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The value of what you don’t know.
You are an expert in your chosen path. As an expert, you understand possibilities because you comprehend your domain on an atomic level. Your angle of acceptance for new ideas is limited by what you know is possible. Frans Johansson defines this as directional thinking.
When you are presented a problem outside your area of expertise, and forced to work with others whose knowledge is very different from yours, you are forced to perform intersectional thinking. This is the realm of breakthroughs and true innovation. Innovation is achieved by reconfiguring what you do know in the context of what you don’t know.
In his book, The Medici Effect, Johansson presents examples of great innovations by people from diverse paths, intersecting with ideas and information they didn't understand. In this unfamiliar turf, they ask the critical question: “What if?” And the answers are astounding. When you don’t know something is impossible, you are no longer bound by familiar thought patterns and assumptions.
Johansson identifies how you can find intersections and create breakthrough ideas. Innovation is not the realm of great thinkers, but of explorers and questioners who embrace the chaos of foreign information. More often than not, true breakthroughs occur when people connect bits of information never combined or considered in the same context.
Imagine a conversation between a musical composer and a microbiologist. Imagine how different their perspectives on the world might be. Imagine how their definitions of simple terms may differ. Imagine how their thinking patterns could push each other to see things through new eyes. That is the type of intersection Johansson explores in The Medici Effect.
It was my pleasure to meet Frans last year. He is the embodiment of The Medici Effect, the product of parents from different cultures - multilingual, global, constantly intersecting with different ideas and cultures. Inquisitive, energetic and constantly making connections between non-contiguous information, he has empowered others to use the most basic tool – imagination.
Read The Medici Effect – Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures. Listen to Moira Gunn’s Interview on Tech Nation.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006 | 2 Comments 
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Reader Comments (2)
Intersectional thinking is a great example of accepting change (not rejecting, ignoring or resisting change) by releasing any pre-convieved notion of how something might turn out. And, by the way, you don't have to be an expert in your field to have this experience. It happens all the time all around us...here's a few: snowboarding, velcro, oh! and blogging...
Very cool, I actually went to another talk about this logic (I need to find my notes on that at work and will send them to you later) – You can’t innovate with only what you know, you need the knowledge of others, and you need to try and combine the information in new ways, changing what you know in the context of the new knowledge, therefore innovation is impossible in isolation. People need to collaborate to innovate. But pure collaboration doesn’t result in innovation. We have to also find innovative ways to collaborate. (chicken and egg)