I picked this book off my bookshelf to see if it would help me with some background for an idea generation workshop I was planning. In the interest of “I don’t know enough,” I thought that if I knew “Where Good Ideas Come From,” I could design a workshop around those concepts.
Steven Johnson wrote the kind of book I love. One where I can learn some fun facts that I store in my brain and bring out as a kind of party trick, like the air conditioner was invented by a guy named Carrier who was commissioned to help a newspaper control the humidity in their printing room (pg 280) or that with only four molecules (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water) and electricity, the building blocks for life (sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids) can be created (pg 49).
Great for a party, but how is this useful for a workshop?
This book gave me some great back story for moving innovation
As an aside, I am fascinated by the Charles Darwin quote that, as Johnson states show Darwin “oscillates between two structuring metaphors that govern all his work: the complex interdependencies of the tangled bank, and the war of nature; the symbiotic connections of an ecosystem and the survival of the fittest.” (pg 238)
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life…
Pg 238, Steven Johnson,
.