The Citizen’s Mind: A New Lab for Innovation
Discovery is an essential civic skill.
Too many people are waiting for someone else to chart a new way through our treacherously polarized and partisan soaked politics. Without a Shackleton, Earhart or Armstrong on the horizon, it’s up to us.
Being an everyday discoverer is an open proposition. You have to look at what you think you know with an eye to discovering what you missed. This is a loop I can get stuck in when I wander into thinking about how I think. I have missed the point of a friend’s story entirely because I saw a glimpse of how they put the story together.
When we orient ourselves to discover something new, we become diligent observers of the world around us and approach each twist or turn with open curiosity. And that’s what our communities need from each of us.
As children, we each discovered entire universes of new possibilities in a secret space carved out under the branches of a tree or within a pocket of invisibility at the center of a department store clothes rack. This capacity to look at the world we know and discover something new is one that Einstein and Vonnegut have told us can make all the difference, whatever our age.
Discovering Ourselves in How We Think
The more we understand about how we think, the more likely it is that we can find a way to work together. How we think is a different question from why we think what we think. It’s about our process rather than our motivation. There’s much more of ourselves accessible in those processes than in a tally of our preferred outcomes.
One of the most famous series of thought processes is Einsteins’s route to uncovering the secrets of time and space. In a recent NYT piece, Walter Isaacson marked the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with a refresher course on these “thought experiments.” There’s falling back in his chair in the patent office, racing a light beam and the perplexing difficulty of synchronizing timepieces across the city of Berlin. Isaacson uses these stories of modern thought to focus our attention on the ideas that Einstein “twirled around in his head rather than in a lab.”
Then, imagining Einstein’s head as his lab for scientific discovery, I remembered one of my favorite Vonnegut passages.
Describing his brother Bernard’s laboratory at General Electric, Vonnegut called it a “sensational mess… where a clumsy stranger could die in a thousand different ways.” When a safety officer had “bawled him out” over it, Bernard responded by tapping his fingers to his forehead and saying, “If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it’s like in here.” His lab was a representation of his mind and his mind was somehow manifest in the jumbled mess of his lab.
How might our approach to citizen engagement change if we understood each individual’s mind as a potential lab for civic innovation? Each of our communities as a representation of our frenetic collective mind?
Uncovering Opportunities for Civic Innovation
Working with this model of citizen engagement, we might look beyond the cluttered surfaces and heavy weights lurking in dark corners and instead turn to search out where the desk lamp burns on an active puzzle. What open questions already have a citizen’s attention and what can that individual contribute to our understanding of that problem? Or other problems in that same category of concern? What leverage might this person provide when thinking through the potential or peril of different proposed solutions or for recognizing the structure at work constraining our approach to all of the above?
In a recent interview on the Axe Files podcast, British campaign guru Alistair Campbell observed that other industries use today’s data and technology to innovate. The sports industry looks for ways to test limits and to achieve new performance records. He compared this to politicians who only aim to verify confirmation bias. Campaigns want to identify the heavy weights lurking in the darkness of an individual’s mind. They want to then push them around to manipulate the individual’s vote. Exciting new tools. Same dirty game.
So what would it look like for politicians to direct today’s tools to innovative purposes? If we approach each individual citizen as the curator of his own civic lab, we might use the data to identify open loops of inquiry instead of closed ones. These open loops could be where we recover the innovation that suffers from our neglect.
Understanding Discovery as a Civic Skill
In Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science is something that is written backwards or rewritten to fit what we know. Stories of individual discovery and inventions as singular unrivaled moments of insight obscure the story of progress that actually occurs through “many puzzles of contemporary normal science” that only the most recent revolution in scientific thought set in motion. Those puzzles — unfinished loops — present opportunities to better understand the strengths of current thought as well as to consider what it fails to resolve.
If we each imagine ourselves to be a citizen discoverer, we accept a responsibility to see those open loops and to pull at them when it comes to the ideas and policies that shape our communities. We then make it possible to approach one another with an interest in understanding the puzzles we’re each pursuing. There’s real potential in new tools that can connect these citizens and combine their insights into new modes of civic work. This is the space where projects like adopting a fire hydrant in a snowbound city already exist but this approach could lend substance to these projects. Civic apps like this are less a novelty and more a necessary channel for the work we each do in our communities to promote the best outcomes.
Our politicians need to conjure up the curiosity to see what our citizens see. Not in terms of what an individual hates or fears, but in terms of what an individual is still willing to discover and to puzzle over. There is an opportunity to better undestand who we are, who we have been and who we aim to be if we see our citizens to as civic discoverers looking for open loops, working at our own thought experiments and sharing the puzzles where they see something new.
Citizen discoverers represent a new way to understand the familiar, an opportunity to see ourselves again and to imagine ourselves anew.
