I can’t actually remember the original source, but I think it might have been the audiobook Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg, which I’m listening to right now…
Anyway, whatever I was listening to made the interesting point that new ideas only tend to come about when certain preconditions are met: namely, the person involved must already possess a level of expertise and mastery in the area, knowing most or all of the relevant information on a particular subject. Once he gets to that point, he has access to what this author calls the “Adjacent Possible”.
I picture this sort of like someone who’s lived most of his life in an isolated, tiny little town, and has no idea what’s outside of its borders. As long as he stays within the borders of that town, he’s never going to learn anything about the world that anybody else in the town might know. But as soon as he ventures to the edge, now there’s the possibility of newness.
Multiple Discovery
This is the reason why most scientific advances show up in duplicate or triplicate: it’s very common for new ideas to arise independently in multiple parts of the world, by experts who all are aware of the cannon of literature on a given subject. (Apparently this phenomenon is so well-documented it has a name: Multiple Discovery.) A few famous examples:
- Calculus was simultaneously discovered by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz.
- Sun spots were simultaneously discovered by Thomas Harriot, the brothers Fabricius, Galileo, and Christoph Scheiner
- The telephone: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell
- The phonograph: Charles Cros and Thomas Edison
While the official Multiple Discovery title primarily seems to apply to science and tech, I suspect the same thing is true in any subject. I find the concept of Multiple Discovery fascinating because it means you have to first become an expert in something before it becomes possible to do anything truly unique or revolutionary in that space.
This seems obvious when I say it like that… but as an avid consumer of business and marketing podcasts and books and articles, it seems that the focus so often seems to be on finding a great idea as fast as possible, getting it out there, and marketing the heck out of it. It’s another example of our “microwave” society: we want success, and we want it now, without having to slog through the many hours of work it takes to first gain expert status. But only then will we have access to the Adjacent Possible, and possess the preconditions necessary to come up with revolutionary ideas.
Another good reason to never stop learning!
So where does that leave the truly creative thinker that thinks of the Maybe Possible without any background knowledge of the current reality? Do you really need all the current relevant information to be the visionary that leap frogs to what ought to be possible, bypassing the Adjacent Possible? Or is it like convergent evolution (similar plants with similar structure growing in similar environments even though half a world away)… everyone has access to a telescope now so they start looking at the sun and find there are sunspots, or a prior discovery leads to multiple parties going forward and developing the same (or similar technology) at or around the same time?
I don’t know that you need ALL current relevant information… but I think you certainly need a lot of it, in order to even understand what the problems to be solved are in a particular space. But I do think the reason for multiple discovery is because people in different parts of the world all have access to the same information on a given topic, which leads them to ask the same questions at the same time.
These days it could be industrial competition/sabotage that targets the same idea/discovery. So much easier to hack a server and steal a couple of documents than doing all that tedious research yourself…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E