Idea nodes & innovation

I am a wanderer, enthusiastically trudging wherever my curiosity leads me. In Australia last month, a client gave me a copy of Smart World, Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle. The author uses stories of Watson & Crick, Ruth Handler & the Barbie Doll, Picasso & cubism, and Frank Gehry to enrich his speculation on the sources of intuition and imagination. Permit me to lead you down the path.

Ogle’s concept of nodes as idea spaces are a piece in the puzzle being decoded by Rob Cross, Ross Dawson, Valdis Krebs, Duncan Watts, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Verna Allee, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Albert Laszlo-Barabasi, George Siemens, David Weinberger, Ross Mayfield, and others. Ogle’s focus is innovation; top business leaders put innovation, well, top on their lists of priorities.

Below the fold, my summary of Ogle’s thesis.

The aspect of networks that grabs Ogle is the nodes he calls “idea spaces.” An idea space is social. It’s grounded in the shared ideas, ideals, practices, preferences, values, and training of a community. Communities of practice, scientific paradigms, and the culture of the internet are idea spaces.

Enter tipping points. Tipping points violate what scientists used to think of as a fundamental principle of physical systems: that there is a direct, quantifiable relationship between cause and effect. Tipping points typically emerge as a higher-level structure emerges as the result of the self-organizing interaction of otherwise uncoordinated lower-level elements. That’s how a progress quantitative change suddenly produces a qualitative shift. Tom Kuhn describes the impact of a tip in paradigm: “What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterward.”

Hold that thought. If you’re the only person seeing the rabbits, you won’t get far. Tipping points are collective ideas; they highlight the fallacy of the mind-in-the-head (MITH) paradigm. Minds have been outed. The extended, external mind is a self-organizing network of idea-spaces, spaces of embedded intelligence that creatively form and reform themselves in accordance with laws based on principles of network science. Imagination, insight, and intuition, the core individual metal capacities underlying creative analogical reasoning, engage dynamically with the spaces, giving rise to creative leaps.

In an adaptive system (i.e. one that is becoming fitter), learning — the system’s capacity to change effectively — thus takes the form of the alignment of lower-level elements with what lies in the future, a growing but as yet unseen pattern. This is the reverse of normal learning, which is based on reasoning from past experience.

Abandoning the MITH myth eradicates the age-old firewalls we have erected around our minds. Connectivism rules. Once we begin to think in terms of network dynamics, there’s no need to draw such a sharp distinction between the workings of the inner and extended mind. This is not a matter of psychologizing the latter, but rather of de-psychologizing the former; inside or outside, it’s networked idea-spaces all the way down. Just as the conventional wisdom now sees individual computers as part of one giant interconnected cloud, so we can interpret the individual mind as an integral part of the extended mind.

Ogle asks us to think spaces, not places, and to return to Kevin Kelly for answers. Breakthrough creativity comes about when the idea-spaces think for you. Thoughts without a thinker. The self-organizing dynamics of the extended mind itself give rise to order for free, creating vast pools of surplus value available to creative minds sharp enough to find and exploit them.

No promises, but I am developing a synthesis of network theory to include in my un-book.