Stepping Stones in Idea Space

Ideas are stepping stones to more ideas.

Some ideas are useful.

String enough useful ideas together and you may find yourself in an unexpectedly interesting and lucrative neighbourhood.

In Greatness Cannot be Planned, Stanley and Lehman compare ambitious projects with generative art. In the search space of ideas, we are mostly limited to ideas that are close to ones we have previously encountered*.

For highly ambitious objectives, i.e. ones which require multiple innovations or inventions, the path of stepping stones from here to our goal is definitively obscured.

It is like looking across a foggy lake, with only our immediate next steps visible.

How then are we to choose where to place our feet? Which stepping stones to choose.

Stanley and Lehman, critique our bias for objective measurement to evaluate these stepping stones when our destination is obscured in the fog.

If the rules that govern search algorithms can be generalised to ambitious goals then this is a compelling rationale.

Regardless, there is a lesson here. A reframe of how to evaluate any next step in a path into the unknown.

Be that of constrained problem-solving, invention or indeed in deciding on what to work on.

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Notes

*either directly or second-hand.

Sources & Inspiration

• Why Greatness Cannot be Planned by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman