Reckon Those Two Things Can Fit Together?

Some inventions look inevitable after somebody else has invented them. You see the finished thing and think, Well, hell, of course. The pieces seem as though they were always meant to be together. A telephone and a camera belong together now because we’ve spent years carrying both of them around in the same little rectangle. Before somebody put them together, though, one was something you talked into and the other was something you pointed at Aunt Martha while telling her to move three feet to the left.

That interests me because the pieces of a new idea don’t necessarily have to be new. Sometimes the interesting part is the relationship between pieces that already existed.

Take two things that have been around for years. They may do completely different jobs. They may come from different businesses, different sciences, different generations, or different drawers in the garage. Then somebody looks at one, remembers something about the other, and asks a wonderfully unsophisticated question: Reckon those two things can fit together?

That’s the sort of question I like, because you don’t have to know where it is going before you ask it.

You Don’t Have to Invent the Pieces

We tend to give inventors more magical powers than they probably deserve. We look at the finished result and imagine somebody sitting alone in a room creating the whole thing from nothing. Certainly people sometimes create genuinely new components, but a great many useful ideas also come from putting existing things into relationships they hadn’t occupied before.

Think about the wheeled suitcase. Human beings had been making containers for carrying things for a very long time, and we had become reasonably proficient at making wheels. Nobody had to invent either one before somebody could notice that dragging or carrying a heavy suitcase was a damned nuisance and wonder whether those two existing things might enjoy being introduced. Once you’ve become accustomed to luggage with wheels, luggage without them begins to look slightly ridiculous.

The same sort of borrowing happens in places where the connection isn’t nearly so visible. A restaurant owner may see something a factory does and realize that part of the process would work in a kitchen. A teacher can borrow something from a game. A nurse can change a procedure after noticing how somebody organizes tools. A software designer can recognize a useful relationship in something that has absolutely nothing to do with computers.

In each case, the interesting part may not be the creation of a new piece. The pieces were already there. What hadn’t existed before was that particular arrangement of them.

Things Come Apart in Your Head

This is where I have become increasingly interested in something I call patterns and elements. Don’t run away. You don’t have to study my model before you’re allowed to have an idea, and I am certainly not suggesting that your brain contains little boxes conveniently labeled PATTERN and ELEMENT.

I’m using element as a simple name for a piece of something you have encountered. A wheel can be an element. So can a handle, a sound, a procedure, a shape, a rule, a phrase, a way of fastening two things together, or the peculiar way somebody solved a problem forty years ago. What interests me is that those pieces don’t necessarily remain permanently attached to the things where you first encountered them.

Suppose you once worked in a restaurant and learned a particular way of organizing customers when things got busy. Years later, you’re sitting in a doctor’s office where everybody is confused about who is next, and something about that situation reminds you of the restaurant. You haven’t transported the restaurant into the doctor’s office. You haven’t brought the grill, the waiters, the menus or the fellow at table twelve who has been complaining about his soup for twenty minutes. You’ve carried away some smaller piece of the arrangement, and that piece may now fit somewhere else.

I use pattern for the larger recognizable arrangement in which pieces participate. You recognize a bicycle because its various parts form something you have learned to recognize as a bicycle. You recognize a restaurant, a baseball game, a sales meeting and a birthday party for much the same reason. Each contains elements related to one another in ways that make the whole thing recognizable.

The part that fascinates me is that an element doesn’t necessarily belong to only one pattern. A wheel can participate in a bicycle, shopping cart, automobile, office chair, wheelbarrow, hospital bed or suitcase. The wheel hasn’t changed its allegiance. It simply has a useful relationship with different collections of other elements.

Once I started looking at ideas that way, I began seeing pieces everywhere.

Now Screw With It

Find something near you that you understand reasonably well and, instead of looking at the whole thing, take it apart mentally. Ask what its pieces are, what each piece does, and which of those pieces you normally ignore because you’ve become accustomed to seeing the finished object as a whole.

Then pick one of those pieces and ask where else you’ve encountered something that performs a similar job. It doesn’t have to look the same. In fact, the more interesting connection may be between things that look completely unrelated.

A restaurant waiting list and a computer queue don’t look alike. A factory assembly line and the way people move through an airport don’t look alike. A beehive and a business organization certainly don’t look alike. Yet some relationship inside one may resemble, solve, alter, or illuminate something inside another.

This is where I would resist the temptation to become sensible too quickly. We have plenty of time later to determine that an idea is impractical, expensive, impossible, illegal, or simply stupid. At this stage we’re only asking whether a piece from one familiar arrangement might have some relationship with a piece from another.

Reckon those two things can fit together?

Maybe they can’t. Maybe they fit beautifully and produce something utterly useless. But every once in a while, you may see an arrangement that wasn’t there before, and that’s when things get interesting.

I Wonder Whether You Do This Too

I’ve been looking backward through my own life trying to understand how some of my ideas developed, and I keep finding pieces that seem to have traveled. Something encountered in one business turns up years later in another. Something learned from a machine becomes useful in thinking about people. An old experience that seemed to have nothing to do with a current problem suddenly becomes relevant because one part of it fits.

Those observations helped lead me toward the model I’m developing about patterns, elements, encounters and the relationships among them. You’ll find more about that under The Model on this website if you’re curious about where we’re going with it. The model isn’t presented as a requirement for participating here, however. In fact, I’m considerably more interested in discovering whether other people’s experiences support it, contradict it, or send us somewhere we haven’t thought to look.

That’s because studying my own ideas presents a rather obvious problem: they’re mine. I know a fair amount about what has happened inside one life because I’ve been stuck in the damned thing for eighty-four years. What I don’t know is whether the same kinds of relationships are visible when you go backward through an idea of your own.

That’s one of the reasons this website exists.

Have You Ever Caught Yourself Doing It?

Think about an idea you’ve had. It doesn’t need to have made you rich, earned a patent, or changed civilization. Maybe you changed something at work, rearranged your kitchen, found an easier way to perform an annoying chore, made something in your garage, or solved a problem everybody else had simply learned to tolerate.

Now go backward through it and see whether you can recognize where some of its pieces came from. Was there something in your solution that you had encountered somewhere else? Did you deliberately borrow it, or did the relationship simply occur to you? Perhaps you only recognized the connection afterward. Perhaps you’ve never thought about where the pieces came from at all.

If so, that’s even more interesting to me.

The Your Ideas section of this website is where you can tell us about it. You don’t have to prove anything, and you certainly don’t have to learn my terminology before you’re allowed through the door. Tell us what you made, changed, noticed or wondered about. Tell us about the apparently unrelated things that somehow came together. If you don’t know where one of the pieces came from, tell us that too.

Then we can have a look at it together. Other visitors may recognize something from their own experience. I may see a relationship to something in mine. The artificial-intelligence systems I work with may turn up another example, some history, or research that gives us somewhere else to look. Sometimes we’ll probably discover that our wonderful new idea was patented during the administration of Millard Fillmore. That’s fine too, because the object isn’t to prove we’re geniuses. The object is to learn more about what happens when things meet.

So have a look at something familiar. Break it into pieces in your head, pick up one of those pieces, and mentally carry it somewhere it has no obvious business going. Look at something else and ask the wonderfully unsophisticated question: