Innovation comes from ideas having sex

Today’s idea is that innovation comes from ideas having sex.

This is important because innovation is needed to solve complex problems.

And solving complex issues is how we create impact, demonstrate value, and achieve our visions.

Origin of the idea

I first heard this provocative phrase several years ago in Matt Ridley’s book, “How Innovation Works,” and the language stuck with me ever since.

Innovation happens, as I put it a decade ago, when ideas have sex. It occurs where people meet and exchange goods, services and thoughts.

• Matt Ridley from “How Innovation Works”

I’m currently working on a complex problem. I was trying to figure out why the “answer” won’t just pop out of my brain and onto the whiteboard. It feels like the biggest leaps forward come from talking to other people, but people aren’t always around for me to debate with.

As I went for a walk to reflect on what might be blocking my brain from letting those ideas come forth on their own, the Matt Ridley quote above resurfaced.

Maybe what felt like my problem isn’t my problem, it’s just a fundamental law of how innovation and complexity work.

Ideas having sex and evolutionary fitness

When two people with two ideas come together, those ideas can form a third idea that’s an evolution of the original two.

This is just like in real life where parents produce offspring that’s a combination of their DNA. The offspring then gets pressure from its external environment and tries to survive. If it does, it goes on to produce another generation of offspring.

You have to start with your single cell organism, get to fish, and then frogs, before you get a dinosaur.

Ideas, like organisms, have to go through multiple generations in order to evolve into sufficient complexity to solve whatever problem is at hand. If your problem requires a “dinosaur” solution, then you better get your idea evolution journey started!

This is important because it connects back to my original problem. I felt like I needed to get the solution to a complex problem to pop out of my head, but that was like aiming for divine creation. That’s not how innovation works! You have to evolve your ideas there.

The more complex your problem, the more complex of a solution it needs, and the more cycles of evolution your ideas need to go through. Two frogs can’t pop out a T-Rex.

Think about Albert Einstein, the classic image (at least in America) of high intelligence. If anyone could pop a solution to a complex problem out of his head, it’s him. But even Albert Einstein went through years and years of chewing through the problem before eventually proposing his theory of general relativity.

He published papers. He went to conferences. He wrote letters to other scientists. All of this was Einstein letting his ideas have sex so they could evolve into his final theory.

“Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.”

• Sebastian Thrun, quoted in “Cracking Complexity” by David Komlos

As a more tangible example, look at this video (and this longer one) showing three decades of evolution of Boston Dynamics robots. The robots of today aren’t here because one person wrote on a whiteboard for thirty years before ultimately “figuring out” their current robot, Atlas.

Instead, many people over many years iterated and tested their ideas in order to get Atlas created.

If rocks is your preferred analogy

Steve Jobs has a semi-famous analogy about polishing rocks that speaks to this concept (video below).

Here he’s saying that your ideas are rocks, and you put them in a tumbler with other rocks to tumble and grate on one another. What you get at the end are beautiful polished stones that started as common yard rocks.

It’s the same central idea that exposing your ideas to other ideas forms even better ideas.

Analogs to times in history

This concept of innovation coming from ideas having sex has shown up throughout world history, too.

Two main examples would be the Renaissance period in 1500s Florence, and Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, although there are many others we could choose from.

Here you’ve got lots of really smart people having a lot of interactions in a concentrated geographic area. They try things and fail. So they try new things. They’re drawing, they’re sharing, they’re writing. Companies go under and those people inter-mix in new companies.

Ideas are having sex left and right. They’re evolving into highly productive and impactful results in art, science, and business.

So fun! While none of us can re-create things on this scale, we can certainly set the tone for a little “Florence in the 1500s” at work.

How to “set the mood” for uh…you know

So how might we go about creating a little of this magic for ourselves and our teams?

I’ll share four ideas below: Hiring, Psychological Safety, Frequent Interactions, and Writing.

Hiring
Who you bring in the door, or who you bring onto a project, has an outsize influence on the final outcome. Be clear on the characteristics you’re looking for and test for them in interviewing. I suggest for innovation to happen you want drive, curiosity, humility, and judgment.

Many books have been written on this topic, and I’ll share more in this newsletter over time.

Psychological Safety
I recommend the book, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety,” in order to understand this concept at a deeper level. You have to get good at the many lower stages of safety in order to finally get to Challenger safety where the innovation happens.

Whether your team innovates and how fast your team innovates is up to you. You regulate the speed of discovery and the velocity of information. You accelerate problem-solving. You create a climate of discipline and agility. You engender the patterns and prevailing norms that allow the team to manage itself. - “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety” by Timothy R. Clark

You need to decrease social friction and increase intellectual friction. You need your team comfortable talking without fear of reprisal or punishment.

Frequent Interactions
To evolve a complex idea we’ve already established that you need many rounds of evolution. These rounds of evolution correlate to the number of interactions you’re having.

So you need to set up high frequency interactions of high quality. You need focus. If everyone is working on 10 things, the rate of evolution will be very slow.

Be intentional about the goal of these interactions. A status meeting is not an idea evolution meeting. If you’re meeting with your team and you only talk about the progress of the metrics or the schedule, that’s not idea evolution.

You need to be debating. You need to be sparring on the problem at hand. This type of meeting, done well, is super fun and engaging.

Make sure you’re having those types of meetings frequently!

**Writing
**Lastly, write your ideas down. Follow in Einstein’s footsteps. Just as he wrote letters and scientific papers on his path to publishing general relativity, you need to be writing your ideas down.

First, it forces you to clarify your own thoughts. Writing is where you realize your own inconsistencies or discover the important kernel of the idea.

Second, it travels well. Writing is easily transmitted and retains all of it’s context. People can refer back to your writing and read it multiple times.

Get your ideas on paper (or a digital equivalent) to clarify your own thoughts and ensure the ideas is transmissible.

Bringing it all together

Today’s idea is that innovation comes from ideas having sex. We need this to solve complex problems. Solving complex issues is how we create impact, demonstrate value, and achieve our visions.

The mechanism for how this works is that ideas merge together to form even better ideas. Going through this cycle many times is how to evolve your ideas into something that’s fit to solve the problem you’re facing.

You can set up your environment to do this well if you hire the right people, operate in a psychologically safe environment, with high frequency interactions, where ideas are written down.

Doing all of this sets up a really creative environment, like Renaissance Italy or Silicon Valley.

Call to action this week

Share!

What’s bubbling in the back of your mind?
What would have a huge impact on your business?
Where do you feel stuck?

Leaving an idea in your brain won’t evolve it very quickly.

Expose that idea to others. Let their ideas similarly influence you. We’re not trying to be right, we’re trying to get it right - and we’ll do that by letting our ideas evolve.

Get out there and let your ideas procreate!

Kevin