Safety in Numbers?
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We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they
do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it
works... In his book 'The Sociology of Philosophies,' Randall Collins finds in
all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by
themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the
fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic
philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a
school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who
saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with
one another's spouses. " -- Malcolm Gladwell


In the same article by Malcolm Gladwell that I quoted from above (a book review
from last week's "New Yorker"), Gladwell points out that "one of the peculiar
features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions
that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his
own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and
grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed
when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it
means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace
far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive,
because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting
began is one way of defining innovation."

I love this point. Pushed to its extremes, it's not unrelated to crowd
psychology, which convinced on some perfectly nice Columbus Ohioans to rip up
their city last month just because they got into the Fiesta Bowl. But anywhere
along the path to that kind of behavior, a support system, salon, cult, cirle --
whatever--can be tremendously effective in making something happen.

There's always strength, as well as safety, in numbers.

The numbers hypothesis comes up again and again in discussions of innovation.
Many innovation theorists believe that only when there are several things
happening at once, creating a context, will true innovation occur. The example
given of this is always Silicon Valley, where the Stanford professors, the
venture capitalists, and the young people willing to work long hours have
produced one of the outstanding innovation economies of world history. To get
something to happen, the innovation theorists say, a context has to be created.
That context could be the monastery that preserved literacy during the Middle
Ages, the universities that flourished during the Renaissance, the Romantic
poets, the Bloomsbury Group, the Haight-Ashbury, or even the Soprano family.

Corporations trying to encourage innovation go to great lengths to create that
context: brainstorming sessions, Outward Bound excursions, team-building
exercises, intrapreneurship programs. But true innovation, it seems to me, is
iterative, and takes place over a longer period of time than just a couple of
hours, weeks, or even years. The innovation that comes out of great universities
is built upon decades of shared experience between students, faculty, friends,
and colleagues.

So then the question becomes whether we can continue to innovate now that we
live in cyberspace. Are online communities any better (or worse) at fostering
innovation than actual communities have been? Can they bring together the
multiple factors necessary for true innovation?

To experiment with this, I have already ordered my copy of The Simms Online,
which launches December 17. While The Simms Online is already slated to be the
most popular online game in history, for me it will have another function. I'll
be playing it to see whether online collaboration can produce true social
innovation. Will we fashion a better society sitting at the computer than we
have now?

Perhaps you want to order one so we can find out together:-)

***********************************************
P.S.

My Entrepreneurship class is over, and I have learned a great deal from it.
(Yes, I was the teacher, but so what...) Among other things, it allowed me to
collate my thoughts around the various topics every entrepreneur needs to know:
market research, business plans, finance, marketing, building a team, and so on.
Next year, I'll re-purpose some of that thinking into "The Outside World," our
monthly subscription e-zine. If you wish to sign up to receive it, go to
http://www.acteva.com/go/outsideworld. It's $99 a year: a bargain. In the mean
time, I will continue this general philosophical weekly meander that I've been
doing for four years, but it will be even less useful than it has been in the
past :-)






Want to get "good" information?: http://www.acteva.com/go/outsideworld


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