“The best ideas are born from the union of disparate thoughts.” – Unknown
Befor September 11, 2001, the idea to take down skyscrapers using commercial airplanes had not occurred to many people. It had obviously occurred to some people, including the group of terrorists who had been secretly plotting for months, but it had not yet occured to many more. On that sad, scary day, however, people around the world became aware of that idea.
In retrospect, the idea seemed obvious. Many wondered, How could we have been so blind? How could we not have recognized the potential threat? Those questions carried some extra gravitas for my wife and me because we were in downtown Manhattan that day. We watched in shock as the twin towers burned, we fled in panic as the south tower began to fall, and we were overrun by its collosal gray-white cloud of dust. “How could we have been so blind to the threat?” How indeed.
The answer is straightforward: air travel and blowing up buildings are two concepts that normally don’t sit together in the same part of the brain. Most people had not made the connection until that day, ourselves included.
Many times since then I have glanced up at airplanes in the sky and, because of my perspective at those moments, their flight paths caused them to pass in front of buildings or behind them. Perhaps I am now more predisposed to notice the relationship between planes and buildings than I once was. I don’t know. What I do know is that whenever I’m reminded of that relationship, my mind leaps to the idea that many years previous, someone with the same type of perspective had a revelation: airplanes can take down skyscrapers. Someone made that mental link, and they carried it, eventually, to devastating affect.
The point is, connecting concepts from different domains can spark powerful new concepts. This is foundational to singular links: unique combinations birth unique results. This relates to the “union of disparate thoughts” in the quote above. It is the bringing together of diverse elements, normally-unconnected elements, that sparks an Abracadabra moment.
I’m not talking about the confluence of things that already exist in the same general doman. I’m not talking about, for instance, a Korean taco which you could make by filling a tortilla with Korean BBQ rather than traditional Tex-Mex ingredients. Korean BBQ and carne asada are both salty, spicy meats. More generally, they are both foods. So, substituting one food for another food is not an example of a singular link.
A more demonstrative example would be to hurl tacos against a canvas to make art. That’s an idea. Food and painting are not frequently connected, so connecting them could produce unique outcomes. Or you could your taco, dip it in ink, and use it as an ink stamp on your canvas. That’s also an idea. Just imagine what Jackson Pollack would have done if he had been deprived of access to paints, but instead had access to large stockpiles of mustard, ketchup, grape jelly, cake icing, and chocolate sauce!
That taco image reminds me of the expression “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks.” It’s a quirky expression if you stop and think about it for a moment. It describes a trial-and-error process like brainstorming or whiteboarding. Presumably, if spaghetti sticks when thrown against the wall, it is properly cooked, otherwise it isn’t. To those in the know, spaghetti may connote meaning, as may tea leaves and goat entrails. That’s an idea.
A singular link derives its power from the unlikeness of the elements being connected. The farther apart they are, the more power they create when combined.
Consider a child’s seesaw. Its fulcrum is the fixed point over which the seesaw rotates, and changing its distance relative to one passengers or the other changes their mechanical efficiency. Two children of roughly equal weight sitting at either end of a seesaw with the fulcrum in the middle could keep themselves suspended above the ground. If one moves closer to the middle, she would decrease her mechanical efficiency and she would rise. Alternatively, if she moved farther from the middle, she would increase her mechanical efficiency and cause her partner to rise. The farther away she moves from the fulcrum, the more leverage she would exert.
In a singular link, the more dissimilar the consituents are from each another, the greater their impact when combined.
Have you ever encountered two married people who could not be more different from one another? They may have different ways of thinking and speaking, different interests and hobbies, different cultural backgrounds, goals, and aspirations. They seem to be the most unlikely people to have ended up together. You think to yourself, there’s no way this relationship could work… And yet it does. Each one seems to have found the one individual on this green earth with whom they fit. In fact, if they were just a little more similar to one another the relationship probably wouldn’t work.
This generalizes to the intuition behind promoting diversity in the population. The more diverse the population, the theory alleges, the broader the spectrum of viewpoints, leading to more ideas, better ideas, and better decision-making. By contrast, a homogenous group of individuals is thought to produce a narrower spectrum of viewpoints, more uniform thinking, fewer ideas, and less robust decision-making.
Diverse populations have a better chance of thinking about a subject orthogonally. If you think about something orthogonally, it means you are considering it from different, contrasting perspectives simultaneously. This multidimensional approach can lead to a more comprehensive understanding, in the same way that looking at an object with two eyes provides better depth perception than one. More perspectives uncover more information.
What are some orthogonal ways of viewing a topic? There are too many to count! One way is to combine statistics and stories. If you rattle off a list of statistics, for instance, you may forget those numbers as quickly as a temporary verification code for two-factor authentication. But if you use a story to weave the statistics together, the combination can make the numbers more memorable.
Likewise, statistics added to an anecdote can mentally anchor it, as newspaper copy editors know all too well. The headline, “Woman Saves Cats from Burning House” is not nearly so intriguing as, “Woman Saves 17 Cats from Burning House.” The number 17 is evocative. It raises questions. What kind of person has 17 cats? Did the woman who saved them own those cats or did they belong to someone else? Were there any cats that didn’t make it? What will happen to all those cats? One number spawns many new thoughts.
I often notice there are some people who see the world primarily through stories, and others who see it through statistics. The story-dominant people gather empirical evidence from the lives of those around them and they stitch it all together as a patchwork collage. Their world view is aggregated from the bottom-up like a Jenga tower. By contrast, the stats-dominant people measure populations as a whole, observing averages, proportionality, and deviations from the mean. Their view is compiled from the top-down like a table of contents.
Story people and stats people often speak different languages, use different reference points, and assess the validity of each other’s perspectives using different scorecards. Stories and statistics live in different parts of the brain, so connecting them together in the same topic adds to that topic’s dimension.
What other orthogonal pairings can you use to generate ideas? Well, there’s logic and creativity. Those activities live in different parts of the brain, and bringing them to bear on a single topic can be insightful and entertaining. Think of Dr Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.” It is creative and also logical, to the delight of readers across generations.
There’s also the micro-and-macro duality. Think of the environmentalists’ slogan, “Think globally, act locally” that helps to frame vast climate and conservation issues as manageable activities.
There’s the future-and-past duality, which storytellers often employ to connect the causality of events. Think of “Pulp Fiction” or other movies that flash forward and backward in time. The decisions characters made in the past affect outcomes in the future. Variations include the past-and-present framework (the present was shaped by what happened in the past) and the present-and-future framework (the future will be shaped by what happens now).
And don’t forget the theory-and-application paradigm for understanding topics. In some ways, this entire blog site is really an exploration of theory (what are these things we call singular links) and application (how do these singular links manifest in the world around you).
If coupling creates new ideas, some of the best ideas come from odd couples.