by Matthew Syed
Psychologists often talk about ‘conceptual distance’. When we are immersed in a topic, we are surrounded by its baroque intricacies. It is very easy to stay there, or to simply think about making superficial alterations to its interior. We become prisoners of our paradigms. Stepping outside the walls, however, permits a new vantage point. We don’t have new information, we have a new perspective. This is often considered to be a primary function of certain types of art. It is not about seeing something new, but about seeing something familiar in a new way. One thinks of the poetry of W. B. Yeats, or the paintings and sculptures of Picasso. These great works create conceptual distance between the viewer of the work and its object, the observer and the observed.
In a world where recombination is becoming the principal engine of growth, this could not be of greater significance. The growth of the future will be catalysed by those who can transcend the categories we impose on the world; who have the mental flexibility to bridge between domains; who see the walls that we construct between disciplines and thought silos and regard them not as immutable but movable, even breakable.
This is why the outsider mindset is set to become such a powerful asset. That is not to say that we don’t need insider expertise; quite the reverse. We need both conceptual depth, and conceptual distance. We need to be insiders and outsiders, conceptual natives and recombinant immigrants. We need to be able to understand the status quo, but also to question it. We need to be strategically rebellious. To return to immigrants, there are doubtless additional reasons that help to explain their outsize contribution to innovation. The kinds of people who choose to migrate are likely to be comfortable with risk-taking. Given the barriers they often face, they are likely to develop resilience. But while these traits are important, they should not obscure the significance of being able to question the status quo and step beyond convention.
Catherine Wines, a British entrepreneur, puts the point well. ‘To become a visionary, you have to take the perspective of an outsider in order to see the things that are taken for granted by insiders. Possibilities and opportunities become most apparent when you are confronting a problem with a fresh perspective.’27
Wines founded a remittance company with Ismail Ahmed, an immigrant from Somaliland, in 2010. Ahmed had arrived in London in the 1980s, having experienced first-hand the deep frustrations of receiving remittance. His early life, together with what he learned in his new home about digital solutions, led to the creation of a new venture: a company that makes sending money home as convenient as sending a text message. It is a classic example of recombination.
Jeff Bezos made the same point in his 2018 letter to shareholders. He talked about the importance of incremental innovation, doubling down on existing ideas, exploiting their value. Yet he also recognised that, if you want to innovate in more profound ways, you have to step outside your existing framework. His word for this captures the outsider mindset. He calls it ‘wandering’. Bezos says:
Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient . . . but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity . . . it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency . . . The outsized discoveries – the ‘non-linear’ ones – are highly likely to require wandering.28
Think about the implications for education. Labour experts predict that the children of today will have as many as a dozen jobs, the majority of which haven’t yet been invented. In a fast-moving world, we will need to master not merely the art of invention but of personal reinvention. This is a world ripe for people who can question the status quo, and who can travel beyond boundaries, not least the ones we impose upon ourselves. For if there is one paradigm in which we are deeply immersed, it is our own lives.
If it was difficult for luggage executives to question the status quo when it came to suitcases, how much more difficult is it to deviate from the script we are living every day? The default is integrated into our waking existence, our most basic frame of reference, the jobs we do, the skills we have, the lives we lead. Less salient are the skills we can yet build, and the opportunities we haven’t yet considered. In short, we sometimes need to apply rebel ideas to our own lives.
Of course, sometimes it’s great to have stability. To have continuity. But neither is there anything wrong with seizing opportunities, instead of inadvertently missing them, failing to grasp the equivalent of wheeled suitcases or smart electrification in our own lives. What new ideas could I apply to what I am doing, and how I am doing it? Where is the potential for recombination?
Research led by Keith Stanovich of the University of Toronto measures one aspect of the outsider mindset. It is called the Actively Open Minded scale (AOM). The questionnaire asks people if they agree or disagree with statements like ‘People should always take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs’ and ‘A person should always consider new possibilities’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who score high on this scale are better at coming up with ideas, evaluating arguments, combating biases, spotting fake news, even after controlling for cognitive ability.
There are many techniques that help to transition to an outsider perspective, to see the familiar with new eyes, and to engage with new ideas. Michael Michalko, a former US army officer who has become a leader in creativity, advocates ‘assumption reversal’. You take the core notions in any subject or proposal, and simply turn them on their head. So, suppose you are thinking of starting a restaurant. The first assumption might be: ‘restaurants have menus’. The reversal would be: ‘restaurants have no menus’. This provokes the idea of a chef informing each customer what he bought that day at market, allowing them to select a customised dish. The point is not that this will necessarily turn out to be a workable scheme, but that by disrupting conventional thought patterns, it might lead to new associations and ideas.
Think of how this technique might have altered the Industrial Revolution: if at the time electrification had become available executives had reversed their defining assumption that ‘production processes are based upon unit power’. Instead, they would have said: ‘production processes are not based upon unit power’. Would this not have disturbed their assumptions, driven a new set of thoughts, and helped them escape their paradigm?
Or, to take a different example, suppose you are considering starting a new taxi company. The first assumption might be: ‘taxi companies own cars’. The reversal would be: ‘taxi companies own no cars’. Twenty years ago, that might have sounded crazy. Today, the largest taxi company that has ever existed doesn’t own cars: Uber.
IV
Now, let’s examine innovation from a wider perspective. What kinds of societies facilitate rebel combinations? Why are some places and epochs more creative than others? How does our analysis of diversity fit into the arc of history? Perhaps the key insight is that ideas, unlike physical goods, are not subject to diminishing returns. If you give someone your car, you cannot use it at the same time. If you come up with a new idea and share it with other people, however, its potential increases. This is known as information spillover.
As Paul Romer, an economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on innovation, put it: ‘The thing about ideas is that they naturally inspire new ones. This is why places that facilitate idea-sharing tend to become more productive and innovative than those that don’t. Because when ideas are shared, the possibilities do not add up. They multiply.’29
The key word here is ‘shared’. Ideas can only spill over when people are connected with one another. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine in the first century ad, but news of the invention spread so slowly and to so few people that it may never have reached the ears of cart designers. Not only was the innovation lost on other people, but they lacked the opportunity to improve or recombine it, a poin
t made by the author Matt Ridley.30 Ridley also points to Ptolemy’s astronomy, which was a great improvement on what went before (if not entirely accurate), but was never actually used for navigation because astronomers and sailors did not meet. Innovation was isolated, deprived of cross-pollination, because people lived in structures – social, physical, moral – that lacked connectivity. There was no spillover.
Once ideas are shared, however, they are not just transmitted to other minds, but they can now be combined with yet more ideas. Take the discovery of oxygen, which is typically credited to Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele as if they plucked the element from thin air. But to even start the search, they needed possession of the concept that air is made of distinct gasses. This was not widely accepted until the second half of the eighteenth century. They also needed sophisticated scales to measure fine changes in weight, which didn’t become available until a couple of decades earlier.31
Priestley and Scheele were both creative, and had the outsider mindset willing to challenge the status quo, but they couldn’t have made their breakthrough unless connected to a broader web of people and ideas. It was the diversity in their social network that enabled them to recombine previously unconnected ideas, which then spilled back, inspiring new ideas and recombinations. This implies that our perspective on innovation should shift from one in which individuals are front and centre to one in which new ideas and technologies emerge from a complex dance between individuals and the networks they inhabit.
In his book The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chronicles the intellectual development of pretty much every significant thinker in recorded history. He argues that the likes of Confucius, Plato and Hume were, indeed, geniuses, but shows that their genius blossomed because they were situated at propitious nodes in the social network. Here, for example, is Collins’s attempt to recreate the network of Socrates, and it reveals connections with virtually every major thinker.
For those interested in existentialism, here is the network that encompasses Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger:32
Collins writes:
Intellectual creativity is concentrated in chains of personal contacts, passing emotional energy and cultural capital from generation to generation. This structure underwrites all manner of contexts: we see it in the chains of popular evangelists in Pure Land Buddhism, as among the masters of Zen, among Indian logicians and Japanese Neo-Confucians . . . The emotional energy of creativity is concentrated at the centre of networks, in circles of persons encountering one another face to face. The hot periods of intellectual life, those tumultuous golden ages of simultaneous innovations, occur when several rival circles intersect at a few metropoles of intellectual attention and debate.33
The social context of creativity confers a holistic perspective, enabling us to note the inspiring truth that innovation is partly about the creativity of the brains within the social network, but that the creativity of brains is also partly about the diversity of the networks they are plugged into. The overall network of connected brains is what the evolutionary theorists Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich call ‘the collective brain’. They write:
A common perception of the source of innovation is Carlyle’s ‘great man’ – the thinker, the genius, the great inventor – whose cognitive abilities so far exceed the rest of the population, they take us to new places through singular, Herculean mental effort. They may stand on the shoulders of the greats of the past, but they see further because of their own individual insight; their own individual genius. We argue . . . that these individuals can be seen as products of collective brains; a nexus of previously isolated ideas.34
This picture explains why innovations often occur in different minds at almost precisely the same time. For a long while, fate or providence was cited to explain why, across all of space and time, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came up with versions of the theory of evolution virtually in the same month. Or why Leibniz and Newton hit upon the concept of calculus almost simultaneously. Fate started to seem like a rather unsatisfactory explanation, however, when historians realised that these ‘coincidences’ are not the exception; they are the norm. As Steven Johnson put it:
Sunspots were simultaneously discovered in 1611 by four scientists living in four different countries. The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746 . . . The law of the conservation of energy was formulated separately four times in the late 1840s. The evolutionary importance of genetic mutation was proposed by S. Korschinsky in 1899 and then by Hugo de Vries in 1901, while the impact of X-rays on mutation rates was independently discovered by two scholars in 1927. The telephone, telegraph, steam engine, photograph, vacuum tube, radio – just about every essential technological advance of modern life has a multiple lurking somewhere in its origin story.35
What is going on? How could these ‘independent’ discoveries be happening so often? We can now see that they are the predictable consequence of networked minds. When people are linked to similar people and ideas, they tend to make similar connections and discoveries.
We can see these truths at multiple scales simultaneously. Take a study by the anthropologists Michelle Kline and Rob Boyd on innovation rates in the Pacific islands. These islands are separated by hundreds of miles of water, making it possible to relate the speed of innovation to the size of the collective brain. The researchers found that the sophistication of the technology was strongly correlated with the size and interconnectedness of the population. Bigger networks permitted greater scope for recombination of ideas, competition between ideas, and information spillover.36
Or take the state of Tasmania, an island 240 kilometres south of Victoria in Australia. When Europeans first came into contact with it in the late eighteenth century, the technology was astonishingly primitive; there are tribes dating from 40,000 years ago with a more sophisticated toolkit. The Tasmanians had one-piece spears, reed rafts (which leaked), were unable to catch or eat fish (even though there were plentiful supplies) and drank from skulls.
What was going on? How could they have become marooned with such basic technology? The Harvard anthropologist Joe Henrich has pointed out that the puzzle fits into place when you realise that 12,000 years ago, sea levels rose, flooding the Bass Strait, thus cutting Tasmania off from the rest of Australia. For more than twelve millennia, they were disconnected from the broader network of ideas, shrinking the collective brain.
A tiny population was now isolated, with the risk that a skilled craftsman might die before he has taught his apprentices, leading to the disappearance of hard-won innovations. More significantly, they could no longer communicate with Australia: couldn’t learn, improve, recombine. As the Pama–Nyungan expansion was gaining pace across the strait, Tasmania – which had the same technology at the time of the flooding – went into precipitous decline.37
You can make the same point by comparing technologies. Each year, Henrich shows new students unlabelled toolkits from four different populations: eighteenth-century Tasmanians, seventeenth-century Australian Aborigines, Neanderthals and humans from 30,000 years ago. When the students are asked to assess the cognitive abilities of the toolmakers, they always give the same reply. They rate the Tasmanians and Neanderthals as lower in cognitive ability than the Aborigines and humans from 30,000 years ago because the tools are less sophisticated.
But this is wrong. Why? Because it is impossible to determine innate individual cognitive abilities from the complexity of toolkits. The reason is that innovation is not just about individuals; it is also about connections. Think back to the Tasmanians before and after the flooding. The populations were genetically identical but the relative sophistication of their toolkits could not have been more different.38
Think back for a moment to the previous sections. We noted that luggage executives failed to grasp the opportunities of wheeled suitcases because they were stuck wi
thin a paradigm. They were struggling to seize the vast opportunities of recombination because of the conceptual walls imposed by the context. They were held back by an insider mindset.
We can now see that a similar analysis applies to the bigger picture. Tasmania struggled to innovate because it was separated from the possibilities of recombination not because of an insider mindset, but because of a flood. They were physically rather than psychologically separated from new ideas. The severance in the network structure put literal constraints on innovation.
This kind of separation can be ideological, too. For many centuries women were excluded from the network of ideas. An entire social group faced a barrier not brought about by flooding, but by bigotry. This continued into the Enlightenment. As Carol Tavris, the social psychologist, has written: ‘[the Enlightenment] narrowed the rights of women, who were . . . barred from higher education and professional training.’ This was socially unjust for women – but it also dramatically reduced the creativity of men. By severing males from the insights that could have been brought by half the population – the diverse perspectives, information and discoveries – the collective brain was serially diminished. Whatever else we may say about the pace of innovation over the course of human history, it would have been dramatically faster if the idea network had included women.
These points can be made using simple maths. Henrich invites us to imagine two tribes seeking to invent a particular technology: say, a bow and arrow. He also asks us to imagine that these tribes have different attributes. The Geniuses are smart. They have huge brains. The Networkers, on the other hand, are sociable. They like to interact. Now, suppose that a Genius is so smart that, through individual effort and imagination alone, he will create the innovation once every ten lifetimes. A Networker, on the other hand, will only create the innovation once in every 1,000 lifetimes. We might say, then, that the Geniuses are 100 times smarter than the Networkers.