Alan Kay once wondered why good ideas often are so slow to find adoption. He inquired into the research and came to the conclusion that at any time, only about 1% of people are both able to see entirely unprecedented ways of doing things caused by a new technology and don’t look at their peers for the formation of their own goals.
Most changes, if ever implemented, take decades to find general adoption. In complex systems like our society, a critical mass has to be reached for the spread to be certain. Making the way to get to that mass is tedious, laborsome and often wholly unsuccessful.
But what if an entire population is forced to adopt something new within a matter of weeks?
The current COVID-19 pandemic has applied strong selective pressures onto communication networks, institutions, and businesses.
A mental model that I have found to be helpful in seeing this entire process play out was that of the world in a switched mode of accelerated evolution. Some shifts that had been slow and fractal before the outbreak were now going at a tenfold speed and convergence toward broad adoption that one would normally be glad to see as a result of years of hard work was now a matter of a few months.
Amidst the crisis, certain phenomena that were relatively uncommon before 2020 went critical as a forced circumstance almost overnight. And since humans, while initially reluctant, turn out to be quite adaptive to change after some altered routine has set back in, the widespread adoption of tools that were designated as “temporary measures” might not be reversed so quickly after all.
So, our world is shifting rapidly and we will likely see some very different ways of doing things in the coming decade. In late July of 2020, the time of this writing, this is not a novel statement. But there is an aspect of change whose implications I have not seen discussed too broadly yet. And I think it should be made more salient since much depends on it – present and future. What I have increasingly been thinking about is the knowledge economy’s shift to remote work in relation to innovation.
During quarantine, several books about the great research centers of the past made their way into my home. From Xerox PARC to the Manhattan Project to Bell Labs to ARPA, I became fascinated by the emergent genius that birthed so many of the critical technologies today. And recently, I was fortunate to join a group discussing these institutions and innovation more broadly, under the theme of “Organizing Genius”.
In the summary of my first session, I wrote: “While discussing the characteristics of the labs, a recurrent theme was the dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down approaches to innovation. What all labs seemed to have had in common was their serendipitous flow of ideas funneled by the interdisciplinarity of their teams. Water-cooler-conversations between two curious researchers could result in advances we still use today – an afternoon’s invention of overlapping windows after a round of beer being such an example at PARC. The great labs overall seemed to have had an organic way of innovating.”
For the most part so far, we have had more examples of innovation over prolonged periods of time happening in the physical realm, in spaces where smart minds got together to collaborate. We can’t tell in which exact ways Zoom or its advanced successors will better the remote work infrastructure. We are probably going to see a Cambrian Explosion of approaches to improve communication and workflow. But as has been argued before, the medium shapes the message.
And this applies to work: the setting matters in determining the content it provides. Whether that content be work encounters, idea depth or strength of relationships – with more and more companies, notably Twitter and Facebook, embracing the change to remote and planning to adopt it permanently, it becomes increasingly crucial to ask which aspects of physical exchange the virtual world simply cannot replace. Already, we see people on Twitter talking about the time when “everyone will work remotely”. Many just seem to take it for granted that Zoom can replace it all. But looking at the key factors that many hubs of high productivity have displayed in the past, it’s quite clear that the virtual world still lacks them in many respects.
An obvious one to start with is the mere loss of chance encounters that the physical realm offered with much higher probabilities. The serendipity of oftentimes fruitful collaborations resulting out of several different perspectives on an issue can’t be recreated as easily in a realm where you don’t bump into one another. In the beginning, PARC had a continuous flow of people from external places like Stanford walk in, supplying the lab with a steady stream of new approaches and ideas. Sometimes a fresh, even naïve outlook can make all the difference in discovering new ways of doing things. In the remote realm, there probably won’t be regular Zoom invites sent out to a random set of outsiders who could potentially stir it up on the inside.
Internally, most big firms of course still have separate departments, but shared meeting spaces and the open floor plans of smaller companies permit a different ease of interaction in the physical realm. If not voluntarily by the different teams, this at least permits skilled managers to push and navigate those encounters to a different extent. As a leader of a deep tech team told my discussion group: “You can’t force people from different departments to get into a room and talk it out on Zoom the way you can in the office.”
It is interesting what Kay himself once said about the importance of fresh perspectives: “No biological organism can live in its own waste products. If you have a closed system, it doesn’t matter how smart a being you have in there, it will eventually suffocate.”
The issue of people turnover is relevant in both the remote and physical sphere, but the potential for chance insights of outsiders may be higher in the office, and more generally in cities as a whole.
Next to the end of the office, the scattering of people all across the world will also cause conferences to be held remotely more often. Especially in Deep Tech, they seem to be a critical element of networking and idea generation. During COVID, a member of the discussion group mentioned, they have been held online and turned significantly more awkward as a consequence. There is a case to be made for the option to even participate in these meetings being enhanced due to their remoteness. I myself wouldn’t have been able to attend the group, had it not been for its move to a Zoom event from the physical meetups in London. But this is the kind of pull that cities do exert on outsiders, the attraction that causes one to relocate to innovation hubs. And after all, once there, the exchange might in fact prove to be more productive in person.
The common theme here seems to be the trade-off between broadband participation and the exclusivity that has made so many ambitious people move in the past and in turn perhaps even contributes to the significantly greater efficiency cities have compared to the rest of the world.
It may be easier than ever to work remotely, but simultaneously our mobility is greater than ever before. Throughout high school I was able to work and regularly get cheap tickets back to the US after my exchange year there had ended. At 18, I could work hard and finance an education abroad. I was able to reach out to people I admired, even getting a job offer in California. Had the world not been in a pandemic, accepting it might have been a realistic scenario.
The point here is that the ability to move freely has gotten into the reach of a significantly higher number of people. You still have to overcome obstacles. But it isn’t impossible. And moving to a hub may well signal ambition on your part to the people you would like to reach.
As ease of conversation and holistic physical feedback are much harder to achieve remotely, there is more rigidity – causing the zooming-in on our reliance on a physical frame of reference in many situations.
The loss of contextuality probably shouldn’t be underestimated as the world moves online. Interaction is much more physical than one might consciously realize. Under the surface, we pick up numerous cues regarding body language and space. Signals like posture, distance and even fidgeting play into the subconscious calculations we make on an ongoing basis in any social situation.
It is unclear how deep an innovative team could go in a virtual exchange, how quickly its members could bounce ideas off and infect one another with excitement, while there is a permanent physical barrier separating the flow. This is not to say productive exchange can’t happen online. But the truly exceptional research hubs of the past recount their leisurely hallway soccer breaks and bike races to the office after an exciting, messy exchange at lunch with particular importance assigned to the closeness of interaction. Perhaps you can’t really have one when the other is starkly reduced.
As you read about places like Xerox PARC or Genentech in the 70s, the atmosphere described was heated – many times recounted along the lines of “big ideas were in the air”. The evolution of an idea from its nascence as a spark of inspiration to its becoming of a hallmark advancement was organic, energetic and unscheduled. In his speech “You and Your Research”, Richard Hamming recounts the difference between people, both metaphorically and literally working with the office door open and those who kept it closed: “He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.” Now, remote work quite certainly doesn’t make one an eremite, but there is a real difference between the day-long option of spontaneous rush-ins to discuss an idea and the nuisance of having to schedule sessions of limited time to get face-to-face value. Inspiration is perishable.
For the fall of 2020, colleges like Harvard are trying to come up with new ways of “facilitating serendipitous encounters” and “casual co-presence” virtually. One art professor, it was described, previously left on his video feed as he painted, letting students tune in to work in quiet company. This might be a sneak peek of a broader adoption to digital life moving forward.
But if you structure and pre-designate certain things as “serendipity infusing” online, it might lead to too much of a top-down sentiment and thus to the opposite of a genuine space where ideas can emerge. The day-long possibility of exchange in the physical realm of research hubs was just a given and happened without the assigned function and time slots of the virtual world. Perhaps the mere fact of having an environment allowing for this causes more fertile ground for the emergence of productive exchange.
What great groups have demonstrated many times in the past is their strong cultural identity. Evolutionarily, we are tribal and this extends to innovation. While bright minds are at play and might take several different approaches to solve a problem, they will still see themselves working toward shared goals (“the future of computing” at PARC, “the defense of the US” in case of the Manhattan Project) that define in-group from out-group. The closeness that great groups display, as well as their frequent, but oftentimes healthy arguments, require substantial trust. Is this in-group trust typically stronger offline?
One way to look at this is to consider the permanence and potential spread of everything said online. If we recount the times when controversy has erupted after something like an internal memo went viral and caused the people in question to lose their work and networks, it becomes quite obvious that the record-keeping of every word and sentence may hinder the openness to controversy that is sometimes in fact needed to spur new approaches and form the tightness of great groups. Looking at the way PARC was run from the perspective of the de-facto norms today, we may be surprised: regular sessions of project presentations followed by attacks from the others in case of a flaw or inconsistency may not seem polite and proper, yet they were ways to learn and improve, ways to fuel the fire of ambition among the teams.
Members of great groups can seem almost cultish in their beliefs, with ties that are tight-knit and the shared knowledge that controversy is encouraged. This, by today’s standards almost oxymoronic “safe space to disagree”, influences trust. Without self-censoring, ideas in those, for the most part, closed cultural circles are able to flow on the fast track. This applies to physical teams as well, as Slack groups and virtual memos aren’t just a vital part of remote groups.
Perhaps we should acknowledge more widely that fire in teams can often be seen as a feature, not a bug, and thus heterogeneous idea exchange should be encouraged rather than extinguished too quickly.
But cutting out any remaining physicality and increasing the permanent documentation of sentences black-on-white, while the risk of offense is arguably the greatest for content taken out of context online, may only further decrease the ease of trust formation in groups.
Of course, there are also positive aspects in the shift to remote work: next to cheaper living expenses, perhaps most notably, the increasingly even spread of expertise around the globe. Not being confined to a given city feels liberating, the option of giving individuals scattered all around the globe access to high-value knowledge is exciting. The democratization of know-how will most likely enable many people who were previously cut off from epicenters of productivity to pursue or create new opportunities for themselves, in their distinct locations, after learning from the best.
But copy and paste might only get us so far collectively.
This to me is the crux of it: remote might work well for maintenance of already started ventures, or for groups working on more incremental ideas whose next steps are pretty straightforward. Physical interaction on the other hand seems quite important for the early stages of groups that formed around radically new, hard issues. Groups that still need to define the fundamental questions and objectives of their mission.
The members of the Homebrew Computer Club might have had an inkling that personal computing, a geeky niche obsession in the early 70s, had the potential to be something big, to impact the world in a positive way. But they didn’t yet have the perfectly rational, well-articulated explanations of their interests that one would find in biographies and interviews decades later. You have to wonder if every one of them would have persisted had they not had that critical, undesignated time in the beginning to just let ideas flow. In his book Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy recounts:
“[Members] used the club as a source of ideas and early orders, and for beta testing of the new prototypes”, and furthermore: “It was a sizzling atmosphere that worked so well because, in keeping up with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained…exploration and hands-on activities were recognized as cardinal values; the information gathered in these explorations and ventures in design were freely distributed even to nominal competitors.”
In the beginning, physical spaces that are somewhat isolated from the outside seem to matter a lot in having those groups exchange common sentiments while formulating more concrete ideas and convictions around their obsessions. There seems to be some critical mass of conviction required to get going. It is interesting to think about the possible effects that the outward-facing social sites online could have on this process. If a half-baked idea sounds insane and only a trickle of people subscribe to some version of it, while a hundred million other users display themselves as accomplished and on-top-of-their-game, does this disincentivize a very niche exchange that goes on for long enough to reach that critical mass? In other words, will the status games created through big social platforms inherently create outward-looking motives that extinguish the spark too early? The physical space might actually permit a different degree of self-radicalization.
As a new decade begins, there is much to innovate. Biotech, Energy, Cryptocurrency, AI, quite frankly the Media – the frontiers of many spaces are working to solve complex issues that require broadband collaboration and new, clever approaches. When I recall the stories of the idea hubs of the past, it doesn’t strike me as a given that the remote landscape will be able to simply substitute the above-mentioned key factors that seemed so essential to any high-achieving group back then.
Surely, there will be clever ideas that improve some of the initial bumps in the workflow of Remote. But so far, the central question of to what extent physical life can be imitated remains. We evolved for millions of years to flourish in certain social environments; the greater odds of serendipity, inspiration, and trust emerging from in-person work-life might exist for quite some time to come.
Thanks to Arnaud Schenk and the Organizing Genius group for providing interesting conversations and pointers that made these ideas more concrete