(Re-)Combine Things

“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
Ecclesiastes‬ ‭1:10‬ ‭NIV‬‬

I remember the first time I heard Bob Sutton say, “there’s really no such thing as a new idea; only new combinations of old things, seeing old things in new ways.” We were teaching our class at Stanford called “d.leadership,” and he was attempting to validate the students’ lingering self-consciousness about the fact that many of their “new” ideas weren’t technically, properly, “new.” At the time, this explanation seemed a little too simplistic for my liking, but I’ve come to see the wisdom of Bob’s perspective. And Solomon’s (above).

This, it turns out, is the nature of creativity. As Arthur Koestler put it, “Creativity is the collision of two apparently unrelated frames of reference.” Both of those things existed, and the “new” idea is really just a mashup of those things. Those things’ baby.

Jeff Bezos valued this kind of thinking even very early in his life. As Brad Stone recounts in The Everything Store, as a high school senior, “After his greasy summer job at McDonald's, Bezos wanted to avoid another low-wage job, so with (his high school girlfriend, Ursula) Werner he created the DREAM Institute, a ten-day a summer school for ten-year-olds that explored such diverse topics as Gulliver’s Travels, black holes, nuclear deterrence, and the Bezos family’s Apple II computer. The class ‘emphasizes the use of new ways of thinking in old areas,’ according to a flyer the young teachers passed out to parents…”

One manifestation of the “no such thing as new ideas” premise is what are known as “multiples,” or simultaneous but unrelated instances of innovation. It turns out, there are many more of these than one may think:

“In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars named William Ogburn in Dorothy Thomas decided to track down as many multiples as they could find, eventually publishing the survey in an influential essay with the delightful title ‘Are Inventions Inevitable?’ Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most of them occurring within the same decade. Reading the list now one is struck not just by the sheer number of cases, but how indistinguishable the list is from an unfiltered history of big ideas. Multiples have been invoked to support hazy theories about the zeitgeist, but they have a much more grounded explanation. Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of these parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.” (Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From)

It turns out, this is true at the neurological level as well. As neuroscientist Morten Friis-Olivarius says, “The underlying neural process of creativity is quite simple: it’s taking some things we already know and combining them in a new way. You have to realize that the brain is not capable of producing new material from scratch. We can only take what we have in our memory system and combine that in different fashions...”

What’s fascinating is, simply becoming aware of this has a profound impact on an individual’s creative output: researchers found that becoming aware of what’s happening neurologically — ie new connections between known things — increased divergent output by 30-70%! Which is to say, Bob was right to encourage students with Solomon’s proverb.

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