
2018 Tools, 1820 Thinking
idea infrastructure as a catalyst for updating human software
I was in a startup incubator last year called Young Social Entrepreneurs, in which we did a study visit to Mumbai. Listening to a talk from Ashoka about measuring impact, one thing that stuck was the importance of distinguishing between the root causes and the symptoms of an issue. It made me rethink Troveko’s model, messaging, and whether I was treating symptoms or addressing a root cause.

On many levels, recent societies have a tendency to address symptoms, resulting in innovation at the human hardware layer, our material world — the trains, planes, and automobiles. Our human software — the ways we think, live, and organize — has made incremental changes in response to hardware upgrades but hasn’t been deliberately addressed. In that sense, we continue building new hardware powered with outdated software — the equivalent of a Macbook Pro running on System 1.
When we look at the our shortcomings as a global (albeit western-dominated) society, whether it be acceleration of climate change, the widening of wealth gaps, or pervasive starvation in some areas, there is one thing that undercuts all: outdated software, also known as old ideas or old thinking.
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” ― John Cage
Embracing our Uniqueness
Our reality has objective and subjective elements (and inter-subjective but we’ll save that for now). An objective phenomenon exists independent of human consciousness and beliefs; think trees, cows, water, the undeniable life on earth. Subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of individuals and is a reflection of our imagination and ideas; ideas so woven into the fabric of everyday life that its hard to see it as such. This ability to conceive new realities and understand meaning in ideas makes us human in the first place. Through years of collective self-discovery, social scientists, philosophers, biologists, palaeontologists, and archaeologists put forth that our ability to have new ideas and act upon things that don’t exist is what separates Sapiens from other species.
Thinking from past generations’ imagination have become perceived as near truth over time, placing us in 2018 following ideas that precede 1820. For something as fundamental to our existence, it’s surprising that we don’t have much built around the very idea of ideas. We have very few spaces that welcome ideas to be shared and very few tools that prompt or inspire ideation. No prevalent physical or digital infrastructure that encourages and supports our distinct “what if…” but instead have the opposite: stronghold systems and structures that kill creativity and limit imagination. Ideas can have consequences that transform, and if we welcome our human uniqueness, it could catalyze events we can’t yet imagine (pun intended).
Bringing Ideas to Life
Ideas are a medium that can have vast ripple effects, inspiring new ideas or actions in others. Materializing ideas takes insight, imagination, and initiative. Insights informed by our experiences, environments, and interactions; imagination that draws connections and associations, drumming up an idea; initiative to share, action, collaborate, and make manifest.
Our last book club reading was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and Part One was about our cognitive revolution when we began to imagine possibilities. Fast forward some 70,000 years and we’ve made our ideas a reality with boats, wheels, wings, electricity, smartphones, race, democracy, borders, money, bottled water, sliced bread, sports, basketball; you name it.

Let’s take this last one, basketball, an idea from a fellow named James Naismith:
While working as a physical education teacher at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891 , he was invited to find ways to get rid of the boredom his students experienced in sports lessons during the winter. Inspired by a game he had played as a child in Ontario , Naismith created a game that became known as basketball on December 15, 1891.
- Insight: he recognized students were bored and remembered a fun game from childhood.
- Imagination: he created a set of rules and tools including a basket (using a fruit basket), passing, and shooting.
- Initiative: He gave it a go…

127 years later and putting balls into fruit baskets in a Massachusetts YMCA became a global phenomenon professionally and recreationally. Not only did something like basketball stem from somebody’s idea, but the very reason we’re now able to play it with complete strangers is because of our shared beliefs around this idea. Harari lays it out as such:
“They can nevertheless play the game [basketball] with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball. These ideas are entirely imaginary, but if everyone shares them, we can all play the game.”
Now what if we saw other things for the ideas that they stemmed from. How does that change the way we look at and interact with the world around us?
The Value in Sharing Ideas
Ideas become important when they’re shared into the world but some hold onto their ideas either because they think they aren’t good enough or because they think they are too good — some secret that can’t be let out. I thought similarly some time ago but over years have found little value in keeping ideas top secret, if anything it hurt in the end. My experience has taught me a few things:

First, it’s improbable I’m the only person with an idea of this type. Second, someone stealing a mere idea and becoming an overnight billionaire is an irrational fear (and ideas are a dime-a-dozen once you have an ideation mindset, really). Third, I was doing the disservice of leaving tons of constructive feedback and new inspiration on the table. Lastly, there is even the question of whether our ideas are ownable property.
“Those ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature…”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson
I guess the basis of not sharing ideas ties back to our dominant ideologies, such as capitalism: an idea turned theory turned unquestionable centuries later. Once we open up to the value of exchanging ideas, we see how better idea infrastructure can inspire positive movements in individuals, organizations, and societies. We need to deliberately invite ideas.
An Invitation to Imagine
I don’t see why we should live with the capacity to connect with people globally, feed every human on the planet, and have the world’s information in our pockets yet still sit in classrooms created for an industrial revolution, follow 250-year old documents created by homogenous groups, and measure collective success of by a single economic metric.
If old thinking is the root cause of our collective shortcomings, then new thinking is a way to address that, and we have no chance of improving ‘what is’ without ‘what if.’ So let’s generate, exchange, and welcome ideas by creating environments and tools to do so without the fear of ill-judgement (i.e. getting fired or receiving a demerit) because ideation is a medium with the power to catalyze the software update we need.

I love inviting people to explore, ideate, and collaborate around seemingly complex issues. We recently released ThinkFish, a chatbot and community for creative thinkers to come together around their ideas. We built it on top of Telegram, because the world doesn’t need another standalone app for the sake of having one, which also speaks to the fact that we have existing mediums to exchange ideas but we just aren’t intentional with doing so. That said, I’d like to encourage people to see the world anew as a collection of ideas, begin to have new ones, and not be afraid to share them.
More projects in motion so stay tuned, have a new idea today, and clap for this if I’m not alone in this thinking.
“Ideas are these disembodied life forms, they don’t have a form, but they have a will. All they want is to be made manifest. If you can manage to open up your consciousness to an idea of living in a world of abundance, then you can believe that, constantly, ideas are trying to find human collaborators.” — Elizabeth Gilbert

