Open Conceptual

Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.”

That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate things by looking at how many unexpected new opportunities they generate.

Failure breaks things open and allows us to remix the pieces in different ways. If we don’t do this from time-to-time — if we just keep accumulating more mass onto the same framework — eventually it gets too bulky and falls on our heads.

It’s like forests that don’t have enough regular little manageable fires: eventually they get too dense, the ground accumulates too much dry wood, until one spark destroys thousands of acres without anything anyone can do to stop it.

This isn’t pseudo-profound stuff. This is just how life works — life outside the boxed-in board game version we’ve imagined ourselves playing for decades.

It’s like the shift from Newton’s physics to the less intuitive models of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity: the new ideas aren’t as neat (and in many cases aren’t as useful) but they’re more accurate… and one day they will make sense and people will wonder how we could have been so stupid — just as we wonder how people could have once believed the universe revolves around a flat Earth.

That in itself is a good demonstration of what generativity means. Newton’s physics and calculus succeeded because it passed its DNA through generation after generation of subsequent discoveries, inventions, and ultimately a cult of efficiency that took over the world.

But now it’s becoming more difficult to stand on Newton’s shoulders. His ideas aren’t as generative anymore; they perpetuate more than they generate.

The technical edifice is so massive and sophisticated and dense that younger generations are having trouble seeing opportunities there. In science there isn’t much left that’s fit for Newton to explain; in engineering there’s plenty left to build, but the great challenges have already been conquered is largely gone.

The bridges and dams have been built, the moon has been conquered, the atom has already been split….

So we’ve been breaking-off Newton’s limbs and leaping away from the edifice to smash bosons, create ambient intelligence, and who-knows-what-else.

The new sciences address things that happen randomly, things that grow, things that don’t fit on the static grid: string theory, genetics, nanotech, etc.

Much of the new science — like the new economy — is not about layering subsequent successes on top of each other, but they are generative in the sense that they open up new fields to explore. They are adventures that could very likely fail to prove their original hypotheses but can’t fail to generate new ideas and insights.

E.g. String theory might eventually prove to be a “failure” in the limited sense — I suspect because it is tethered by what our math and mental models are capable of; we need to make some kind of conceptual leap — but whatever resolves the problems will be articulated by ideas that emerged by accident in the process of adventure.

In the process of writing this I remembered an older post (that should have been imported to this blog but doesn’t seem to have made it) about failing in a good way:

I just published (and deleted) a truly stupid post. Which is fine.

This blog is all about trying things out, challenging myself to explore and define new boundaries — that I don’t quite understand yet — as opposed to beginning (and then staying) within bounds.

Some of the best things are discovered by accident, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on them.

For example, a few days ago I was picking out random books and I accidentally found one about Henry Hudson.

I’d never heard of Hudson — or so I thought — until I flipped it over and read the back. Turns out this is the guy who lent his name to the Hudson River in New York, and Hudson Bay — and thus the Hudson Bay Company, HBC, The Bay.

Yes, he found the Hudson River for the Dutch (at the site of what is now New York City), and he found Hudson Bay for the British. For these accomplishments, Henry Hudson was seen as a total failure in his time.

Hudson’s backers weren’t looking for what he eventually found — nor even where they very interested after he found them. They wanted to find a route to “the Orient.” The expidition that took him all the way to (what is now) Albany NY was supposed to travel north of Russia, to China…

That obviously didn’t go as planned.

Nor did his expidition that took him into Hudson Bay, which was also supposed to reach China, although it did manage to set up one of history’s longest commercial dynasties. That expidition — and Hudson’s life — ended in mutinous disaster.

As we explore new ideas and new ways of doing things through the web, are we emulating Columbus and Hudson by “failing good”? Are we paying enough attention to the potentially positive accidents around us? Or are we more like Hudson’s financiers, who were disappointed that he never sailed over the North Pole?

Sometimes we react to these accidental discoveries as, “Oh well, I’ll take what I can get… could’ve been worse,” but accidents are aren’t mere consolations, they are the heart of life’s most essential processes.

Randomness and uncertainty are the keys to what we know of evolution and quantum theory so far — and, I believe we’ll soon learn, the keys to psychology and every related human science.

After all, what motivates us? What actually compels us to do things?

It isn’t perfection, and it sure as hell isn’t efficiency.

Even looking at the people who hold perfection in high esteem, it isn’t perfection itself that motivates them, it’s the challenge of pursuing it — and the sneaking uncertainty that they can’t attain it: it’s a dare.

Then there are the discoverers, creators, and adventurers who are drawn to the unknown — or rather, to what-they-think-they-know-but-can’t-prove…

If you take the uncertainty and randomness and genuine risk out of life (as in, risking oneself, not just other people’s money) you take the life out of life…

So why would we perpetuate organizations, rules, and systems that are based on the fundamental assumption that randomness and uncertainty can be mechanized and ordered into a irrelevance?

It’s the fatal flaw of both communism and industrial capitalism — not to mention fascism.

As a partial aside, I worry that our response to the finance crisis — “we’re getting it under control” — is simply an extension of the same defective ideas and attitudes that set off the crisis in the first place… like smothering a fire with wood: it’s still smoldering underneath, and now we’ve adding more fuel.

We’ve got a long way to go before overcoming these defects. And how do we get there?

I don’t know — but I do know that in order to move-on we’ll need to generate a lot of new ideas and a lot of new stuff. Most of it will fail — yes, but most of the stuff we have now is failing too… at least we won’t be sitting helplessly in the midst of collapse.

Ultimately there’s no single solution — nothing we can design and plan and settle on. What saves us at critical moments is a) luck, b) an abundance of options, and c) the ability to navigate uncertain terrain…

That last is the one that’s most in our control. Like any ability, it develops through practice. Unfortunately for most, by the time you actually need it, it’ll be too late to start learning.

The society that embraces uncertainty, nurtures a love for it (i.e. a love of learning) and develops institutions that thrive because of randomness rather than despite it, will eventually have the most success, generation-by-generation.

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