Think of the most recent good idea that you had - at work, in your home life or for your career. Was it the product of thinking in isolation or were other people involved? If you are a naturally creative without the help of others, you won't be interested in this blog. But if at some point you found that other people were important for making suggestions, refining your thinking or helping clarify the problem you were trying to solve, then you might understand what I mean when I say that ideas have a social life. Ideas become what they are because we interact.
If you could engineer a social network that was designed to optimise your creativity, what would it look like? Who would you draw ideas from? How would you capture and build on their ideas? In what ways would you involve the people around you - and the people around those people - in your thinking? How would you deliberately expose yourself to new and diverse insights? How would you know when you were too exposed to new and diverse insights, and at risk of creative implosion? In what ways could you identify and connect with the people that you don't yet know you need to know?
These are questions that my colleague Andy and I have started to grapple with. We identified a mutual interest in the convergence between innovation sandpits, creativity and creative problem-solving, networks and social networking. (These last two are different things, but that will be a topic for another post.) Developing ideas with Andy is a great privilege. He provides a trampoline for my thinking: launching new ideas in a structured way. Between us, we want to apply network theory and its principles to creativity, and creativity theory and its principles to networks and networking
We don't know the answers to the questions outlined above, or indeed whether they can be answered. But we have a hunch that it will be fun trying to come up with answers. And that in order to probe for answers to the question 'in what ways might I design my ideal creative network?' we need other people to help us clarify, develop, invent, validate and build on the idea. In other words, the idea of designing your ideal creative network needs to have its own social life.
In this blog Andy and I plan to reflect on and develop our thinking about the social life of ideas. But the blog has a much more important role that that. In it we also propose to track the progress of our own experimentation with ways to design and build our creative networks. What does that process look and feel like? How did we approach people? What worked? What didn't work? How did the process change as we went along? In what ways did we analyse our networks and how can we show their evolution over time?
By forcing myself to reflect on and write about the process of building a creative network, I hope to learn a small amount about this process. By reading comments from you and others, I imagine that I'll learn a large amount beyond that. Your thinking and reaction to what we write will, I hope, give this idea a social life of its own.
