Steven Johnson‘s book titled “Where good ideas come from“ tells the reader exactly that – where good ideas come from. The enjoyable read touches on many aspects of work, life and natural history.
As an academic or research group leader you are in the business of good ideas. Thus, some aspects of this book might be especially interesting for you. Here are the six most relevant takeaways for group leaders:
Create the right environment
Create the right environment for good ideas to thrive. It is important to hire good people, and group leaders usually put a lot of effort in the selection process. Yet, many tend to underestimate the role the environment plays in creating good ideas.
The brilliant genius, who conceives world-changing ideas, is part of our collective misconception. Even so, he/she is an absolute exception in the history of great ideas and innovation.
Fact is, some environments are better than others in breeding good ideas. In turn, those environments attract the most motivated people in the field. Aim to create such an environment. Here is how:
Encourage sharing ideas
Encourage the sharing of good and bad ideas. Make a space or time where group members can bounce around ideas and thoughts and talk about the challenges in their work. This could be the weekly group meeting, seminar or the coffee kitchen.
Create this environment where you can exchange speculations, guesses and hunches. Do not reject bad ideas to quickly. Students should not come with polished presentations that only show good results. Nor should you rejected them for voicing crazy ideas. Make the threshold for your group members to voice their ideas and thoughts as low as possible. Welcome bad ideas. Talking about good as well as bad ideas is the only way to develop good ones.
Foster breaks
Taking a break from the most pressing tasks has a great impact on creativity. It rearranges the thoughts in one’s head and subsequently lets them fall into place in a completely different way. Give this process time to take place.
A time off could mean the break from a current task by going for a walk and returning to the office or lab with a fresh mind. It could entail a break from generating output, e.g. when reading or doing literature research. Doing this, one might not have much to show for in the end. More importantly though, the groundwork for connecting new ideas has been laid.
And last but not least, this means time of work as part of the annual leave.
Be inspired by other disciplines
Let approaches from other fields than your own influence your work. The problem you are working on might have been solved in a completely different context. Be open to adapting ideas or solutions form other disciplines to problems in your field. Encourage the cross-fertilization between different fields and disciplines. This also means that you will benefit from building a diverse team. Group members should come from different professional backgrounds. Having a bunch of people tackle a problem from their different perspectives opens up more avenues to an innovative solution than several people trying all the same approaches. Besides, a diverse team as a whole is exposed to more potential solutions from other fields than a uniform team ever will.
Cultivate diverse networks
Input and impulses from other fields or schools of thought help develop ideas and put them in meaningful contexts. When it comes to networking, do not practice a division of labour. Do not only encourage selected members of your group to build and expand their network. Let all your group members work on their connections. This will lead to a much greater network for your group. This way, much more possibilities for exchanging and developing ideas will occur. Again, this is even more fruitful the more diverse your team is, professionally and otherwise.
Do write journals
Writing lab notebooks is good practice in most scientific disciplines to keep track of experiments and results. However, a journal or diary can be so much more and you should encourage your group members to enter more than the bare essentials. Note down a conclusion for each experiment or study. This helps reflect on the outcome instead of just pasting results in the labbook. It helps to understand what the results could mean. One thinks about what might have gone wrong and conceive good follow up experiments.
Make sure that experiments that did not work find their way into the notebook. The same goes for observations that do not fit in or experiments that were designed but never carried out. Even remarks, suspicions and hunches could be useful later. Writing all down helps to gather one’s thoughts and allows ideas to take shape. Fixing temporary and fleeting thoughts makes it possible to integrate them later in the bigger picture to form a great idea.