Idiocy and Innovation

A follow-up to my earlier post: I got into the same discussion with an American colleague about the dominance of Indians in the IT industry (a quick summary, because humility is a cultural attribute – particularly the humility to accept they weren’t born experts, and so read the documentation to learn how things work rather than goofing around and hoping that things come out OK), and he offered an interesting rebuttal. More a defense of the arrogance of our own culture, but an interesting point nonetheless:

He admitted that South Asians are moving into the “low level” positions in Information Technology, but the very cultural attributes that make them effective at the hands-on tasks of programming and systems analysis hold them back when it comes to innovation, which is the key to more “high level” positions. His argument was, in effect, that you have to be ignorant in order to be innovative – if your approach to technology is to read the manual, and do only what it says to do, you will never discover the alternative, innovative uses that weren’t intended and haven’t been discovered.

My sense is that his rebuttal suffers from binary thinking, that a person who pays attention to documentation is necessary locked into a mindset that prevents him from being innovative. That aside, I think there is a point to what he's saying: the reason teenaged hackers are always a step ahead of more experienced and educated systems analysts is that they don't limit their thinking to what systems are supposed to be able to do, by the book, but instead experiment and "hack" to see what can actually be done, and discover loopholes and vulnerabilities that aren't documented.

And in the same way, the “technology innovator” can be differentiated from the “technology user” in his willingness to experiment and think in unconventional ways to stumble upon capabilities that were not intended by the creators of the original technology. Said another way, if you stick to doing only those things that you’re supposed to do, you’ll not discover what is truly possible.

But even so, I’m not convinced that the way of the bumbler is a better or superior approach, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing when such a person rises to a position of control within an organization – the method of discovery by simply goofing around is extremely wasteful, and a lot of damage is done by the trial and error process before a useful discovery is made … if, ultimately, a discovery is made at all.

I’m reminded of the hackneyed phrase often attributed to one grammar school teacher or another: that you have to demonstrate that you know the rules before you’ll be allowed to break them. I don’t think that “have to” is quite right, but I do see this as a sensible approach. There’s a difference between creative and just doing things in a random and sloppy manner hoping to arrive at a happy accident. To be creative, you have to understand how something works.

So in the end, I don’t think the rebuttal has entirely changed my attitude about the necessity of humility and the value of taking the time to figure out how something works rather than just goofing around and seeing what happens. But I do think that innovation is ultimately a combination of the two, though I do expect that bumbling is still not the best approach, the process of innovation does have certain bumble-like aspects.