I Have An Idea

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."  Paul Simon

So here's a pop quiz testing your high school knowledge. Sing along.

(answers below)

1. 1066 
2. amo, amare, amavi, amatus
3. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
4. Oxygen valence
5. π r²
6. Split infinitive 
7. Fifty-four forty or fight
8. Gregg method 
9. Side-angle-side
10. Capital of Nevada
11. How do you spell queue
12. Frog anatomy 

High school is mostly about soon forgotten facts and ill prepares you for creative thought.  Caveat - This observation is based on my 20th mid-century memory so I am willing to be convinced that things may now be different. 

My granddaughter, when she was about 3 and wanted to do something would come to me with "I have an idea".  Grandfathers cannot resist a 3-year old's ideas. But normally great ideas don't appear spontaneously from one great mind. Most ideation comes from collaboration and questioning, not individual pondering. 

What follows is nostalgia, a post hearkening back to my past of fast paced software development and my penchant for pep talks.

A Fast Company article dismisses traditional “brainstorming” as a productive way to generate innovative ideas.  “... the brain does not make connections in a rigid atmosphere. Anything–even doing laundry–will help you dream up new ideas better than sitting in a meeting." Or a classroom.  The free association done in brainstorming sessions are almost always subject to peer pressure and as a result generate obvious responses. In fact, psychologists have documented "the predictability of free association.”  

So where do ideas really come from.  As always TED has ideas.

In one TED segment, Steve Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, offers a variant to the brainstorming is worthless argument. He suggests that informal gatherings bringing people together with different backgrounds and experiences - say, at a coffee house - so called liquid networks - produce ideas.   

This is what your office - or your home - should look like!

                    

Johnson’s research focuses on identifying the recurring patterns behind the Eureka Moment.  He has found that break-through ideas depend on a network and build on existing concepts cobbled together into new forms.  He gives the example of a neonatal warmer for rural Africa powered by car batteries and constructed from car parts because car parts are available and the expertise to keep vehicles running is transferrable to this equipment. 

He postulates that Eureka moments are not a flash from the blue, but more commonly from long incubation periods - “the slow hunch” - from trial and error, contemplating & sharing mistakes.  Johnson says, “chance favors the collective mind”, although I prefer Pasteur’s “chance favors the prepared mind.”  

Collective thinking can lead to results wildly different than the original hunch.  Johnson uses the evolution of GPS as a case study, owing its development from an experiment by the Advanced Propulsion Lab in tracking Sputnik. In 1957, APL scientists tracked radio signals emitted from Sputnik and precisely defined its orbit and speed.  GPS was simply the reverse process - well, maybe not simply, but simple in concept.

So your challenge is to connect your hunch with others’ hunches and generate something greater than the parts.  As my friend Tennyson says, ”To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.  And, by the way, you’ll need to gain followers for your idea.  Followers are the key to turning you from that lone wing nut into a movement.

Pop Quiz answers.

1. Battle of Hastings  2. Latin verb 'love' conjugation  3. A Tale of Two Cities  4. 2  5. Area of a circle  6. To boldly go  7. Asserting US claim to Oregon territory 8. Beats me  9. Congruent triangle proof  10. Carson City  11. queue  12. Mostly viscera

How did you do?

Copyright © 2026  Dave Hoplin