Man of String

The Mother of all Inventions? A Surprise Candidate

If you were asked to come up with a list of the most important inventions of all time, the chances are that you’d include among them agriculture, writing, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, the car, and the airplane. If you’re young enough you might include the iPod and if you’re whimsical enough you might include the flushing toilet. But there’s one invention you almost certainly wouldn’t even think to include on your list, let alone to put it at number one. As far as I can tell it’s never made any published list except rather vaguely as “food storage and processing”.  And that invention is the granary. You see, I want to make the claim that the granary, dating as far back as 11,500 years ago and predating agriculture by a millennium, has had a greater impact on the human race, and thus on the world, than any other invention before or since and therefore deserves the title of “the mother of all inventions”, even more than necessity itself.

 The reason is twofold. Firstly, it was directly responsible for the development of several of the other inventions that all usually make the top ten on the list:

 -       It created the infrastructure and rationale for farming (which, without food storage, is just a more laborious way of putting food on the table than hunting-gathering)

-       It enabled the growth of larger, denser populations. Some of these populations would eventually become cities, widely regarded as the crucibles of creativity and innovation.

-       It made possible the concepts of ownership and trade, by transforming surplus into an asset

-       It drove the development of written language and numbers, as granary owners looked for reliable ways to control and account for their inventories. It is surely no coincidence that Nissaba, the Sumerian goddess of the granary, was also the patron of scribes.

 Secondly, and this is even more important though not as immediately obvious, the granary also fundamentally changed our relationship with nature. For the first time in their history, our ancestors no longer lived hand to mouth, dependent on whatever nature provided to them then and there. Now, they could take out of nature more than enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs and build up reserves in their granaries to feed themselves during times of scarcity or to trade with others. The granaries made the grain more useful to the gatherers than if they had left it on the wild crop stands. This gradually became a new way of thinking about the world, a logic that declared that everything in it – not just grain - is available to us as a potential resource; that the more control we have over a resource the more value we can derive from it; and that the easiest and best way for us to wield that control over any given resource is to control its environment. I call these environments “stores” and this way of thinking about the world “store logic”.

 The granary was our first store, and we have applied the same logic, store logic, to resources and stores of all types ever since then. We have increased the value of animals and plants by controlling their propagation in fields and farms, of ideas and memories and knowledge by controlling theirs in tablets, papyri and paper (and back to tablets!), of raw materials in factories, of finished goods in retail stores, of students in classrooms and schools, of electricity in batteries, of water in dams, of “knowledge workers” in the appropriately named cube farms, and so on.

 Everywhere we look we can see stores and store logic hard at work. Even the remarkable 21^st century achievement of physicist Lene Hau and her team in capturing light in a Bose Einstein Condensate, a highly exotic store, is grounded in the same belief, that if we can control the propagation of a resource, even light itself, we will be able to make more use of it. The original granary builders would be proud.

Why Do We Hate Nature?

Previously I’ve argued that we want a better version of nature, one that we can control, and that technology is the answer to the question of how we’re going to accomplish our goal.  But why would we want to control nature in the first place? The short answer is that we want to control nature because we hate it. After all, it’s fairly self evident that we have routinely raped and pillaged the earth for millennia already and that we are well aware of what we’re doing.  But this then begs the question, why do we hate nature? What would cause us to embark on this quest for domination? It's a fair question, and I should preface my explanation with a clear acknowledgement that what follows is highly speculative and hardly mainstream thought.  No one other than me is to blame.

It starts with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Not by God but by our cousins, the chimpanzee.

The usual explanations for the split between humans and chimpanzees start from an anthropocentric view of our superiority. It was a human choice enabled by our mental or physical or technological prowess that caused us to leave the safety of the forest. But if we take a chimpanzee’s point of view, rather than our own, I think we might see an entirely different reason.

Prominent primatologists including Jane Goodall have observed two things about chimpanzee society that are particularly worth bearing in mind here.  Firstly “in chimpanzee society, it is the female, rather than the male, who may leave her natal group during adolescence and transfer, temporarily or permanently, into a neighboring community” (Social Rejection, Exclusion and Shunning Among the Gombe Chimpanzees, by Jane Goodall).  Secondly “It appears that the violence of the chimpanzee ‘warriors’ is especially severe towards old, lactating, and anestrous females, and considerably less severe towards females in estrus, i.e., those with high reproductive value. “ (Nonhuman Intergroup Agonistic Behavior and Warfare, by Johan M.G. van der Dennen)

 In other words, male chimpanzees are most likely to reject new females from their group who are lactating (swollen breasts) and/or are anestrous (not in heat, signified by lack of genital swelling).  And it turns out that Women are the only female primate among the great apes with persistently swollen breasts and conspicuously absent genital swelling, the two physical manifestations that the male chimpanzee finds most repellent among potential mates.

So my account of humanity starts with a female chimpanzee who, because of a hormonal imbalance that causes her to appear perpetually post-partum or anestrous, is rejected by chimpanzee society and is forced to create her own group, one that will forever be only too aware of the difference between them and their ancestors. Eve clothed herself not in shame of a hyper-sexualized body but rather the exact opposite, in shame of a body that repulsed the male.

From here we mark the divergence of humans from nature, from the expulsion and the self awareness of the difference that caused it.  This is the difference that we have grown to admire and to desire.  The typical male obsession with breasts comes not from a childish desire for his mother but from a human desire for a mate as unlike its cousins as possible.  To be more obviously anti-animal.  Why a desire for smooth, hairless bodies, especially in adult women?  Not because a hairless body reminds us of pre-adolescence but because it reminds us of anti-animals.  Why an obsession with adornment, why high heels?  Why make up? Why cosmetic surgery?  We have a notion of what human perfection looks like, and what it looks like is the antithesis of perfection among all other primates.

We were rejected by our ancestors and we in turn reject them. And our rejection of chimpanzees has spilled over to a rejection of the cradle they threw us out of.  All but a handful of us refuse to live in forests and we rejoice in tearing them down.   And our quest against nature will continue until we’ve finally mastered it and replaced it. It is, if you will, the ultimate revenge tragedy. And all because of a hormonal imbalance in a female chimpanzee some millions of years ago, a memory still fostered in myth and legend.

Second Nature

In my previous post I stated that we want to control and improve on nature, and that technology is what we use to achieve our goals. In other words, technology is in the process of becoming second nature, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.  What proof of this do I have? Well, even the briefest survey of some of our activities over the past 30 millenia or so should make it reasonably clear. And I should note that I am not saying that we will succeed in controlling nature, but that’s demonstrably what we’ve always tried to do and that‘s what we’re going to keep on trying to do in increasingly sophisticated ways. And even when we don’t succeed in control, we mitigate the effects of nature by building defenses against it.

Agriculture is arguably our greatest achievement in the manipulation and control of nature. Vast areas of the earth’s surface are now cultivated by us, shaped, irrigated, ploughed, fertilized, and required to produce crops of our determining.  We describe our livestock (our cows, pigs, sheep, and chicken) as breeds, not species, for they have been systematically and persistently “improved” by us to be as productive as possible. They would never survive in the wild but their numbers remain in strong supply despite our slaughtering of tens, even hundreds, of millions of them every year.  Our fruits and vegetables are mostly clones. As Michael Pollan eloquently describes in “Botany of Desire” apples grown from seeds are never the same as their parent. It is our influence that creates the Granny Smith, the Fuji, the Golden Delicious. We are now able to engineer grain seeds that will produce pest resistant crops whose own seeds will be infertile. Seeds that cannot reproduce are, in at least one important respect, no longer living things. We have turned life into product.

This same mindset is now pervading other areas of cultivation, like “sustainable” or “responsible” logging. Of course it is admirable that when we cut down a tree we plant another one in its place, preferably one that we have chosen for its fast growth and high quality timber characteristics. But this too turns trees into things.  Before long there will be no more forests. We will have replaced them with high yield tree fields.

If farms are our outside factories, then gardens are our outside galleries. Or maybe museums are a better analogy. For our gardens are not, as I’ve written elsewhere, a celebration of nature.  They’re a celebration of technology, of our (as yet incomplete) control of nature. Whenever we colonize a new, wild place we bring with us our domesticated plants and animals.

There is much to say on this subject, perhaps too much. We have said nothing of our cities (yet), or of our other engineering feats whose common purpose is to lay a human interface on the planet.  Everywhere we look, and in many places that we don’t, there is abundant proof of our domestication of the wild. So I will close by mentioning a recent article in Nature magazine about mosquitoes. According to this article, the earth would get along just fine without them. Sure, there would be local ecosystems that might collapse, but who cares about ecosystems that depend on mosquitoes for their survival? And there, only marginally concealed, was a hint of the future.  Even scientists hate mosquitoes. As soon as we can send them to extinction, we will. And the earth will be a better place.

What Technology Wants (part 2)

I am by no means the first to notice that technology and nature are deeply and increasingly intertwined. In a way that I think somewhat echoes Brian Arthur’s view of technology in his 2009 book “The Nature of Technology”, I see a feedback loop going on between our discoveries and our inventions, as follows:

• We observe phenomena in the natural world and we strive to understand them;
• We develop technologies based on that understanding;
• We use those technologies to alter our experience of the natural world, and understand natural phenomena at a deeper level.

So the cycle of Discovery, Invention and Exploitation creates a positive feedback loop that amplifies both the rate and capability of our technology and the rate at which we alter our relationship with, and experience of, nature.

So far so good. But to answer Kevin Kelly’s question, “what does technology want?” I have to take a path less well trodden.  For while the politically correct and majority viewpoint seems to be that our exploitation of nature is a Bad Thing That We Need To Do Something About, I’d suggest that our actions speak louder than our words. And that if you look at our actions, you’d have to conclude that as a species we are not only consciously but also deliberately on a mission to control, improve and even replace nature. Everything we do speaks of our rejection of nature, from deforestation and overfishing to pest and disease control, from dam construction to our mass migration towards the city.  If you take into consideration the positive feedback loop of Discovery and Invention, you’d also conclude that we want technology to be the executor of our mission.  In other words, we want technology to be Second Nature. And that’s what technology wants too.

What Technology Wants (part I)

Back in 1995 one of my closest friends, Stevie Zimmerman, introduced me to “Out of Control” by Kevin Kelly.  The book was a revelation.  Kelly opened my eyes to what felt like an almost entirely new and very exciting world, even though I had been working in the field of information technology for nearly a decade by then and was also familiar with the newish field of Complexity Theory.  So about 8 years later when I heard that he had posed himself the rather interesting question “what does technology want?” I felt sure that the answer was going to set me off in all sorts on new and exciting directions once again. I guessed it was going to have something to do with the future of what we consider “living” and that it might reveal something deep and unexpected about what it means to be human.

Since I knew I was going to have to wait for a few years until he published his answer, I decided to have a stab at the question myself.  I fairly quickly formed a view by contemplating our earliest stone age technologies that we have always developed technologies by observing and then imitating natural phenomena and that we have then used those technologies to mediate our relationship with nature. I then sensed that we actually use technology not just to mediate but to change our relationship with nature, and that we use the knowledge that comes from that changed relationship to further advance and improve our technologies.  In other words, our relationship with nature and the evolution of our technologies contains a continuous, mutual feedback loop.  I further imagined that this mutual feedback loop will culminate in the complete embedding of technology within nature and vice versa, and that this eventual integration will mark our maturity as a species.

Needless to say, when “What Technology Wants” was published last year, I had wildly inflated expectations of it. And inevitably perhaps it couldn’t live up to them. Kelly begins by expressing the tension he feels between his love of technology and his respect for those that live a simpler life close to nature, and that tension made for uneasy reading. It seemed to me that he desperately wanted to declare that technology is already alive and that it really does have wants and desires, desires of survival and reproduction and maybe even of pleasure.  But he stopped short. For someone who had 16 years previously written an ode to the marriage of the Born and the Made it was as if he had witnessed a Hollywood-style divorce between the two (“work got in the way”, “we separated with deep love and respect for one another”, “we’ll always be friends”). He conjured up the Technium but then didn’t quite know what to do with it except remind us endlessly of its billions of connections.

And though I like the fact that he invented a new word, as you should when you’re imagining something new, his word has a musty Victorian feeling to it. The Technium sounds old, the kind of word you might imagine that his beloved Amish would have coined for this unwelcome and nagging intrusion in their lives. The word is, I think, precisely a reflection of his tension. It’s the pidgin English of the first generation immigrant, not the language of the next generation, the native. And so Kelly, even as he has surfed the frontiers of technology for longer than the vast majority of us, in his later years has found a cognitive threshold, or a border, that he cannot cross.  This is the territory of a younger generation, a generation that was born here. And it will be this generation, or the next, that will give us the appropriate language. It’s unlikely that Kelly, or the baby boomer generation in general, or I for that matter, will ever become entirely fluent.

gardens as technology

This being Father's Day and my children being on a mini-vacation at their Grandparents' cabin, I got to choose today's activities for myself and Mrs King.  And on something of a whim I suggested that we go visit the Chicago Botanic Garden.  Wikipedia describes it a 385-acre "living plant museum" and while I agree with the living plant bit it didn't feel much like a museum to me. I was, however, delighted by my choice.  The Garden was really quite breathtaking in the scope of its undertaking as well as in its beauty.  The entire 385 acres has been meticulously designed and crafted and continues to be lovingly maintained and improved by a professional staff that is supported by over 1,000 volunteers.

To go to the Garden is to experience a surprisingly strong and coherent design aesthetic, where order and symmetry reign over chaos.  Or, you might say, over nature.  I guess that's the point of a garden, a forced separation of nature from itself, a place where nature is at the same time honoured and rejected.  I hadn't thought about it in these terms before today, but a garden fits perfectly with Brian Arthur's definition of a technology.  A garden "captures" the phenomenon of plant life.  Of course a field also captures plant life, but does so to fulfill a need we have, the need to eat.  I had thought that we were going to see the plants.  But it turns out that we weren't really.  We were there to satisfy another need we have, the need to believe that we're different and better and more powerful than them (however misguided that belief might be).  And the garden, in a way that does turn out to be similar to a museum after all, is the technology we use to do that.

Allee Effects and Small World Networks

It sometimes takes reading about a subject several times from different sources to pick up on something that should have been evident the very first time but somehow wasn’t.  Or at least that’s how it is with me.  For instance, I recently read Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” and was struck by his description of small world networks as being characterized by a balance of small, densely connected groups and large, sparsely connected groups.  Now, I’d previously read several other books about aspects of network theory and had ooh’ed and aah’ed at the examples and explanations of the 6 degree of separation phenomenon, synchronicity and other network effects, but this unexpected component of the small world network structure, first described in 1998 by Duncan Watts (Six Degrees) and Steve Strogatz (Sync), had never really taken hold in my brain until now.

And I think maybe the reason for my sudden but belated awareness is another phenomenon that I stumbled upon a few years back as I was researching success and failure in “founder”, or start-up, groups.

Warder Clyde Allee, an ecologist and zoologist working in the first half of the twentieth century, was particularly interested in how animal groups form and survive.  In the classical model of population dynamics, over-crowding typically has a negative effect on group growth.  What Allee discovered was that under-crowding can also be a problem.  Below some critical density, small populations – as founder groups typically are - can be at increased risk of group decline and even extinction due to effects such as:

- Inability to find mates during the mating season;

- Reduction in foraging efficiency (and other activities) in the absence of cooperating hunters;

- Increased vulnerability to predators when group defensive behaviours (e.g. herding, flocking, schooling) become ineffective at low prey numbers

- Failure to attract pollinators when there are few conspecifics nearby to create an appealing place to forage

Achieving density is thus a prerequisite to population growth.  But only up to a point.  At some threshold the problem of under-crowding, also known as positive density dependence, (or Allee effects, after their discoverer) suddenly gives way to the problem of over-crowding, or negative density dependence (the classical model).

In other words, it’s important for small populations to get to critical density, but as they grow they need to spread out.  And maybe something like this is what’s happening in small world networks.  Small groups thrive at high densities (positive density dependence) and perhaps even need that density to retain group coherence or identity and thus survival.  But large groups - where individuals begin to compete with one another - thrive at lower densities (negative density dependence).  And I’m guessing that this is a recurring, dynamic pattern.  New groups will form over time and only those that develop dense connections will persist. But as they grow they will tend to dissipate, leaving the leaders and fast followers with new groups to found and more Allee effects to overcome. 

Do disruptive innovators lack social skills?

Not to keep you guessing for too long here, the answer is “yes”, if recent research into the invasive mosquitofish is anything to go by.  A paper by Julien Cote et al. suggests that dispersers – those individuals that leave their group to set up home elsewhere – tend to have a different personality type than the average from a source population.  In particular, it is the least socially tolerant individuals that are most likely to disperse from high density populations, and it would seem that they may also to do this cyclically.  In other words, asocial individuals are more likely than the average to leave home and colonize new habitats, but if/when those new colonies become too dense they’ll up and leave those too.  If this is true it would help explain the propagation wave that typifies invasion spread.

It turns out that other studies on common lizards and on humans report similar findings; “that asocial individuals are more likely to disperse, especially when population density is high”.

So what does this have to do with disruptive innovation?  As is probably clear by now, I view invasive species as models of disruptive innovation in nature and believe that we can apply the characteristics and behaviours of invasive species to our own efforts to innovate in business.  Dispersal in this sense is not, therefore, literally about a business invasion of another geographic region, although that is often vital to growth, but more generally about a mindset that looks for opportunities outside the heavily contested norms of any given corporation or industry. I have already discussed in a previous post, albeit briefly, the advantages of thinking or acting like an outsider.  Here I am suggesting that there may be a personality type which may be more likely to think or act that way “naturally”.

Within the corporate world, however, this personality type is often explicitly weeded out by the recruiting process under the label of “not a team player”.  And for the most part this probably makes sense since at least 90% of the energies of an organization should be focused on the efficient operation of its core function.  But that still leaves a small percentage that should be focused on what comes next.  And the two jobs are almost completely different.  As explained by O’Reilly and Tushman in their paper “The Ambidextrous Organization”, they require very different strategies, structures, processes, competencies and cultures from one another.

I would go further and suggest that at least some the people within an organization who are tasked with disruptive or transformative innovation should have different skill sets and different personalities too.  But as the research itself shows, these people tend to flourish in smaller, less dense populations, so it makes sense to follow another of the invasion theory prescriptions which is to act small.

Which means that if you have the responsibility of building a disruptive innovation capability within an established organization, resist the temptation to build big to signify the importance of your mission.  Instead, build as small a team as you can.  Even with executive-level support for innovation, other units within your company will view your work as a waste of time, money and resources, and as an irritating distraction from the day to day business priorities.  Being small achieves four important objectives in the early days: i) it will make your activities more inconspicuous and therefore less likely to attract the corporate antibodies; ii) it will make you need less support and fewer resources and therefore allow you to survive longer on whatever you’re given;  iii) it will make you create less infrastructure and therefore give you greater adaptability; and iv) it will make it easier for you to align your efforts around a single vision and goal and around a small number of cohesive ideas.

And don’t forget to hire at least one “disperser”.  They may not fit in very well.  But that’s the whole point.

Outsiders

“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change… these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.” (Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Chapter 8, The Response to Crisis).

Invasive species in nature are, literally, outsiders.  They travel from their native habitats, often hitching a lift from our global transportation, trade and tourism networks, to arrive in an unfamiliar place possibly thousands of miles from home.  In the USA alone, killer bees from Africa via Brazil, kudzu from Japan, hydrilla from China, the gypsy moth from Europe, argentine ants from, well, Argentina are among hundreds of alien species that have become invasive.  Of course the traffic is not all one way.  The rosy wolf snail, native to Florida, is now found in nearly all Pacific and Indian Ocean island systems and is classified as one of the world’s top 100 invasive species.

Now, being an outsider is as tough in nature as it is in human societies.  In fact it is estimated that only about one in a thousand alien species become invasive.  And that’s because outsiders face significant obstacles all along the way, including:

a long, arduous journey often experienced under inhospitable conditions;

an unfamiliar and potentially hostile climate in their new “home”;

unfamiliar and potentially poisonous food and energy sources;

new predators, competitors, parasites and diseases (eventually).

But they also have three major advantages over the natives whose ecosystems they invade, if they are bold and hardy enough to exploit them:

Firstly, they have no co-evolved relationships or affinities with any of the native species and thus have no commitment to the status quo.  They are not bound into the complex web of interactions that lead, over time, to a dynamic but stable ecosystem.

Secondly, when invasive species leave their native land they also usually also leave behind their own predators, parasites, competitors and disease vectors.  For a while then they often have no one to protect themselves from and can focus all their energies on offensive, rather than defensive, strategies.

Thirdly, the natives often have no defenses against them or the diseases they carry with them.  It’s a reasonable enough assumption that you can’t defend against something of which you have no prior experience, knowledge, or immunity, and in fact experiments have shown that fear of predators in prey animals is a learned behaviour, not an innate one.

In business, as well as in other human pursuits, these advantages translate into “outsider” prescriptions for innovators:

Challenge the status quo and orthodoxies that exist in your company and industry to find its blind-spots.  Often the greatest opportunities for innovation exist precisely in those areas where no one’s looking;

Refocus on competing with the new rather than protecting the old.  No one’s job should be protection.  Everyone’s job should be improvement, addition or replacement;

Be informed and be prepared.  The chances are that the greatest threat to your long term success will come not from the usual suspects but from something small and not very threatening.  Yet.

About all of which, more to come…

Invasive species, nature's disruptive innovators

Today, March 29th 2010, sees the online publication in Businessweek.com of my article on Invasive Species and Disruptive Innovation.  I welcome any comments on it that you might have.

Invasive species are most commonly portrayed as destructive pests that threaten native species, ecosystems and economies and that must be controlled and/or eradicated.

This portrayal is not very surprising, given that their worldwide economic impact was estimated at $1.4 trillion in 2002 (source: Pimental, 2002), equivalent to China’s 2003 GDP.  They’re often spread, intentionally and unintentionally, by human trade, travel and tourism and, with the estimated rise in cross border global transactions from $10 trillion in 2007 to $70 trillion by 2025, they will inevitably become an increasingly common problem.

But viewed from a different perspective, the facts tell a story of adaptability, persistence, and transformational impact.  Invasive species endure long and hard journeys, fight for survival in hostile and unfamiliar conditions, and succeed in establishing widespread, flourishing populations, beating out their competitors in the process.

They are, in short, the disruptive innovators of the natural world.  And it turns out that many of them have a similar invasion lifecycle.  I believe that this lifecycle is also common to disruptive innovators in human endeavours, from business to science to the arts.  In this Businessweek.com article I have concentrated on similarities between natural and business "invaders".  Given size constraints I have had to keep my arguments and examples to the bare minimum and have had to whittle them down to a fifth of my original paper's size.  Over the course of the next few months I intend to post more details of my theory on this blog, extending some of the more applicable parts of the theory such as density and innovation, the outsider's perspective, and the invasion lag phase.

I am always on the look out for more business examples of invasiveness as I hope to deepen and improve the theory.  I welcome all comments and suggestions.