Quotes from Steven Johnson

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective version of the 20-percent-time concept that proved so successful for Google and 3M.

The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.

Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into less protectable eddies of art and philosophy.

JUPITER'S MOONS (1610)

FLINTLOCK (1610)

LOGARITHMS (1614)

Bone flutes are among the oldest known artifacts of human technological ingenuity . . . Many archeologists believe that our ancestors have been building drums for at least a hundred thousand years, making music technology almost as old as technology designed for hunting or temperature regulation . . . It seems to be jumping more than a few levels in the hierarchy of need to go directly from spearheads and clothing to the invention of wind instruments.

Greatbatch's pacemaker is an instance where a great idea came—literally—from a novel combination of spare parts. Sometimes those novel combinations arrive courtesy of the random collisions of city streets or the dreaming brain. But sometimes they come from simple mistakes. You reach into the bag of resistors and pull out the wrong one, and four years later, you're saving someone's life.

BLOOD CIRCULATION (1628)

The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for many Americans, the first cultural common ground between black and white America that had been largely created by African-Americans.

The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.

OCEAN TIDES (1632)

SLIDE RULE (1632)

subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

LAW OF FALLING BODIES (1634)

Being wrong on its own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

ANALYTIC GEOMETRY (1637)

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it.

be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbar's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the "correct" result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

That is often how new ideas come into the world: someone perceives a signal where others would instinctively perceive noise.

MECHANICAL CALCULATOR (1645)

VACUUM PUMP (1654)

good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

PENDULUM CLOCK (1656)