Creation can be engineered, if you understand what drives it... A few powerful forces lie behind any act of creation. Take plant growth, the most efficient source of food, and therefore life, throughout the ages. What makes plants grow? Rain is clearly important. And what causes rain? Clouds—but a few clouds create most rain. They create it at particular times, in particular locations. Fertile land is also important. Land fertility is partly a matter of rain, but there are other influences, for example the variety and number of plants and animals that have used the land before. A few pieces of land are very much more fertile than others—not a little better, not even twice or three times as good, but tens of times better. A few influences are always critical, and a few inputs always lead to a large majority of results. Creation can either be unconscious, as with clouds, or conscious, as with humankind. Our history, especially that of the past three centuries, demonstrates that people can multiply the effectiveness of the rest of nature many times over—hundreds, thousands, even millions of times. (We can also apply similar multiples to nature’s destructive forces, but let’s pass on that for the moment.) There have been three great human inventions that have driven the number of people on our planet, and our living standards, into the stratosphere. One was the invention of agriculture some 9,000 years ago. Before that, our ancestors gathered wild plants and fruits and hunted wild animals. Deliberate cultivation of plants and breeding of animals for food dramatically increased the size and complexity of human society. The second breakthrough was the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mechanization of agriculture and the application of industrial techniques. Whereas 300 years ago the vast majority of the population worked the land to make a bare living from it, today in the developed world the same proportion do not work on the land. Yet agricultural production has increased thousands of times, sup- porting a vastly greater population with more and better food. The third breakthrough has been the industrial revolution, the alliance between science and business that defines the modern world. How can such extraordinary conscious acts of creation happen? We could describe them in many different ways, but there are three characteristics of any conscious creation. One is that creation is a matter of rearranging things that already exist. “There is nothing new under the sun,” as the Preacher said in the Old Testament. The invention of agriculture around 7,000 BC involved taking what already existed in nature and rearranging it to make it dramatically more productive. The agricultural revolution after 1750 rearranged the ancient elements of production, applying the leverage of scale and machinery. Biotechnology today imitates what nature does, speeds it up, and applies new permutations. Sand has been around forever, abundant and of little or no value; yet a microchip, made of silica, formed from sand, can be extremely valuable. The second common characteristic of conscious creation is that it leverages the most powerful forces available. There are countless natural forces, both of species and inanimate forces (such as clouds). Only a few of them are really useful for creation. And within each species or type of force, a small minority are much more powerful and useful than the rest. Among all plants, a few vegetables are the most nutritious. Among farming methods, a few are pre-eminent. Among all areas of production, a few are the most fertile. Breakthroughs in productivity occur when the most productive way of doing something is further leveraged by scale, capital, or a particular technique. Breakthroughs spring from thought and experimentation. The most powerful force that thought can leverage is thought itself. Great things are created when new ideas leverage not only the most powerful physical forces, but also the most powerful ideas. Hence the third and most intriguing aspect of conscious creation: Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude. Of course, the raw materials of creation are physical, the stuff the universe makes available to us. But the essence of creation is not physical, it is intellectual. The idea for the microchip did not arise from playing around with sand in the desert, but from playing around with other related ideas. Creation requires ideas and individuals, usually a few of each—and not too many. All great scientific breakthroughs can be traced to a few fertile ideas that are pondered and rearranged by an individual or a small team. All business growth arises in the same way. Doing something differently, creating something new—all such actions start with an idea. The idea normally originates with an individual, and is refined within a small team. Business creation has a fourth common characteristic: If it is to survive, even for a time, a business innovation has to improve value to customers. It has to offer more for less—either something that is better, or the same thing at lower cost, or something better at lower cost—to customers who will pay for it. (It is not enough to offer something that is better and cheaper than something else if the latter is not wanted anyway, or if there is an even better alternative to the improved product.) Both agricultural revolutions—the one around 7,000 BC and that around 1750–1850 AD—provided better food at much lower cost. Any automobile bought today costs a fraction of the price, adjusted for inflation or earnings, that a car cost 50 years ago, yet it is much safer, more comfortable, and stuffed with features, including hundreds or thousands of times more computing power than existed on the whole planet then. We get much more for much less. Creation is not a mysterious process, confined to the scientific genius, the mad inventor, or the entrepreneur receiving visions from who knows where. Creation can be engineered, if you understand what drives it. Individuals and ideas drive creation. It happens in predictable and repeatable ways. If we understand this, we can create. - Richard Koch, The 80/20 Individual
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 20:42:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015