries.74

  Public forums like these weaken the social sting of failure. The financial sting can be taken care of by a government’s way of forgiveness: lenient bankruptcy laws. Here, the United States has also been doing well, mainly thanks to its Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which protects failed entrepreneurs from paying back most debt and allows them to keep some assets, such as a home.75 A 2003 study led by San Diego economist Michelle J. White asked whether legal leniency like this can indeed lift the entrepreneurial spirit. The study examined entrepreneurs in ninety-eight thousand families across the United States. What made the study possible is that different US states do not treat bankrupt individuals equally. Some states, like Texas, allow for a large “homestead exemption,” as lawyers call it. In these states, a failed entrepreneur can keep all or most home equity, whereas other states, like Maryland, allow her to keep little or none of it. In theory, a large homestead exemption should be good for business. It reduces start-up risk because it protects more of a family’s assets from failure.

  And this bit of economic theory works: families who own their home were 35 percent more likely to own a business if they lived in states where the homestead exemption is high.

  Unfortunately, forgiveness is not free. In 2004, nine times more people filed for bankruptcy in the United States than in Britain, and to the chagrin of lenders their number has increased five-fold since 1981. That chagrin materialized itself in a 2005 tightening of the legal thumbscrews for US debtors. It essentially reduced the size of the Chapter 7 safety net such that now fewer individuals qualify for Chapter 7. Landscape thinking helps us predict how this long-term experiment will affect business innovation.76

  Just as essential for national creativity as failure tolerance and recombination is the autonomy of individuals. That’s a simple consequence of creativity’s Darwinian aspect. Because we are blind to the best solution for hard problems, it pays to have many people tackle such problems. And if we let each institution, business, or individual explore a solution landscape in a different direction, we increase the chances of stumbling upon good solutions.

  But while lawmakers can turn the dials of legal forgiveness by rewriting bankruptcy law, enhancing the autonomy of explorers can require more profound—not to say daunting—social changes.

  First, individual autonomy directly contradicts some forms of government. Most authoritarian governments would be suicidal to grant it in even small measure, lest its people get a dangerous whiff of the freedoms they could have. In their book Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson identify what has united nations—from the Neolithic to the modern world—that function well: a government and institutions where individuals are not at the mercy of a king, feudal lord, or dictator, but where they can shape their own fate. Because the same autonomy also helps creativity, a society’s creative potential will grow with the number of people endowed with it. (And that potential will erode when a society’s middle-class does—for example through income inequality.77)

  A second obstacle to autonomy is even more formidable than the form of government. It is a bedrock of social values that can discourage taking the road less traveled.

  Students of civilization have long argued that humans in Eastern and Western cultures develop two different conceptions of self. The West values an independent self that expresses its own needs and develops its own potential. In contrast, the East values an interdependent self that is focused on how to serve a larger whole—family, community, and nation—a value epitomized in the proverb “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”78 The roots of the Western perspective lie in the defense of civil liberties and personal freedom by eighteenth-century liberalism.79 By comparison, those of the Eastern view are ancient, going back all the way to the emphasis Confucius placed on social harmony some two millennia ago.

  Schools imprint these differences onto children. Western schools aim to develop and empower the individual, whereas Eastern education is more about socialization—teaching the individual to fit in and serve the collective. That’s why the Imperial keju exam was more than just an emperor’s way to neuter challengers, and the gaokao test is more than just a tool for meritocracy. They also sustain social harmony, which is easier to achieve when people think alike.80

  These millennia-old cultural differences help explain why well-known Chinese inventions like the printing press, compass, or gunpowder transformed the West but made barely a dent in the East. Where stability, order, and harmony are cherished, disruptive innovations cannot be.81

  In other words, if a standardized education is to blame for the less creative artwork put out by Chinese students, as shown by the Yale–Beijing study I mentioned earlier, that education is itself a symptom rather than the disease.82 And the disease is not endemic to China. Twenty years before the Yale–Beijing study, researchers at Tel Aviv University evaluated the creativity of ninety children from the United States and the Soviet Union and found that the Soviet children scored lower on creativity tests.83 Soviet schools were not known for Chinese-style hypercompetition, but Soviet society shared another feature with the Far East: they were collectivist and valued conformity, although for a different reason—communism.

  But what about the one great advantage of collectivism, superior teamwork? That advantage is real, but remember that creative teams do not just divide labor among worker bees. They exist to recombine ideas, and that is where diversity is crucial: you cannot recombine ideas that no one has thought of.84

  Homogeneity is not the only by-product of collectivism. Another one is what Kai-Ming Cheng, chair of education at the University of Hong Kong, calls “the extraordinary significance that extrinsic motivation plays in student learning.”85 Student achievement in a collectivist society is often driven by the expectations of others and rewarded by their approval rather than by inner drive.

  Unfortunately, as we heard earlier, extrinsic motivation does not drive creative achievement. In
trinsic motivation does.86 And the landscape perspective helps explain why: an explorer must blaze his own trail because nobody can know where solutions to hard problems might be found. An interdependent self-suppresses, whereas an independent self-supplies the courage to be different. That’s why autonomy is so central for creativity.

  From the microcosm of a child’s mind to the macrocosm of civilizations, the same principles appear in different guises. To help recombine and associate remote ideas, single minds can acquire diverse educations, whereas nations can build networks of autonomous schools and facilitate the migration of skilled workers. To tolerate failure, weaken the tyranny of selection, and suspend judgment, nature has endowed individual minds with priceless abilities like those of playing and dreaming, and governments can endow an entire nation with forgiving bankruptcy laws. On the surface, Chapter 7 bankruptcy has nothing in common with a playing child, but the landscape perspective reveals their deep commonalities. And it reveals the hallmarks of creative societies: they treasure diversity, tolerate failure, and shelter the autonomy of individuals.

  Epilogue

  More than Metaphors

  When physicists like Max Planck and Louis de Broglie developed quantum theory, they also discovered that vibrating strings are more than superficial metaphors for glowing atoms. In the century since then, another new kind of science has been emerging, this one fed by rivulets from disciplines as different as molecular biology and psychology. It is a science of the creative processes that unfold all around us, from chemistry to culture. And just as the idea of vibration ties together quantum theory and acoustics, optics and cosmology, the concept of a landscape ties together creative processes from chemistry to culture.