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I’ve been thinking recently about patterns. I like patterns and I don’t think that is strange or unique, in fact I think it’s a very human thing. I’ve written previously about puzzles and about how they help us to spot patterns, but I’ve been thinking more about why it’s important to spot patterns and why we find them so pleasing.

Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has summarised his work by saying: “My mind searches for patterns and structures as I contemplate the unexplored reaches of the mathematical landscape.” He is talking about how he sees a lot of mathematics as searching for patterns, whether it is patterns of prime numbers, or symmetry groups. But patterns are not just important in mathematics. Searching for patterns helps in a lot of contexts. For example chess Grand Masters memorising games, or concert pianists memorising music, usually rely on seeing a pattern and remembering that rather than each individual piece or each individual note.

So patterns are useful, but it’s not just that they are useful, I think there’s something more deeply human about why we like them. David McCandless puts this… erm… beautifully in his brilliant TED talk: “The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns and variations in colour, shape and pattern. It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. It’s the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other.”

McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, or Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. The way he sees it, finding patterns in data allows us to derive information or insight from raw data, and allows him to tell a compelling ‘story’ with the data. But it is important to him that there is a ‘beautiful’ pattern (in the language of the eye) at the heart of his story (in the language of the mind).

The point McCandless makes is that our eye finds patterns and symmetries beautiful; we like things tidy and we like patterns and it’s interesting to try to understand why that might be.

In his book Deviate, Beau Lotto talks about how our brains have evolved to seek for certainty in an uncertain world. The way he sees it: “Resolving uncertainty is a unifying principle across biology, and thus is the inherent task of evolution, development and learning”. Marcus du Sautoy makes a similar point in The Creativity Code: “Any animal’s ability to survive depends in part on its ability to pick out structure in the visual mess that nature confronts us with. A pattern in the chaos of the jungle is likely to be evidence of the presence of another animal… We are programmed to search for patterns, to make sense of the chaotic world around us. It’s what saved us from being eaten by wild animals hiding in the undergrowth. That line of yellow might be nothing, but then again it could be a lion.” Essentially it’s a complicated world and in order to make sense of it, we need to try and simplify it. One of the ways we do this is by looking for patterns; and we can see how our brains have evolved to seek simplicity (or certainty) and a complex (or uncertain) world. Applying this to learning, development and evolution, we could speculate that if an early human was better able to recognise the patterns of a migration of buffalo to improve hunting, or the patterns of the seasons to better manage farming, then that human would likely be more successful. And it’s not such a huge leap then to speculate that this could be why we are wired up to find patterns compelling or attractive.

And this leads us to appreciation of beauty and art. As du Sautoy puts it: “The human code is extremely good at reading patterns, interpreting how they might develop, and responding appropriately. It is one of our key assets, and it plays into our appreciation for the patterns in music and art.”

Undoubtedly we find things like patterns and symmetry pleasing. The composer Johann Sebastian Bach loved symmetry and used it to structure much of his music. Béla Bartók used Fibonacci numbers in his compositions. This BBC Three article cites a number of instagram and pinterest accounts dedicated to symmetrical pictures of buildings, symmetrical origami (which is quite close to my own heart), and even pictures of symmetrical breakfasts! Quoted in the article, physicist Alan Lightman writes in The Accidental Universe that: “Symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance.”

And this article discusses in more detail some of the reasons why we might find symmetry and order pleasing. There are some beautiful examples of symmetry in nature from starfish and flower petals to snowflakes and crystalline rock formations. Bridges and buildings with regular geometric structures and symmetry and generally stronger and more stable. Humans are (largely) symmetrical and research has shown that we find symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical ones, the explanation being that symmetry is an easily observable sign of good genetics and good health. Essentially symmetrical structures are stable and efficient and (maybe) therefore we’re programmed to find symmetry and order reassuring and secure and therefore pleasing.

However, as the article also states “too much symmetry can be a tad boring.” Johan Wagemans, an experimental psychologist from Belgium, found that perfectly symmetrical designs are pleasing to the brain, but that they’re not necessarily more beautiful. We seem to prefer art that strikes an “optimal level of stimulation,” art that is “not too complex, not too simple, not too chaotic and not too orderly.” So maybe we like order with just a pinch of chaos? Marcus du Sautoy sums this up brilliantly in The Creativity Code: “Our brain responds to that tension between recognising a pattern and knowing it is not so simple that we can predict what will happen next. It is that tension between the known and the unknown that excites us.” Obviously I like this because it’s about balance isn’t it?

And as ever, there’s a Japanese word for it, the aesthetic principle called fukinsei, which is all about creating balance, using asymmetry or irregularity, and accepting that nothing is ever perfect and that the imperfections can be beautiful. Good (or at least relevant) examples are the Japanese arts of bonsai or ikibana, working with natural materials like trees or flowers means that there is always going to some irregularity, and this rather than being seen as an imperfection, makes art interesting and beautiful. It is like the grit in the oyster that forms a pearl, or the seed that helps a crystal grow, necessary to perturb the status quo and lead to something beautiful.

So there’s something beautiful about a bit of imperfection and in many cultures artists deliberately introduce some imperfection of flaw into their work. This article cites some examples in Navajo weaving and Islamic architecture. And another Japanese art form (this is becoming a bit of a thing with me isn’t it?) is Kintsugi, which is the beautiful art of putting broken pieces of pottery back together, and actually highlighting the ‘scars’ in the piece.

Thinking about how a pinch of chaos makes things interesting got me thinking about fractals, mathematically generated patterns with infinite complexity. As you zoom in on a fractal it doesn’t become simpler, but ever more ‘layers’ or complexity are revealed. The classic example is the Mandelbrot Set which is generated by iteration of relatively simple equations. So fractals are complex and beautiful, but also (in a manner of thinking) they are simple since they can be generated with simple equations.

This leads us to the concept of emergent complexity, the idea that dramatic and diverse behaviour can emerge spontaneously in a complex system. Think about the patterns in murmurations of starlings, or schools of fish avoiding a predator. These behaviours don’t necessarily derive from adding up the behaviours of the component parts of the system, which means that complex systems are chaotic and difficult to model or predict. Pretty much anything natural is a complex system, one where there are many moving parts, all interconnected to such an extent that you can’t really predict how they will all affect one another. Examples are ecosystems, stock markets, traffic in cities, and weather systems.

Now I like connections, and think that interesting things happen where things overlap, such as where art meets science. There are some great examples of this such as artist Nathalie Miebach who takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time or into musical scores for a string quartet to play. Or the work of ‘data imaginist‘ Thomas Lin Pederson who creates beautiful artwork using the R programming language (which is more usually used for statistics and data analysis).

But this idea of beautiful things emerging from complex systems or from ‘big data’ got me thinking about negative capability, a phrase used by poet John Keats to explain the capacity of artists to perceive and recognise ‘truths’ without conscious reasoning, that is to sometimes create something without really understanding why they are creating it. As Keats himself put it: “With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.” I think Keats is saying that great artists just make something beautiful and don’t overthink it… And maybe I’m overthinking this (wouldn’t be the first time!).

So I want to tie this up with a return to puzzles, and beauty and symmetry. I remembered one of Alex Bellos’s Monday puzzles in The Guardian from a few months ago about symmetry and patterns, and it also involved a bit of colouring in and was therefore right up my street! But even better, the puzzle was inspired by Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math, by computer scientist Alex Burke called. The idea is to provide a gentle introduction to mathematical ideas about symmetry through the process of colouring in, which I think is all kinds of wonderful!

A couple of previous blogs got me thinking about transferable-skills and the benefits of multi-skilling. This has been an interest of mine for some time, but I read a couple of books recently that gave me pause for thought.

Range by David Epstein espouses the benefits of being a generalist. Epstein gives many examples of where people have developed mastery from a more generalised approach, from Roger Federer, who apparently played soccer and a range of other sports and focussed relatively late on tennis; to the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian orphanage which produced a group of musicians, known as the figlie di coro, who were virtuoso on a range of instruments.

This is quite similar to Emilie Wapnick’s thinking on multipotentialites, she has a book How to Be Everything, which is brilliantly summarised in her TED talk ‘Why some of us don’t have one true calling’. Wapnick feels that being driven to find one passion does not fit for all people, and she is especially keen on the ‘superpowers’ that can be derived from cultivating a wide range of interests, such as adaptability, and creative ideas generation. 

Epstein argues that practice in a specific domain yields benefits only in that domain. That you develop a way of solving the same problem with increasing efficiency. This is okay if you are operating in a “kind” learning environment, that is one where ‘patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and very rapid’. Essentially one where the rules remain relatively static and you get better by increasingly adapting to those rules. The argument is that real world problems require us to learn in a “wicked” environment, that is one where ‘the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.’ To avoid this ‘entrenchment’ we need to ensure we have a varied palette of learning within a domain and also entertain interests outside of our own specific area of expertise.

So we can argue that having multiple interests and skills can make us more adaptable and able to respond to ‘wicked’ problems, but how do we manage a diverse portfolio of skills?

Of course it can be hard to find the time to spread across a diverse range of interests. There is the famous adage popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, that it requires 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in any field. 10,000 hours translates to roughly 2 hours a day, 5 days a week for 20 years!

Wapnick argues that you are better able to develop a unique skill-set, or create a unique position in the marketplace, by being quite good at a range of things and finding a way to combine them, rather than striving to achieve mastery in one specific thing. So what if you don’t want or need to be a master of your chosen craft, just good enough at it? Well here we can look to the Pareto Principle which proposes that you get “80% of the consequences from 20% of the causes”. This was originally applied in quality control where the idea proposed is that if you can solve 20% of your issues (the right 20% of course!) then you can reduce your failure rate by 80%; but it has found many other applications such as economics, sport and even viral transmission in pandemics!

So it’s worth speculating that if it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery then 2,000 hours (20% of 10,000 hours) might well get us 80% of the way there. And let’s not forget this is an exponential relationship, so maybe 400 hours (20% of 20% of 10,000 hours) would get us to 64% mastery, this is just a hour a day for a little more than a year; or even better 80 hours gets us roughly 50% of the way to mastery. Would it be worth spending less than 2 hours a week for just 1 year to get halfway to mastery?

But we should also think about the quality of practice. Deliberate practice with a clear idea of what we are trying to achieve is always going to be better than mindless repetition. Repeating the same thing over and over will have little benefit, as Andres Ericsson (who did the original research behind the 10,000 hours rule, and felt that Gladwell’s book over-simplified it) says: “If you want to improve at chess, you don’t do it by playing chess. You do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.” Or there’s the famous quote (often attributed to Einstein) “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

This got me thinking about cross-training, that often in sport, working on skills, or training in disciplines outside of your own sport, can yield benefits back in your own sport. If you want to run a marathon well, one approach would be to keep running marathons and see if you gradually get better at them, but all serious distance runners will have a programme of training that incorporates a range of different training modes, some long and steady running, some faster speedwork or interval training (akin to the work middle-distance runners do), and lots in-between. This helps develop the runner in a more balanced and rounded way than just grinding out the mileage.

Of course this is a fairly narrow example of ‘cross-training’ in sport. A decathlete has to balance their performance in ten different, but related disciplines, so will find themselves working on strength, or plyometric power, in the gym and away from the track altogether.

Then there’s CrossFit, a sometimes controversial fitness community, but the basic philosophy of preparing athletes for a range of challenges by adopting a broad definition of fitness is sound. CrossFit incorporates elements intended to develop stamina and endurance, strength and power, and agility; but also flexibility, balance, coordination and accuracy. The idea is that, on balance, CrossFit athletes are better prepared for whatever physical challenge they may be faced with, they might not have the fastest 10km time, or the highest maximum bench-press, but they will probably be able to lift more weight than a distance runner, or run further and faster than a weight lifter, the idea is than on average they come out on top. And the CrossFit training mantra that “routine is the enemy” is one that is applicable to any kind of training (avoiding the Einstein definition of insanity!).

So CrossFit is intended to prepare athletes for physical challenges, but what if we are training for life in general? The challenges life throws at us are not just physical, but mental and emotional as well. And balanced people have strengths across all of those elements: “Mens sana in corpore sano” “a sound mind in a sound body” and all that.

As I’ve said before, the samurai from ancient Japan were fearsome warriors, but they would also practice some form of expressive art, they would write haiku, practice calligraphy, or origami, or ikebana (flower arranging), this brought balance to the samurai. And then there’s the concept of the renaissance man (or person), like Leonardo Da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, who was an architect, and artist and a mathematician, and was also a fine athlete who could reputedly jump over a man’s head! These men were equal parts artist, philosopher, scientist, engineer, and athlete.

So perhaps training for life ought to include mental and emotional workouts as well as physical ones. Workouts for body, mind and soul, so: lift weights, but also play chess, and read poetry; go running, solve sudoku, listen to music; swim, learn a language, paint a picture. It’s like we’re training for life’s Krypton Factor, a classic game show with tests of things like mental agility, observation and memory, response, and physical ability (and in the original series, creativity as well).

But now I wonder if it is possible to completely separate Battista’s work as an architect from his work as a mathematician, or whether Da Vinci’s studies of anatomy and engineering were helpful in his art. The point is there is crossover, cross-training if you like, between different areas of interest can have some surprising benefits. And not everything fits into neat boxes. Sure, you might say that solving crossword puzzles is exercise for your mind; and writing a poem or a short story might be good exercise for your soul. But often the lines are blurred, so solving a Rubik’s cube might be considered a mental exercise, but I do it for relaxation, and I also use them to create mosaic art, so it could be an activity for my mind and soul?

Some other examples might include:

• Orienteering – mind and body
• Yoga – body and soul
• Origami – mind and soul

I wonder where these activities would fit on a Venn diagram of body-mind-soul? Or where they might fit in a three-dimensional space with axes of body, mind and soul?

Developing ourselves as humans, training for life in a balanced way, could be about looking for things that challenge our mind, things that strengthen our bodies, and things that enliven our souls; but maybe a more holistic approach would be to look for activities which stimulate all of those things, things which sit nearer the centre of the body-mind-soul Venn diagram.

This leads me finally to Ikigai, another Japanese concept which means “a reason for being”. This is another lovely looking Venn diagram, this time we are looking to find that thing which sits at the union of what we love, what we are good at, what the world needs, and (perhaps optionally) what we can get paid for. This balance point is your Ikigai, your life’s purpose.

And balance is the key isn’t it? Too much of anything is bad for you, and most things in life require some balance, work/life, effort/outcome, heart/head, challenge/comfort, static/dynamic, simplicity/complexity, order/chaos… innocence and experience. Happiness, I think, lies in finding that balance, or rather all of those balances, a kind of balance of balances, or meta-balance. Of course finding balance across many apparent contradictions can be difficult, especially in a dynamic world and when we as individuals (and everyone around us) keep changing as well. But this brings me back to the start, developing ourselves as multi-skilled, multi-interested people gives us more tools to deal with a changing world and the more wide and diverse experience we gather the better we are able to find that balance. I’m going to finish with some words of wisdom from Ernő Rubik on the beauty of contradictions and balance and finding connections: “I believe the contradictions are not opposites to be resolved, but counterpoints to be embraced. Rather than becoming frustrated by what seems irreconcilable in a contradiction, the better option is to appreciate that a contradiction helps us make connections we may never have considered.”

The other week I finished reading Tom Vanderbilt’s book Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning. It’s a fairly easy read, but if you’re strapped for time there’s an article in The Guardian which is a really helpful distillation of the book. The story starts with an anecdote about learning to play chess as an adult (very topical since we’ve all just binge-watched The Queen’s Gambit!), but it goes onto explore the broader benefits of learning something new, and continuing to keep learning new things.

The central idea here is that the beginner phase has value in itself and we shouldn’t think of it as something that just has to be ‘got through’ on the way to competence. There is the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known concept that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ and the idea that once you progress beyond the absolute beginner you start to develop habits (sometimes bad habits) and perhaps you’re not even aware of them. The mind of the beginner is open to wider possibilities and this has knock-on effects in your wider life, it makes you more open-minded generally and a more creative thinker. There’s a lovely Zen quote from Shunryu Suzuki: “In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in expert’s mind there are few.”

But there are obviously difficulties in trying to learn something new as an adult:

1) There’s an assumption that by the time we are adults we ought to be competent at things. But I think we need to give ourselves permission to be bad at something and enjoy it anyway. It’s okay to make mistakes, as Carl Jung said: “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon errors also.” Young kids don’t put pressure on themselves to be ‘achieving’ something in their hobbies, they just do things they enjoy.

2) There’s our fear of looking silly, a four-year old making their first tottering moves on roller-skates is cute, a forty-four year old in lycra and kneepads, trying to learn to roller-blade is perceived as ridiculous! But there’s real joy in being able to laugh at ourselves. Maybe one of the secrets of happiness is not giving a damn what other people think!

3) And then there’s our old enemy, time! It’s easier to learn to play piano when you practice for an hour every day and when you’re a kid, and you don’t have to do a full-time job, fold the laundry, empty the dishwasher, and re-grout the bathroom you just have more time on your hands. But as an adult maybe we appreciate how valuable our spare time is, and therefore we’re able to be more focused and efficient when we do find five minutes to practice a card trick, or half an hour at lunchtime to read about renaissance art, or an hour in the evening to write Python code.

Nevertheless, learning new things is hard, and if you have the disadvantage of not being an eight-year-old, then why bother? But here is where it gets interesting.

No education is ever wasted

First there’s the idea that education of any kind is never (or unlikely to be) wasted, you never know when a skill or piece of knowledge will be applicable to a new situation and the more tools you have at your disposal, the better able you are to respond to different situations. Vanderbilt gives the example of (polymath) Claude Shannon, an early proponent of information theory, who would plunge into all kinds of pursuits such as juggling or poetry; who knows how his brain worked, but making connections is key, and somewhere in the mix of juggling patterns and poetic structure he found something new. Most things we learn have some transferable skills, so the dexterity learned from solving a Rubik’s cube might be beneficial when playing piano, or chess may help concentration. There are lots of good examples of how you can transfer your learning from one area and apply it to another. There’s a great story about how Jon Tannahill took the dedication and rigorous approach he was familiar with from training for rowing and applied it to Space Invaders. Vera Wang was a figure-skater before she turned to fashion. Or how about chess prodigy Demis Hassabis who moved onto creating award winning computer games, founded DeepMind, and developed the AI programme AlphaGo which defeated a Go grandmaster. (DeepMind is basically about understanding how solving one problem can leapfrog to solutions to other problems; creating AI to solve general problems rather than specific ones, essentially an AI with transferable skills!)

Learning to learn, unlearn and re-learn

But also just the act of learning something new makes us practiced at learning, in the book, Vanderbilt starts with learning chess, but moves onto trying to pick up a number of different skills, effectively keeping himself at the learner stage. As Ravi Kumar (president of Infosys) puts it: “You have to learn to learn, learn to unlearn, and learn to re-learn.” These all seem like critical skills in an ever-changing world! It seems to be important to learn across a range of different domains and this reminded me of a brilliant TED talk by Emeilie Wapnick about not having one true calling, but embracing a number of different things and seeing where the combination of disciplines takes you. Emilie calls people with multiple interests and multiple skills multipotentialites, and she’s a big fan of the idea that having broad interests brings a range of benefits such as: generating ideas, being adaptable, and of course being able to learn rapidly because you are practiced at the art of learning. 

Fluid dynamics

Learning new things opens us up to wider possibilities and, as mentioned in this blog, it gives us options. Being a beginner helps to develop, what Raymond B. Cattell and John Horn refer to as ‘fluid intelligence‘ the ability to respond to novel situations and solve novel problems, as opposed to ‘crystallised intelligence’ which is using what experience and knowledge we already have. Niels Bohr said: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” this is crystallised intelligence, an expert has built up a wide catalogue of mistakes which they have made and know to avoid in future; this helps in repeating the same problem or responding to the same situation (or very similar ones at least), but it is the initial phase of the beginner where we are continually solving the problem from first principles, not relying on past experience, that we develop an understanding of how to solve problems generally, this is fluid intelligence.

Wonderstuff

There’s the idea that learning things helps us to maintain a sense of wonder, to discover new things and perhaps to see the world with new eyes. As Vanderbilt puts it: “Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world. Learning to sing changes the way you listen to music, while learning to draw is a striking tutorial on the human visual system.” Or as Picasso said: “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Maintaining that childlike sense of wonder is something that becomes more and more difficult as we get older and more cynical, but perhaps by exposing ourselves to new experiences we can in some way maintain the capacity to surprise ourselves. This reminds me of neuroscientist Beau Lotto’s TED talk on experiencing awe; in the talk he uses an aerial performance by Cirque Soleil to explain how experiencing awe can make us more comfortable with uncertainty, lead us to strive less for closure, and gives us a greater appetite for risk (which sounds just like my kids!). This can allow us to develop and learn and be more creative ourselves. He quotes Joseph Campbell: “Awe is what enables us to move forward.” or as Lotto himself puts it: “Your brain only learns if you move. Life is movement.”

Machines for learning

Finally there’s a lovely thought that learning things is just what we are meant to do. Perhaps one of the most important things about learning new things, is that it reassures us that we are still capable of learning new things. And that we still have the capacity to grow, to change, and perhaps even occasionally surprise ourselves!

Our ability to learn and adapt has certainly contributed to humans’ success as a species. The idea that our brains are ‘novelty-seeking machines’ is wonderful, that “humans seem to crave novelty, and novelty helps us learn” and that learning “equip[s] us to better handle future novelty” and therefore to deal with uncertainty and change. It seems there’s never been a more perfect time to learn something new!

Lately I’ve been thinking about innovation and the development of creative ideas. I’m generally interested in creativity and innovation, but I admit this recent foray is partly because we are currently living through a time of quite unprecedented uncertainty. Creative thinking helps us respond to uncertainty, because we can’t solve problems using the same thinking that created them, right? And also uncertainty can foster creativity, because it is a disruption to the status quo, and it must be easier to make something different when beginning from a different starting point?

I remembered a while ago reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation‘. The book discusses innovation and different approaches to innovative thinking, and has some thoughts about how we can try and encourage ourselves to think innovatively and have creative ideas.

One of the ways we can be innovative is to borrow ideas from elsewhere. This reminded me of Austin Kleon’s book ‘Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative‘. (I happened across his blog a few months back.) He sums the book up thus: “The big idea… is that you are a mash-up of what you let into your life, and anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.” Or as Salvador Dalí put it: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” So, borrowing is fine (with appropriate attribution of course!) and sometimes innovation can be as simple as taking an idea or a solution from one field and finding an application for it in another field. As Johnson explains in Where Good Ideas Come From, evolutionary biologists call this exaptation; the classic example being the premise that birds’ feathers originally evolved to provide warmth and were later adapted to help flight.

So borrowing ideas is good, but in order to effectively borrow ideas we need to have somewhere to borrow them from, we need to find influences to surround ourselves with, and this leads us to cultivating interesting networks. Another quote, this time from Dudley Field Malone who said: “I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.” So we need to get out of our echo-chambers, have wide and diverse networks to draw on, and ideally these networks need to be constantly refreshed, changeable and evolving, in order to keep us supplied with fresh stimulus. The wider the variety of stimulus, the better chance of developing an innovative idea; so we should read widely, have challenging conversations, ask questions, and continue to keep exploring and learning new things, to gather as much information as we can. All of this can help us to foster creativity and spark ideas. 

But for me the most interesting idea is that innovation often comes from making connections. So by mixing things together you get something new, and indeed possibly even something that might be more than the sum of its parts. Steve Jobs said that “creativity is just connecting things” and perhaps that’s what Apple have done, connecting a music player with a mobile phone, connecting form with function, connecting design with technology. Or as Steve Johnson puts it: “Collisions lead to creativity, collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.” So as I’ve said before, interesting things happen where there are connections or junctions; in the borders, where things overlap; or where things change or transition from one thing to another. Where are we now if not in a time of change and transition?

I remembered a Guardian article and another blog I read a while ago, both about the importance of creativity in uncertain times. Some great thoughts here:

• Doing something creative can distract us from what is going on in the wider world; as Josh Hogan puts it: “When I’m focused on that one activity I’m not worrying about things that might happen in the future; it brings me back into the present moment because I have to pay attention to what I’m doing.”
• Creative activities can let our unconscious mind figure things out while we’re occupied with what is in front of us. As  Dr Daisy Fancourt says: “While activities such as creative writing can help you vent your emotions, other things like knitting or crafting can give us some space and a safe haven away from our stresses, which might provide a chance to think things through and find solutions.”
• Creativity is needed to drive change. Of course change is inevitable, “this too shall pass”, but if we want to proactively drive change then we need to think differently and creatively.
• Being creative gives us the ability to adapt and grow. So change can be external, or (often more interesting) internal. If we don’t change, we can’t adapt, we can’t grow and we can’t respond to external change; but more importantly, frankly we’re not really living!
• Creativity gives you a greater capacity to choose. Because thinking creatively gives us options, and having more options is always a good thing.

So being creative and thinking creatively is  good for us, as well as being a good way of responding to uncertainty. Essentially as I said at the outset, we can’t solve the problems we have using the same thinking that created them. The good news is that times of uncertainty can foster creativity, “necessity is the mother of invention” and all that, and there can be huge steps forward made in relatively short periods of time.

I got to reading about crisis-driven innovation and this almost inevitably leads to John F. Kennedy and his famous quote that: “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.” (Unfortunately according to Wikipedia this isn’t quite true, the second character means something more like ‘change point’, but we can still appreciate Kennedy’s point.) There are lots of examples of how crises help to drive innovation, for example the rapid development of radar technology during World War II, or the repurposing of automotive factories to build aeroplanes, or more recently Formula One teams making ventilators, and rapid development of vaccines.

I know that we are living in difficult times at the moment, and there’s no way that war or a pandemic could ever be described as a good thing, but I have to believe that there are some positives that might come out of this. There is a feeling that things will never quite return to how they were, and maybe that is a good thing? There will be impacts on many aspects of our lives as we find our ‘new normal’; things like travelling less, meeting virtually, working more flexibly. But the great thing about innovation is that you’re never quite sure when and where your ideas are going to come from, or where they are going to lead you. So perhaps the most interesting things that might change are things we haven’t even thought of yet. Innovation is often about trying to solve a problem, and we are currently trying to deal with one of the biggest problems to arise in our lifetimes, but it can also be about just making the world a better place, (even if only in a very small way).

So I’m going to finish this with some advice from ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ on how to have creative ideas: “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”

I’ve been thinking recently about the importance of making connections. I admit this started with a bit of idle Googling on the name of a certain quiz show, and I disappeared down a rabbit hole for a while.

Only Connect is a TV quiz show which requires contestants to spot esoteric and cryptic connections between clues. As a viewer there is a certain amount of pride in even occasionally being able to keep up with the teams and spot a connection or two, but also there is an appreciation for a well-constructed question, even if you don’t get it initially and have to have it explained to you (and even if none of the contestants get it either!). I guess that as humans we find something satisfying in finding patterns or making connections.

The title of the show comes from the epigraph of Howards End; it seems E.M. Forster was a big fan of connection, and emphasised the value of personal connections in much of his work. The epigraph for Howards End is a little cryptic in isolation, but it is suggested that the novel is basically about human connection. And human connection is something of which we are all becoming more and more intensely aware.

Forster meant connection amongst humans, but also connection within the individual: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted… Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” I think he means connecting the different natures of each of us “the beast and the monk” recognising that neither is our true self, but that somewhere in-between we find a balance. So maybe making that connection, finding that balance, is how we find our humanity, we’re not savage beasts, but we are also not cold machines, we’re something of each and that’s what makes us interesting.

This got me thinking about the samurai from Japan, who were famously fearsome warriors, but would also practice some form of expressive art, they would write haiku, practice calligraphy, or origami or ikebana (flower arranging). This is the concept of the warrior-poet, the idea that you can be two things that are, apparently, in opposition to one another and that the apparent conflict can actually be a strength. And I think this is similar to Forster’s “beast and monk”.

In an article I read a while ago I came across an idea that I liked, the idea that humans are curiosity machines, and learning things is what our brains are meant to do. But what do we do with the things we learn? Maybe making connections is really what humans do? The example given in the article was Claude Shannon, a mathematician and engineer, who also wrote poetry and juggled, and was adamant that these practices (and generally being open to other things) drove his creative thinking.

So interesting things happen where there are connections, at the nodes or junctions, in the borders where things overlap, or in the times and the places when things change or transition from one thing to another. Interdisciplinary research often yields the most interesting results, and cross-disciplinary thinking is often required to address the big problems.

By now I’m quite deep in the rabbit hole and I’m reflecting that this rabbit hole is itself about connections (I know, #SoMeta right?). I’ve actually been reading about a lot of this on Wikipedia and I remembered about the WikiGame. The game is about finding ways to connect two articles in an efficient manner using only the links on Wikipedia. It relies on the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ that often complex networks are closely linked enough that you can get from more-or-less anywhere to more-or-less anywhere else with just six degrees of separation (see ‘Five Clicks to Jesus’ or ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’).

So it’s a ‘small world’ and everything is connected; great right? But not all connections are equal, and especially connections between people. I think at the moment we’re all feeling some degree of isolation and we’re trying our best to bridge those gaps. Social media platforms are great, because they allow us to make lots of connections with lots of people, but is the quality of each connection diminished? Zoom is great, because it allows us to see people we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see, but it’s not the same because it robs us of some of those vital human clues we get when interacting with someone else in person.

So where am I going with this? This post is mostly a way of collecting (and connecting) my own thoughts in some sort of ordered fashion. But coming full-circle on this, the E. M. Forster quote “Only Connect” is about connection of ideas, but also connection of people. So having a thought, an idea, or pretty much creating anything is fine, but sharing it with others is even better. So I thought I would start sharing some of my random ramblings and a blog seemed like a good way to do this.

To be honest this is probably going to be a sort of commonplace book where I store stuff I’ve read, and things I’ve been thinking about, and reflections on how they connect and overlap; so I’m hoping it will be a useful ‘exo-brain’ for me, but if anyone else wants to comment, then wonderful!