The Power of Co-Iteration
Innovation happens when experts and non-experts experiment together
You’ve heard the term “trial and error”. You remember as a child being told to “try and try again”. You may have heard entrepeneurial types using the catch-phrase “fail fast, fail often”. By now, chances are you are familiar with the concept of continuous experimentation as a path to success.
[For a quick primer, read this article by Michael Simmons about how success follows the 10,000 experiments rule. He quotes Jeff Bezos as saying — “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per day …”]
Experimentation is iteration — doing the creative process again and again. Here at Polynize we consider iteration as one of the core principles of creativity . We’ve seen over the years how repeated experimentation and a tolerance for failure leads to creative success in the long-term.
So people get the concept of iteration, but why don’t more of us do it? Well in our experience people don’t understand just how effective it is. In fact, when doing creative work in any given field, innovation always comes from iteration.
As Simmons says — it’s not just a strategy. It’s THE strategy.
Most of us have this idea that ‘trial-and-error’ is inefficient, and it is — especially at the beginning. If you don’t know much about maths, then your first ideas for solving a maths problem will be poor. You’ll have to iterate a lot before you hit on a good idea. A mathematician, of course, will have many more good ideas at the first step.
But here’s the thing — although you’d expect the mathematician will get to a solution with less iterations, the non-mathematician can also get to any solution as long as he/she keeps iterating. You can make up for a lack of expertise by iterating more than the expert.
But the real magic happens when we go from iteration as a solo activity to a group activity — especially when experts and non-experts iterate together. We call this co-iteration. The power of co-iteration is the following —
Together, people can find solutions that no single person could have found alone.
To understand this more deeply, we have to reference the concept of the adjacent possible as popularized by Steven Johnson — the idea that innovation progresses by taking incremental steps through the space of possibilities.
Let’s imagine possibility space as a lattice, and suppose that an expert and non-expert both start at their respective positions.
Now, the expert knows where to search for solutions and tends to explore confidently in one or two directions.
The non-expert, on the other hand, explores possibility space in random directions, many of which may turn out to be dead-ends.
But look what happens when the two work together to co-iterate. When the knowledge of the expert is combined with the lateral thinking of the non-expert, you get the best of both worlds. Together they explore possibilities that the expert would have missed, but they are much more efficient than the random search of the non-expert.
This means that they can end up finding new, better solutions to problems in unexplored regions of possibility space. This is — by definition! — innovation.
Now we’re not the only ones to recognize this concept. An initiative such as Open Science — scientists and non-scientists working together — is pursuing a similar model. But now we can see why it works. Co-iteration is a powerful principle that should be more widely recognized.
This is why we bring diverse groups of people to our Polynize games. We want people with different levels of expertise in the given topic to co-iterate together to maximize innovation. Kind of the opposite of what most organisations and governments currently do (clustering experts together and excluding non-experts).
But that’s what innovation is — doing something new. And we ourselves wouldn’t have come to this insight without all the co-iterating that we have been doing over the years with diverse groups of people!
Want to unleash innovation in your team, organization or industry? We’re looking for partners for our new Polynize game — get in touch!
