Innovations, too, often need a kind of isolation to realise their potential. It’s not that isolation is conducive to having ideas in the first place: gene mutations are no more likely to happen in the Galapagos than anywhere else, and as many people have observed, bright ideas emerge from the swirling mix of other ideas, not from isolated minds. Jane Jacobs, the great observer of urban life, looked for innovation in cities, not on Pacific islands. But once a new idea has appeared, it needs the breathing space to mature and develop so that it is not absorbed and crushed by the conventional wisdom. This idea of allowing several ideas to develop in parallel runs counter to our instincts: we naturally tend to ask, ‘What is the best option?’, and concentrate on that. But given that life is so unpredictable, what seemed initially like an inferior option may turn out to be exactly what we need. It’s sensible in many areas of life to leave room for exploring parallel possibilities – if you want to make friends, join several social clubs, not just the one that appears most promising – but it is particularly true in the area of innovation, where a single good idea or new technology can be so valuable. In an uncertain world, we need more than just Plan A; and that means finding safe havens for Plans B, C, D and beyond.
One of the more meaningful messages I got out of this book. It is ok to try multiple things to solve one problem at the same time, especially given that we are terrible at selecting the most optimal approach until we have seen the results.
While most of us won’t have the luxury of pursing parallel solutions towards a problem, the market can. A startup would not have the luxury to be trying out multiple strategies at the same time. It would, most likely with its limited resources, stick to one and hope it works. Its competitors would be trying their own solutions as well. From the perspective of the economy and society, these startups are each one of the many parallel possibilities and it should lead to good overall outcomes for us. This is provided we do not select any “winner” of these possibilities by funding/subsidizing them to crush the others.
It also reminds me on how we should be comfortable with a little redundancy at work. When I was managing my team members, I wouldn’t mind a little slack and having some team members overlap their responsibilities once in a while. This helps us find the best approach to a specific problem. Of course, doing so, we should also be alert to festering any unhealthy competitive vibes within the team.
I find that most of us are so attuned to the idea of efficiency that sometimes, allowing for a little bit of redundancy might help us be more robust in our approach to problem solving.
