MassRefinement 05: Some thoughts on "Cross-pollination of Ideas Across Disciplines"

The fifth MassRefinement is happening this Wednesday at Westerdals School of Communication. We will discuss and work on ideas on how we can encourage and facilitate the sharing of ideas, experience and knowledge across disciplines in society in general and in educational institutions in particular. Here are some thoughts and ideas to get you going: 

“Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.”
- Thomas Disch

How does a spark of genius occur? Why do ideas appear and how is one mind more likely to innovate or be more creative than other? This is all a mystery, sort of.

We tend to look at the creative as this lonely wolf sitting alone thinking, thinking and thinking, until one day s/he takes a bath and shouts out his/her eureka. In some cases it's certainly so, but in most cases it's not.

As Steven Johnson points out in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, the idea pops into your consciousness when a bunch of neurons form a small big-bang inside your head.

“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson

Ideas appear when connections occur when you see something, when suddenly an untapped potential appears and just seems obvious. You pick up one piece here and another one there. You're remixing.

Your mind cross-connects ideas, thoughts, insights, experience and biases. Your increasing knowledge and experience feeds your creativity and shapes new ideas.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
- Steve Jobs

And that's why collaboration and sharing across disciplines is so important for innovation. When you mix people with seemingly unrelated perspectives, knowledge, insights and experiences all this melts together with eachother and cross-connects and forms new and unexpected connections between neurons in your brain, connections which forms new ideas. Ideas which cross-connects again and turns into new ideas, and so on.

Three things to think about:

1. How can we get people with different minds together sharing their thoughts and ideas freely? And make an ecosystem of thoughts and ideas, where each idea is shared and connected with each other? Since you're connecting ideas with other ideas; the ideas grow exponentially, which means that one idea is one idea, but two ideas becomes three ideas, four ideas becomes eleven ideas, and seven ideas becomes 120 ideas.
2. How can you find partners and collaborators for your next big idea and also make your passion for the idea their passion?
3. How can we constantly innovate?

Ten ideas to get your minds sparking:

1. Making a #hashtag on Twitter sharing your ideas
2. Public notebooks at cafées where anybody can share their ideas and thoughts.
3. Leave your ideas in the books of public libraries.
4. Arrange meetups where everybody brings and shares one idea.
5. Head swaps. Swap lives for one day, or only an hour, with somebody totally different. Would be a cool social network.
6. The opposite - a social network which matches you with the person that has the least in common with you. Look out for some interesting chats.
7. Google Hangouts with 10 people from 10 different disciplines. A topic for the chat would be nice.
8. The red table, a table at a café which is for meeting new people. If you sit there other people are welcome to sit down and start a conversation.
9. Idea battles, you start out with one idea and build upon each others ideas through out the battle. Last man standing. When you can't think of anything you're out.
10. The idea sms, send one idea to a friend and let the friend add something to it and send it to another friend. 

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein

And even though Albert Einstein was a true genius, don't hide your sources, share them and let everybody else take part in your work and ideas. (And by the way, Einstein was a true collaborator, which most scientist are, he shared his ideas freely through countless of letters with his peers and in a bunch of science publications.)

See you this wednesday for some MassRefinement at Westerdals.