‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe,’ said science communicator, author, and host of Cosmos, Carl Sagan. Even without going back to the Big Bang, we are surrounded by foods, technologies, products, and practices that we could not possibly recreate from scratch. Almost everything we rely on – from Google to the government – were not invented by us, were not invented in our lifetime, and are typically too complicated to truly understand, let alone recreate. We simply don't know what effect a change will have until we try it.
Our success as a species has been a result of our incredible ability to innovate, but that has not been a result of individual intelligence alone; nor has it been the result of genetic geniuses who see further than the rest. Instead, innovations don't require any specific innovator any more than your thoughts require any specific neuron. Of course, specific innovators are involved, just as specific neurons are involved in your best ideas, but innovations are more accurately seen as a result of our collective brains – how intelligent humans come together to learn from one another and share ideas as a collective. Understanding these collective processes will allow us to break the next energy threshold. Indeed, it is these collective processes that have led to every innovation that surrounds us.
Even the simplest things in our lives are the product of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, borrowed and recombined across multiple generations in multiple cultures, spanning the globe. The smartest among us could not recreate the smallest fraction of the modern world from scratch. Not even Sagan's humble apple pie.
Canadians love Kraft Mac & Cheese or Kraft Dinner as the Canuck call it. The simple three-step recipe involves boiling macaroni in water, draining it, and adding butter, milk, and the prepackaged powdered cheese. The recipe is simple because most of the manufacturing took place long before the box arrived in a Canadian kitchen. But all recipes, even those made from scratch, involve complicated histories, global supply chains, agricultural know-how, and sophisticated processing that unlike our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we no longer have to think about or even understand, let alone do.
As a simple illustration, let's actually make an apple pie from scratch.
First, the pastry. We're going to need some flour. Do you know how to grow the Middle Eastern grass we call wheat? Let's cheat and assume wheat has already been artificially selected over thousands of years for easier harvesting and larger grains. But even with the benefit of this selection, do you know how to plant and look after wheat? Do you know when the grains are ready for harvesting? Or how to separate the grains from the chaff? (I'll assume you know what chaff is.) Do you know how to grind the grains into flour without your coffee grinder or food processor? If you want to use those, can you find and extract the raw materials, manufacture the grinders and motors, and design and create the electrics truly from scratch?
Next, let's add some sugar. We need another grass, this time from South East Asia. Do you know how to grow sugar cane, when to cut it, and how to process it into sugar crystals? Have you got a plan for cane beetles or other bugs? What's the fertilizer? (Many of us can't even keep a house plant alive!)
Let's leave the plants aside and add some animal products. First, eggs. Those come from the South East Asian junglefowl we call a chicken. Do you know how to catch a chicken and how to keep it alive and healthy? How to help it produce more eggs?
Don't forget the butter. For that, we need the milk of a Eurasian female bovine who recently gave birth. Make sure you domesticate her and care for her, so that after she's given birth, instead of defending her calf, she'll let you milk her. Now take that milk and extract the fatty cream. Now churn that cream into butter.
Remember the illusion of explanatory depth – there's a lot of refinement and complication to each of these processes, and we haven't even got to how to make pastry or bake the pie. But once you've discovered the recipe for apple pie or any of its ingredients, that recipe is easier to spread than the process that led to it. Over time, through a division of labor and the invisible hand of efficient supply chains, the marvel of the apple pie becomes a trivial family recipe. So too with our mental software.
Humans can't cook without culture. And we certainly can't count without culture. We went from counting one, two, three, many, as some small-scale societies still count, to a full-blown number system. Numbers likely emerged as an innovation for more efficiently tracking agricultural inventories of cattle and crops, perhaps for the purposes of trade. (You need to know who owes you what!) Invention may be driven by necessity, but it also needs the right analogy, metaphor, or suitable mental model to make the leap. In this case, that mental model was fingers.
As briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, today we commonly use a decimal system because we count on our ten fingers, but societies have had number systems based on the twelve phalanges (three finger bones per finger) counted with the thumb or counting up to dozens with different parts of the body. There is nothing special about the number ten. But to count beyond body parts, we needed another innovation and that required a different mental model. Something like stones.
The word ‘calculus’ comes from ‘pebble’ (think calcium or limestone), and was used for addition and subtraction. It's one way to think about addition or subtraction that lets us move beyond how creative we can get with body parts. There are some stones, and you can throw down more or snatch some away. Stones are great for what we call natural numbers greater than zero: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. But stones are not enough to make something like zero obvious. It took millennia to get to the innovation of zero. What does zero pebbles look like? Well, it looks a lot like zero of everything else – it's nothing – and ‘nothing’ is hard to imagine.
But while it took the greatest mathematical minds to develop the concept of zero, the invention of the number line as a mental model helped make zero concrete and transmissible, even to children. We still use number lines in schools today. The number line also revealed the negative numbers, which ‘darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple’, as British mathematician Francis Maseres melodramatically complained in the eighteenth century. Number lines work by mapping numbers not to objects but to movement and position. Without these cultural innovations, nothing about numbers is intuitive to our ape brains. But just as you can try to improve on Grandma's apple pie recipe, analogies and metaphors can help us go even further.
Sitting on my desk is a framed copy of Euler's identity, eiπ + 1 = 0, often referred to as ‘the most beautiful equation’. Two transcendental numbers (e and π), one, and zero, all connected by an imaginary plane orthogonal to the number line. To me it signifies that the world may be complex and confusing – there is no pattern to e or π – but there are hidden rules that bring order to the complexity and confusion. Rules that once discovered can be used to do things we couldn't do before – such as solving electrical circuits or doing Fourier transformations – both of which are essential to modern technology and can be done more easily with complex numbers.
Cultural innovations literally change our minds and give us new capacities. They're like software upgrades. What is impossible becomes possible with the right innovation, and with further innovations we may even learn to reliably transmit what we have discovered. Some innovations are more general than others. For example, thanks to the invention of writing, I can convey information through straight and squiggly lines on a page. I'm doing it right now and I'm literally changing your brain. As writing became more standardized and easier to learn, it eventually extended from the purview of the elite to an essential for everyone.
How can we turn what our theory of everyone reveals about human ingenuity into actionable ways to improve our own capacity for creativity? How can we improve the innovativeness of our companies and our societies? The answer appears once we realize that innovation is a social process – a product of a collective brain. Once we realize this, we can become intentional in how we seek information and connect people to maximize the probability of good ideas emerging and spreading.
In order to get there, here is a COMPASS. COMPASS is an acronym for the seven secrets of innovation that I teach to classes and companies. After I go through COMPASS, I'll show you how the head of Uber in the United Kingdom and northern Europe, Jamie Heywood, and I used it to develop an innovation strategy to solve Uber's challenges in this tough market. (Uber encountered a clash between the American Silicon Valley approach and the European traditional approach; a battle between preferences for unregulated innovation and innovative regulation.)
Thomas Edison famously described genius and the process of innovation as ‘1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’. Except that he didn't. At best, Edison popularized a description commonly used at the time, sometimes attributed to author and lecturer Kate Sanborn. Edison was good at borrowing, stealing, and recombining.
The other thing Edison didn't do was invent the light bulb. At best, Edison, along with Joseph Swan in England, developed the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb, together forming the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company (Ediswan). It was the best way to avoid costly litigation over who got there first. But neither Edison nor Swan were singular geniuses who saw further than most. Instead, they were the first commercially successful winners in a crowded market of people trying all kinds of different light bulb designs. The successful designs of a variety of people led to at least twenty-two other patents for incandescent light bulbs at the time. So next time you see a light bulb used as a symbol for an amazing new idea, remember that it is just one of many light bulbs of different design, brightness, and longevity, only the best of which have been selected by the law of evolution. But like moths to a flame, we are drawn to the brightest bulbs – the winning innovations. We forget the evolutionary landscape full of other luminaries who just didn't quite make it into the history books.
Humans the world over tend to attribute important inventions to key ancestral, almost mythical figures. Fire is said to have been given to the Aboriginal Australians by the ancestral being Crow, to the Indians by the divine being Mātariśvan, and to the Greeks by the Titan god Prometheus. Mimi spirits taught Aboriginal Australians to hunt and cook kangaroo and Shaka Zulu, founder of the Zulu Kingdom, invented the iklwa short spear. Westerners are no exception. Edison (or Swan) is said to have invented the light bulb, Gutenberg the printing press, and Benz and Ford the automobile. Remember that our cultural learning psychology seeks out the most successful people to imitate, in order to become successful ourselves. And we do it even if those successful people are from the past. But innovations are not driven by individual innovators. The reality is more complicated. And that reality also reveals how we can become more innovative.
The key figures to whom we attribute inventions are often the first to popularize an invention, first to recombine the pieces floating through social networks where many are working on the same problem, and typically one of many inventing the same thing around the same time. At some level, we understand this.
Scientists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are somehow simultaneously convinced of their own originality and genius but also terrified of being scooped or beaten to market despite that originality and genius. They live in a paradox of seeing further than those around them but fearing that others may see the same thing. We can navigate past this paradox using COMPASS.
Inventors sometimes simply strike it lucky. You might be familiar with Alexander Fleming's prototypical story of the serendipitous discovery of penicillin antibiotics. In 1928 Fleming accidentally left a Petri dish containing Staphylococcus aureus bacteria next to an open window. When he came back, he discovered that the dish was contaminated with mold and that the bacteria near the mold were dying. He carefully studied the mold, identifying it as a member of the Penicillium genus. He published his results in 1929, naming the mold liquid ‘penicillin’.
Fleming's careful research revealed that penicillin was able to kill a range of bacteria responsible for common, but at the time fatal, illnesses, including pneumonia, diphtheria, and meningitis. And that's usually where the story of antibiotics ends. Fewer people know that Fleming's penicillin was incredibly difficult to mass produce and was not widely used until the 1940s. What took so long?
In the early 1940s the amount of penicillin in the entire world was enough to treat around 100 patients. The miracle drug could save only a few. The urine of treated patients was saved, because typically around 80% of the precious antibiotic was passed through it and could be extracted to treat other patients. The right invention often requires the right circumstances, the right timing, and collective effort to become a world-changing innovation. For penicillin to hit prime time, it needed the Second World War.
With European powers and their allies at war, blowing off limbs and tearing bodies apart, antibiotics went from useful to urgently needed. Antibiotics for just 100 patients wasn't enough, so a team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain tried to build on Fleming's work by mass-producing penicillin. They moved from London to the United States to avoid the bombs and get more funding. First to New York and later to Peoria, Illinois, where the new fermentation division of the Northern Regional Research Lab was studying the metabolism of molds. The team took out ads and searched the world for different strains of mold that could be mass-produced. A suitable mold was discovered in 1943 on a moldy cantaloupe from the local Peoria fruit market. The mold contained a mutation that produced a much higher yield than Fleming's original strain. By further mutating the mold with X-rays, the team chanced upon a mutation with a thousand times the amount of penicillin. Most strains of penicillin today are descended from that 1943 serendipitous, trial-and-error, recombined, collectively discovered mold.
There are several lessons from this story, and they are echoed in many other world-changing discoveries: an initially lucky breakthrough; some recombination, followed by some trial and error and partial causal models to figure out what's going on; then the right circumstances, the right timing, and the right understanding of a problem, combined with collective effort to turn invention into diffused innovation. This is how the collective brain thinks and innovates.
Serendipity and recombination as sources of new discoveries, incrementally innovated through trial and error and partial understanding of what's going on, is still how our collective brains make breakthroughs. It's the story of the accidental discovery of Upsalite carbon nanostructures in 2013 and the intriguing discovery of ways to control a quantum computer with electrical rather than magnetic fields in 2020.
But luck isn't blind. We can make our own luck and deliberately seek out serendipity and useful recombinations. The first step is to recognize that where we are today is a result of trillions of small decisions made by the billions of people before us about where we should go and how to get there. We must recognize that not every step has been the best and that there are many inefficiencies in where we are today that can be overcome by walking off the well-beaten path.
Path dependence refers to the role of the past and history in constraining the future; when early decisions lock us in due to the difficulty of changing to something different. For example, if you're used to thinking of temperature in Fahrenheit, it's difficult to learn Celsius and vice versa. The decisions made by James Madison and colleagues in writing the US Constitution may not be the same decisions we would make today let alone the best decisions at the time, but changing a constitution is a challenge once you have one. If you chose to study cosmetics in college, it may lead to a valuable and rewarding career but can make it more challenging to switch to civil engineering.
One of my favorite examples of path dependence concerns literal paths. Britain and many of its colonies drive on the left-hand side of the road. They've done so since Roman times. Romans rode horses and carts on the left, driving with their left hand and leaving their right hand free to use a weapon. One piece of evidence for this is groove marks in ancient Roman roads, as a load heading toward a delivery point leaves deeper grooves than with an empty cart on the way back. This reveals that Romans drove on the left side of a road. Going off the beaten path is difficult but doable. Today, Europeans drive on the right side of the road. Napoleon's empire and influence was large enough that his deliberate decision to drive on the right as a possible military strategy led to a change that eventually spread across the continent. America as a new country was able to pick a new side.
The power, vision, and influence of a new leader, the creation of new societies or new companies all offer opportunities to try something new, off the beaten path. It's why Noah Webster was able to create a brand-new form of English for America. Webster tried to create more consistency in the English language, dropping the silent ‘u’ from words such as ‘color’. As a result pronunciation matches phonemes more reliably in America than Britain, where, I was informed, the city of Leicester is not in fact ‘Lie-sester’ but ‘Lester’ and Oxford's ‘Magdalen’ College is not ‘Mag-de-len’, as written, but ‘Maud-lin’.
The tiny nation of Estonia also went off the beaten track to become the top-ranked country outside East Asia on the international PISA scores in their children's performance on mathematics, science, and reading. It achieved this not by spending more money per pupil: it spends around 8,000 US dollars per pupil, far less than the OECD country average of 11,000 US dollars and far less than countries like the United States (US$14,000), Australia (US$12,000), and Canada (US$12,000), who all had worse outcomes. Instead, these surprising results were achieved through a range of reforms that were adopted following independence from the Soviet Union, borrowing the best educational practices from around the world and combining them into an amazing new, technology-supported education system. Plagiarism is bad, but not when it comes to policy, where there should be a lot more plagiarism of what works elsewhere. We'll discuss how to innovate ways off the beaten path through start-up cities and programmable politics in Chapter 8, and the specifics of what Estonia did in Chapter 12. Estonia was using a magpie strategy.
In folklore, magpies are known for always looking out for shiny objects to bring back to their nests. This is a powerful strategy for empowering innovation – actively seeking recombination and serendipity, collective effort, and new contexts of application. In contrast, a ‘maven’ – from the Yiddish word meyvn – refers to someone with deep and thorough expertise on a topic. Mavens can go far, but when they are also magpies then they can go further. Take Sam Panopoulous, a magpie who created one of my favorite pizzas.
The controversial Hawaiian pizza might be the most multicultural food ever created. Sam Panopoulous, a Greek immigrant to Canada, inspired by American Chinese food (think sweet and sour) put a South American ingredient (pineapple) on an Italian dish, naming it after the Polynesian state, allegedly because the brand of tinned pineapple was called ‘Hawaiian’. Hawaiian pizza is popular but divisive, and I want to take this opportunity to tell haters that they should reflect on their life choices. Hawaiian pizza is also a case study in how immigrants empower innovation.
Immigrants bring solutions from a diverse experience that can be recombined with practices, technologies, and other aspects of culture to solve unsolved problems in their new home. Their diverse experiences naturally lead them to become magpies.
The magpie strategy requires two things: a ‘prepared mind’ knowing the problem in sufficient depth that one's inner magpie can distinguish the shiny and useful from the dull and irrelevant; and ‘intellectual arbitrage’ that actively seeks potential solutions outside one's own domain of knowledge.
But you don't have to move to a different country to be a magpie.
The answers to your problems often exist in other people's heads. More often, for truly thorny problems, the answers are scattered across many people's heads. That's why they're still thorny – the pieces of the solution haven't come together yet. You can be the one to bring them together. To maximize the probability of discovering shiny new solutions, we need to talk to clever people we disagree with, people outside our disciplines and industries, and people beyond our immediate social circles. These are the conversations that make us more creative. You already know what your close friends think, but you know less about your distant friends and even less about your enemies. Having a good understanding of the problems in your nest prepares your mind. Having these diverse conversations allows you opportunities for intellectual arbitrage.
Arbitrage is a fancy way of describing the process of buying low and selling high. For example, finding an underpriced book at a thrift store and immediately selling it on Amazon at a higher price. Intellectual arbitrage describes this same approach applied to creativity.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky realized that economists didn't yet know about findings in cognitive psychology that undermined the predictions of economic models. Kahneman and Tversky were magpies with prepared minds who then used intellectual arbitrage to forever change economics, winning a Nobel Prize, the shiniest of all objects in science.
The McDonald brothers realized that the assembly line approach that had allowed Henry Ford to produce cheap cars could be applied to make cheap hamburgers. Rather than hiring an expensive trained chef like everyone else, the McDonald's burger chain hired people with no training at lower salaries and taught them to do just one thing – one person sliced the buns, another flipped the burgers, another added the cheese, and so on. Through intellectual arbitrage the McDonald brothers created the ‘Speedee Service System’, which allowed them to make hamburgers faster and cheaper than their competitors.
History is filled with famous magpies. You can google the story of Charles Goodyear – after whom the Goodyear tire company is named – with a mind prepared by the Roxbury Rubber Company to discover vulcanized rubber, or watch Howard Goodall's brilliant documentary tracing the origins of the Beatles’ greatest hits to their various experiences in everything from church organs to a piccolo trumpet Paul McCartney heard on TV. But one of my favorite examples is perhaps history's most successful magpie: William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was a master of rhetoric, a skill he likely learned at his local grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. A key element of the curriculum was the trivium: rhetoric, logic, and grammar. Many schools today only retain the grammar (woe betide today's potential Shakespeares). Shakespeare's grasp of rhetorical techniques like assonance (similar sounds, such as blue moon), alliteration (same starting letter, for example power to the people), chiasmus (words repeated in reverse order, i.e. ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country), diacope (repetition with a division in between, for example Bond, James Bond), and so on is unmatched; the next most prominent rhetorical geniuses are probably British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American rapper Eminem. But unlike these more recent figures, Shakespeare was a plagiarist, or rather a magpie, combining historical texts with rhetorical flair.
As writer Mark Forsyth recounts, Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra and for that he needed to look up their history. Because we know that Shakespeare had a poor grasp of Greek, we can surmise that he probably relied on Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. And when we look at North's book, we can see exactly the way Shakespeare plagiarized. But with rhetorical flair!
North: . . . she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold;
Shakespeare: The barge she sat in like a burnished throne, Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
North: the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played in the barge.
Shakespeare: Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes.
Shakespeare would have failed a college Turnitin plagiarism check. But it's hard to begrudge the Bard. He was a magpie who skillfully recombined rhetoric with history, bestowing on us not only beautiful poetry but multiple idioms that continue to be recombined by modern artists. Aldous Huxley's title Brave New World is borrowed from The Tempest (‘Oh brave new world, that has such people in it’). Smash Mouth's hit ‘Allstar’ has the memorable line ‘All that glitters is gold’ – a play on the opposite from The Merchant of Venice (‘All that glitters is not gold’).
We can all be magpies by actively shaping our experiences and knowledge, who we talk to, and where we search for solutions. One way to naturally increase collective brain thinking and magpie strategies is to harness diverse ideas and ways of thinking. An old, much plagiarized saying goes: ‘To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.’ A diverse team or country naturally brings together a diversity of ideas ready for recombination. But diversity is a double-edged sword – both helpful and harmful to innovation. Diversity is a paradox to be resolved. And to reap diversity's benefits without paying its costs, resolve it we must.
The most innovative teams are more diverse, but so too are the least innovative teams. This seeming paradox of diversity occurs because diversity offers recombinatorial fuel for innovation, but is also, by definition, divisive. Without a common understanding, common goals, and common language, the flow of ideas in social networks is stymied, thus preventing recombination and reducing innovation. But diversity is the most powerful method of becoming more innovative. Yet many companies treat it as little more than an inconvenient exercise in counting minorities using Peter Griffin's skin color chart or making sure the proportion of women on a team isn't low enough to be embarrassing. Rather than resolve the paradox, many companies opt for monoculture, ‘good fit’, and diversity that really means ‘people who look different but still think like me’.
Resolving the paradox of diversity is in the middle of the COMPASS and at the heart of a collective brain approach to innovation. To resolve it, we have to analyze the dimensions of diversity, ignoring irrelevant diversity, ensuring we retain deep diversity, and finding common ground on divisive diversity.
Many aspects of diversity are largely irrelevant. Take food preferences for example. If you like sushi and I like schnitzels we can work it out. Other aspects ought to be irrelevant even if they currently aren't, such as the color of our skin. The key to resolving the paradox of diversity is finding common ground on things we don't share that get in the way of smooth communication. We can overcome these challenges with strategies such as optimal assimilation, translators and bridges, or division into subgroups, which retain diversity without harming communication and coordination.
Optimal assimilation means speaking the same language. Not only literally the same language, but understanding the nuances of communication – when it is appropriate to interrupt, when we should follow orders, how emails should be written, what memos should look like. Making these explicit instead of relying on unwritten norms can help quickly assimilate new, more diverse employees. But sometimes separate jargon is necessary within a team or subdivision. Things go more smoothly when sales can understand what engineering can and can't do and when engineers understand the constraints of sales and customer relations, but these groups work more efficiently within themselves by developing their own specialist jargon and unique approaches. Translators and bridges are people who can speak to more than one group, such as people with training or experience in both sales and engineering, who can help achieve more effective specialization within groups and better overall outcomes between groups.
Specialization makes it possible for society or a company to exceed the capacities of its constituent brains. To see how this works, it helps to see how specialization evolved. Imagine that there are ten things that are required to survive – food, housing, medicine, clothes, the rules of society, defense, and so on. And imagine that any individual's cognitive capacity is a maximum of ten brain units. Bigger brains can store and manage more information, but it's difficult to birth anything bigger until medical interventions like cesareans are invented. And so brain size hits a fundamental limit.
If all of us must learn all ten things to survive then each of us can achieve one skill unit on each skill; ten brain units, ten things, skill level 1. But imagine you only have to learn half those things because there are enough people that even if some die, enough others know the other half. There are enough hunters, house builders, and medical specialists that you don't have to learn it all and you know that even if one of the house builders dies, there are enough other people to build the houses. Now you can dedicate yourself to getting better at say five things and others learn a different five things. Together, our society can now reach skill level 2.
Now imagine you only need to learn one thing: society can now reach skill level 10. Your missing nine items are covered by the rest of the population. Divide it further and the sky's the limit, despite a limited ten-unit brain. Individuals become smarter at a few things but also stupider at everything else, siloing specialists into disciplines, divisions, or departments. This in turn creates a challenge for coordination among different specialists. This is the specialist version of the paradox of diversity and the solutions remain the same.
In a small town, there may be one general physician, but in New York a doctor may specialize on a small part of the renal system and get very good at treating that one part. Society is then able to innovate as a more intelligent collective brain. Larger, more interconnected diverse societies that learn how to share and transmit knowledge more effectively and equitably are more innovative, but there are many challenges to unlocking this potential.
Resolving the paradox of diversity is one of the great challenges of our time and so I will go into it in more detail at a societal level in Chapter 7. The reason that diversity at a societal level is a bigger challenge today than it was in the past is because people from more culturally distant places now live side by side in the same societies. This is a boon to innovation, but a greater challenge too. More often, it is easier to take advantage of culturally close diversity – the adjacent possible.
Gutenberg is often credited with creating the first printing press around 1440. As with many technologies, it was a magpie recombination of screw presses like those used in wine and olive oil, replacing woodblocks with individual metal movable types for each letter, trial and error on ink recipes using various oils and black pigments, and more. It was quite the achievement, but a Gutenberg with all those same pieces in place would have failed even a century earlier. What enabled the printing press to become an adjacent possibility for Gutenberg to invent were new advances in pulp-based replacements for expensive vellum and parchment. These were simply too expensive for mass printing to make economic sense. Gutenberg's printing press needed cheap paper.
In evolution, the adjacent possible, a term coined by Stuart Kauffman, refers to the range of possibilities that can be reached with only small changes. For example, wings are not an adjacent possibility for humans – they are far too complex to reach from our current physiology. An extra couple of fingers, however, is very much in the adjacent possible. Technologies too have adjacent possibilities. New advances in one area open up new possibilities for our entire cultural corpus. For example, the falling price and rising power of computer chips led to everything from commerce to dating becoming mediated by a computer. The falling price of gene sequencing machines has made it easier to track diseases and opened up new possibilities in medicine. Tesla's creation of the modern electric car was thanks to the invention of high energy density lithium batteries built for laptops. Tesla's first cars were essentially laptop batteries strapped to motors and wheels. And today, AI is opening possibilities that we are only beginning to comprehend.
Being a magpie can help you find recombinatorial opportunities in what already exists and is well understood in a different discipline. A complementary approach is to actively follow advances in technology across different industries and consider their application to domains they were not designed for. It's very difficult to do this alone, there's just too much to learn in the modern world. And that's part of the reason why being social beats being smart.
Bigger populations are more innovative. There are more ideas floating around. Friendlier populations are also more innovative. Those ideas meet each other as people get to know one another. And big, friendly, interconnected populations? They're the best and brightest. Good ideas are no good unless the right people with the missing pieces know about them.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have long noticed a relationship between sociality – the size and interconnectedness of a population – and its cultural complexity, for example the size and sophistication of its toolkits and technologies. They've also noticed that when sociality falls, that is, say, if population size were to shrink or disconnect, then technology and culture seem to go with it. The classic example of this is Tasmania, a large island off the southern coast of Australia.
Around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago the last ice age ended and sea levels rose. Tasmania, on the southern tip of the east coast of the Australian mainland, was cut off and became an island. From this point on the inhabitants of Tasmania began to lose culture and technology to the point where they were not only less technologically sophisticated than their cousins on the mainland but also less technologically sophisticated than their own ancestors. Tasmanians lost the ability to make fishing spears, bone tools, boomerangs, and even warm clothing, resorting to rubbing fat over their bodies to stay warm. This loss of culture that follows a drop in population size or interconnectivity isn't isolated to Tasmania – there are other examples in recorded history among the Inuit and based on the archaeological record of Paleolithic Europe. Evidence that social beats smart – and indeed creates smart – can be found in the roots of the Enlightenment.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coffee houses were the source of learning, philosophical and political discussion, gossip and news. Pamphlets and other publications spread ideas between coffee houses and communities. They increased the probability of ideas meeting and recombining into something new. They forced people to engage with one another. The caffeine and sugar probably didn't hurt either.
Today's equivalents of the Enlightenment coffee house are Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discords, and other forums and social media. The equivalent of pamphlets are podcasts, Wikipedia, blogs, Substacks, and shared articles and videos. The effervescent, often heated debates and discussions, viral posts, and ‘current thing’ increase our effective interconnectedness and expose us to new ideas. The Internet and social media are where we engage with one another.
Innovation in the collective brain is empowered when we talk to each other.
We need to talk to each other. Differences in terms of a lack of common language and hostility toward those who don't share our politics or group membership harm our ability to communicate. So too does unfriendliness or lack of opportunities to meet one another. But the final secret to human innovation is to find ways to smoothly share information.
The amount of information that is retained during communication is called transmission fidelity. Early genetically evolved and culture–gene co-evolved improvements to transmission fidelity were simple things like paying attention to others, letting others hang around without threatening them, and guessing what they might be thinking in our own minds (what scientists call theory of mind). Remember, this is what we're better at than our ape cousins.
Language would also have been a large boon to transmission fidelity, evolving as a response to having more valuable information to transmit, as we'll discuss in the next chapter.
Later culturally evolved improvements to sharing knowledge included connecting up knowledge through metaphors, analogies, and epistemologies to help people remember the world – such as the collective brain analogy for innovation – and learning better ways to teach one another.
In many hunter-gatherer societies, teaching occurs by allowing children to observe adults in action. Pastoralist societies, that typically have a larger, more complex cultural corpus, spend more time on explicit and effortful instruction. In many industrial and post-industrial societies, teaching has become industrialized and specialized.
Compulsory formal education emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution. Factories required workers to operate machinery so they needed a minimum skill level and the ability to communicate and understand instructions. To provide this education quickly and efficiently, it was necessary to formalize the delivery of a cultural package – numbers, phonemes, grammar, and so on.
Today, cultural evolution continues to increase transmission fidelity in our evermore complex cultural world, not only through improvements in education but also through technologies such as the printing press, radio, television, the Internet, video conferencing, and various iterations of social media platforms. People are freely sharing information with one another with short TikTok tip videos, longer YouTube instructional videos, and entire online courses from the world's greatest universities and greatest instructors, many freely available.
Using the COMPASS is natural and includes many things we do anyway. Cultural evolution has found many ways to improve our ability to innovate and has transmitted these throughout our populations. The difference is that once you explicitly label these secrets and codify these strategies, you can intentionally use them to become more creative and innovative. To show you one example of how COMPASS can be used at an organizational level, here's a real-world example: Uber.
Jamie Heywood was dissatisfied. After a successful career that included being CEO of Virgin Mobile's Chinese and Indian division and Director of Electronics at Amazon UK, he had seen a large part of the world both in terms of geography and business. He had become convinced that the very idea of a company needed a rethink. The purpose of a company, as he saw it, wasn't just to make money. Companies had to make money of course, but profits were the by-product of their true purpose, which was to solve humanity's toughest problems. The better they could do that, the more money they made.
After encountering the idea of a collective brain in my collaborator Joe Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, Jamie finally found a language that helped make sense of his thirty-year career. As he describes it, companies aren't just economic instruments – rational, planned, top-down. They are also social institutions whose characteristics emerge from the bottom up and which are selected for by the company's stakeholders depending on the service they provide to society more widely. The best companies thrive over the long term because they are able to serve both their social and economic masters by aligning their interests through consistently innovating solutions to humanity's hardest problems.
In 2018 Jamie was offered the opportunity to head up Uber in the United Kingdom and northern Europe. The company was in crisis, finding that the traditional Silicon Valley belief in unfettered innovation clashed with a European preference for slow-moving and extensive regulatory protections. Jamie felt the role provided an incredible opportunity to work out how Uber could best balance the often conflicting needs of Uber's increasingly impatient shareholders with those of the cities where it operated. Critical to solving this puzzle was making Uber's collective brain cleverer.
To help achieve this, Jamie invited me to present the seven secrets of innovation and work with him and his team to develop a new innovation strategy that expanded the company's collective brain, making it cleverer. The 5S strategy we co-developed was itself a product of collective brain thinking: stealing like a magpie, having a prepared mind, solving the paradox of diversity, seeking the adjacent possible, and recognizing the importance of being social and sharing.
Every company is different and so it is important to integrate these insights into existing norms and ways of working. Over a series of meetings we boiled it down to the following five principles for Uber Europe, the 5S:
Under Jamie's leadership, Uber has used these principles to help it find solutions to some of its hardest problems, including making peace with its regulator in London, expanding the size of its electric fleet, and integrating bikes, buses, and trains into the app.
Jamie's story is a microcosm of what happens when we recognize that who we are and how we got here – our brains, our bodies, languages, societies, companies, and countries – are created by culture. That innovation is a product not just of individual intelligence but of our collective brains. A 10x engineer is an engineer who is 10 times better than the average engineer. There is no doubt that 10x engineers and other 10x workers are valuable, but perhaps not as valuable as the 10x teams and 10x societies we can create, which, in turn, can create more 10x engineers. Optimizing our collective brains isn't just good for our organizations, societies, and us as individuals; it is also essential for reaching the necessary energy breakthroughs for the next level of abundance. Indeed, the final part of the answer to the question of who we are is that our collective and cultural brains co-evolved, creating every aspect of us.