A Great Idea is a Process

The basis for creativity is conversation. Great ideas don’t just pop out of thin air, ready to execute. They grow and are shaped over time. By bringing an idea in front of an audience, we force ourselves to explain it and defend it. By bouncing ideas off each other, we strengthen those ideas while constantly surfacing new ones.

As we saw with those enterprising skate-punk teens, great ideas don’t live in isolation. They must be exposed to the air, cross-pollinate, mutate, and grow. A bunch of kids decided to break into someone’s yard, and they invented vert skating. They then had conversations with people who could make skateboards, and now skateboards are no longer toys.

You’ve probably held a brainstorming session at work, but brainstorming can happen anywhere and at any time. This isn’t new. In fact, it’s really old.

Socratic dialogue was popularized by Plato, who was essentially writing fanfic about Socrates, his teacher. The most famous of these dialogues is The Republic, in which Socrates pre-parties with his friends by discussing the definition of justice. YOLO! In his writings, Plato used Socrates’ voice to demonstrate the science of exploring an idea in minute detail, over the course of many conversations. In reading these dialogues, you start to lose track of who supports or opposes an idea, even as the idea itself shifts.

Whether you’re discussing new features for your product in a brainstorming session or getting grilled by a fictional version of Socrates, you’re engaging in dialectic: bringing together different points of view in order to craft the best idea. Socrates apparently thought that everyone was pretty much an idiot, including himself. Wisdom, then, is the result of a process, rather than an inherent trait that one person may have.

Wow, from skate punks to Socrates. Eventually we’ll be talking about sharks. You’ll see. First, though, we’ll see what happens when you engage in conversations with people outside your immediate sphere.