I played the violin for 10 years while I was growing up. I wasn’t very good; I never aspired to be the next soloist or Julliard applicant. But I often think about the things we learned in that class, life lessons that have stuck with me. For example, our Hungarian director once told us about the phenomenon of the perfect note. “If all of the instruments in the room are tuned and you strike a perfect note, they will all vibrate that note in agreement,” he said.
It was just creepy enough to fascinate me.
I had a similar moment during my first week at Muhlenberg when I was sitting in my Freshman seminar discussing the ethics of cloning. Suddenly something I’d learned in Philosophy class that morning came to mind, as did a conversation I’d had with my French professor, as did a late night talk with a friend down the hall about literature. “I just feel like everything is coming together,” I told my adviser after class. “It’s as if the college has crafted a curriculum specifically for me and I keep tripping over the same ideas in such different contexts.” I spent the next four years amazed by this string phenomenon of education.
Several years later, I now find myself reading a book about the scientist Joseph Priestley, called The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson. I read a passage this morning in the subway that struck me as relevant to this blog. Johnson writes about Priestley’s innumerable inventions and successes:
Intellectual historians have long wrestled with the strangeness of this kind of streak. The thinker plods along… and then, suddenly- the floodgates open and a thousand interesting ideas seem to pour out. It’s no mystery that there are geniuses in the world, who come into life with innate cognitive skills that are nurtured and provoked by cultural environments over time… the mystery is why, every now and again, one of these people seems to get a hot hand.
When something big happens in the culture… that event is rarely the exclusive result of a single layer: one man’s genius, say, or the rise of a new economic class. Epic breakthroughs happen when the layers align: when energy flows and settlement patterns and scientific paradigms and individual human lives come into some kind of mutually reinforcing synchrony that helps the new ideas both emerge and circulate through the wider society.
Bingo! Breakthrough inventions not only thrive in a crossroads of media, disciplines and perspectives, but are born of them.
What better argument could there be for hiring a diverse group, people who come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences? The energy that comes from finding similarities across disciplines is like fuel for the fire. Whether it’s discovering that designers and writers tackle similar challenges or deriving metaphors from a developer’s journey writing code, working with people who are different provides a constant source of inspiration and perspective.
The thing is, you’ve got to actually start that fire though for things to get good, don’t you? It seems like getting messy and inviting conversation is the only way to break open the innovating. Johnson mentions a group of thinkers in his book that called themselves the Honest Whigs. The group included a certain Benjamin Franklin and met in London coffeehouses to share ideas and debate theories. Sounds like idea collaboration systems happened live and in person back in the mid-1700′s.
Can you imagine? Shooting the breeze with Ben Franklin, coming up with theories about religion and science and math at a time when the world was ripe for discovery? It struck me this morning that the world today seems so figured out, so explored, so… solved.
What’s inspiring to me is imagining that the world is just as fertile for discovery today as it was back then. And if it is, how can you organize your company to achieve “mutually reinforcable synchrony”? Who should be involved? And what can you do to sound that perfect, vibrating note?
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